Are the parties fighting the last war?

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It’s difficult to know how seriously we should treat any individual opinion poll. Different organisations use different methods, particularly when it comes to ‘weighting’ to try and ensure that the sample is representative. But when multiple polls by different organisations over a lengthy period show broadly consistent trends, it’s reasonable to suppose that they are telling us something about what is happening. In the case of the upcoming Senedd elections, I’m still struggling to believe how well in the one case, and how badly in the other, Reform Ltd and the Labour Party are doing. Whilst I can’t simply ignore the data-driven evidence in front of us, I’ll admit that, for someone who spent decades campaigning door to door, the extent and speed of the change is something I’m struggling to understand and accept. It somehow doesn't 'feel' right, and evidence which contradicts experience is always a difficult thing.

Once we get to a situation where there are two obvious front-runners, it’s probably inevitable that those two will start trying to ‘squeeze’ the votes of the other parties by presenting the outcome as a binary choice. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t intensely disappointing. In most of the campaigns I ever fought, I was more of a squeezee than a squeezer, left trying to convince people to vote for what they wanted most rather than against what they wanted least. So-called tactical voting is harder to determine under the new voting system for the Senedd elections, since it will probably only really have an impact on the sixth, or at best fifth and sixth, seats in any constituency, and it’s really hard to predict what will happen as we get down to that level of vote counting. Some of the politicians try to tell us that the new system makes every vote count, but it really isn’t true. Anyone voting for a party (or independent candidate) receiving less than around 10-12% of the vote in a constituency will effectively be, in the eyes of those trying to use the squeezing tactic, ‘wasting’ their vote; such votes will have no impact on the outcome of the election. Denial of the opportunity to register a second or third choice is my main criticism of the new system.

The question isn’t just about the mechanics and technicalities, however. I’ve long wondered just how effective the pressure to choose between Labour and Tory has been or, rather, to what extent the polarisation of electoral politics in the UK between the two largest parties was down to this tactic as opposed to other factors. Purely on the numbers, more recent elections show an increasing tendency away from a two-party polarisation – if it did work in the past, it hasn’t worked so well recently. Not only is it essentially a negative approach, but to the extent that it did work at all, it was never based on any careful analysis of opposing manifestos before choosing the lesser of two evils – it was far more visceral than that. A hatred of ‘the Tories’ on the one side and of ‘the Socialists’ on the other was always a substitute for proper debate between alternative visions for the future. Perhaps the fact that the ‘alternatives’ were generally not that different when analysed more objectively helped that framing. Whether either Plaid or Reform Ltd attract that sort of folk history-based hatred to a sufficient degree (outside the bubble in which the political anoraks live) is surely an open question. 'Stopping Reform' may not be quite the killer line that some seem to think.

They say that generals always prepare to refight the last war rather than the one that might actually happen, and I can’t help wondering if adopting a tactic based on what has historically believed to have been the case and trying to apply it in an entirely different scenario isn’t acting in a similar manner.

Co-operation is about more than simple arithmetic

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It was inevitable after the results of the European parliament elections became clear that there would be calls for ‘Remain’ parties to work together to ensure a remain majority after the Westminster election - which is surely now an unavoidable result of the Tory leadership election, even if the timing is uncertain.  After all, the pro-Brexit side managed to offer a single clear choice, and they only ‘won’ because the Remain side failed to do the same.  There are, though, many problems with any such proposal, even allowing for the fact that ‘working together’ is a vague enough phrase to offer multiple possible interpretations.

There are two important – and almost certainly invalid – assumptions underlying such calls.  The first is that a sufficient number of electors will see the Brexit issue as the defining issue of this particular election, and the second is that they will follow the advice of the leaders of ‘their’ party of choice, and vote for the suggested alternative.  The first is certainly true for political commentators – including this blog – but I’m not aware of any hard evidence of its truth for the electorate as a whole.  Many will be voting on all sorts of other issues.  And the second is based on an over-simplistic mathematical analysis of votes coupled with a degree of arrogance in believing that the parties can tell 'their' voters to vote for someone else and be obeyed.  I would find it very hard indeed, even given the importance of Brexit, to cast my vote for any party likely to support the renewal of Trident, or which is utterly opposed to autonomy for Wales, to give just two examples – and many others will have their own red lines.

It’s true, of course, that the Leave side had the advantage in last week’s election of having a single clear option open to supporters, but we should remember that that came about not because of any discussions or agreements between the parties, but because two pro-Brexit parties (UKIP and the Tories) managed to press their self-destruct buttons and implode.  That isn’t going to happen for the Remain parties, with the possible exception of Change UK.  That means that any arrangement depends on the Lib Dems, Plaid, the SNP and the Green Party (and potentially Labour as well if they ever manage to get their act together) coming to an arrangement where they all agree to stand aside in some seats in favour of each other’s candidates.  I put the chances of that happening at approximately zero.

Whilst arrangements between Plaid, SNP and the Green Party look to be achievable, if difficult, in Scotland and Wales, there seems little chance that the resurgent Lib Dems will stand aside in any of their increasingly lengthy list of target seats, and no chance at all of the Labour Party doing the same.  For all their talk of coming together to prevent a hard (or indeed any) Brexit, both of those parties will be looking at the election as their chance to improve their own positions, and ultimately that is a bigger prize than the single issue of Brexit.  And I suspect that politicians calling for an ’arrangement’ fully understand the reality, and that such calls are themselves more to do with trying to position their own parties as the adults in the room than with any real hope of action.

The problem we face is with an electoral system which allows people a range of choice, but then awards the spoils on a wholly unjust basis, meaning that a party gaining only around 30-35% of the vote can end up with a huge majority of seats.  Trying to game the system by treating voters as pawns to be traded on the basis of a mathematical analysis of votes cast doesn’t address that problem.

Election round up

Tweet The official history of this election will be written in due course, once all the results are in. But after a long and hard campaign, here are a few initial thoughts, untainted, as it were, by any actual numbers.

Clearly, both the main UK parties thought they were learning from Obama by stressing the words 'Hope' in the case of Labour, and 'Change' in the case of the Tories. But it has seemed to me from the outset that they've heard the words, but not understood the message, because my perception is that the campaigns have actually centred around two rather different words.

Labour's campaign seems to have been primarily based around 'Fear' - fear of the Tories and what they might do. The Tories, on the other hand, seem to have opted for 'Despair' - despair about Brown and all his works. In short they've taken two essentially very positive words, and corrupted them into two highly negative campaigns.

Yesterday, Nick Ainger had an article on the IWA website, in which he said "many supporters of Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats have said they intend to vote tactically vote for me to ensure that the Conservative candidate doesn’t get in". I don't doubt that he's found a few saying that, as have I. I'm not sure about the use of the word 'many' though – but I'll come back to that.

Similarly, one of Simon Hart's leaflets carried a picture of a claimed 'Plaid supporter' who has switched to the Tories because "the only way to replace Labour is to vote for the Welsh (sic) Conservatives". He too has claimed that many others are saying the same.

Now, the fact that some supporters of Plaid and the Lib Dems are considering voting tactically against one or other of the main UK parties is no surprise at all. But I suspect that the extent of that is being exaggerated, and it's an over-simplistic analysis which ignores some other trends. Labour and Tory both need to exaggerate the trend, of course. So-called 'tactical' voting of this sort needs people to believe that lots of others are doing the same thing, or else it becomes pointless. In reality, to the extent that it is happening, I suspect that the two different sorts of 'anti' votes are largely cancelling each other out locally.

(As an aside, although AV is not a proportional system of voting, it does allow people to express a second choice, and have that second choice taken into account. I suspect that all parties would find that the second choices of their supporters are nowhere near as uniform as they seem to believe – and that some of them would be quite surprising. A topic for another day.)

The two trends identified by Labour and Tory candidates may be the only ones that they want to talk about – but they're not the only ones which are happening. There's a 'plague on both your houses' trend happening as well – traditional supporters of Labour and Tory alike, fed up at the sameness and bickering, who are looking for an alternative. Some of them will undoubtedly go to the Lib Dems on the back of Clegg's performance; but equally, I have picked up a sense that for some people, Clegg has simply 'joined the mainstream', and that the plague is now being cast upon all three of them.

Then we come to local factors.

'Hunting' is the one subject which the Tories have studiously avoided mentioning. It's easy to see why. Although hunting is a popular subject amongst a certain minority, it has no traction with the wider public. I suspect that even a majority of Tory supporters are opposed to repeal – I've certainly picked up some of them who will not vote for the Tory candidate because of this one issue.

Does the local campaign make any difference in the television age? I'm sure it still does, but it's hard to say how much. The Tory campaign, buoyed up by massive inflows of both financial and human resources from those whose sole aim is the repeal of the Hunting Act has been the strongest and most visible. Money talks – but is it enough to buy victory?

They've certainly had more posters up than anyone else, but most of them seem to be on farmland, which actually tells us little about the underlying strength of their support. And I've even heard suggestions that there have been landowners who have insisted on showing Tory posters even if the tenants are somewhat less enthusiastic. Now that would be an echo of the politics of the past, and of the reasons for the deep-seated hostility to Tories in parts of Wales.

The second strongest and most visible campaign has undoubtedly been the Plaid campaign. 'We've only seen you and the Tories' has been a common message as we've travelled around the constituency. We even picked up a hint over the weekend that the Tories were becoming more worried about our challenge than about Labour.

The Labour campaign seems to have been much patchier than I've ever seen it before – little evidence of a serious effort in many areas. And the Lib Dems have been all but invisible; their campaign has depended totally on the performance of Clegg in the media.

So – where does that leave us? A week or two ago, Vaughan Roderick blogged that no-one had a clue what was happening. I agreed with him then, and still do today. There are movements in voting patterns, but without knowing the relative volumes, it's hard to see an overall picture. Each party - inevitably - concentrates on those switches of allegiance from which it benefits, and conveniently ignores the others. It's spin rather than analysis, of course.

Large numbers of people, even yesterday, were still saying that they hadn't decided. Traditionally, that's been a polite way of saying 'no' in some cases, but I think that there are genuinely more uncertain people this time around, and canvassers from other parties have been saying the same thing.

One final point, which much of the analysis of the latest polls seems not to take into account, is the impact of postal voting. Whilst those voting today will be taking account of all the final statements and news, many of those voting by post – around 9,000 in this constituency – will already have cast their votes on the basis of the position as it looked a week or ten days ago.

Overall, sadly, an overwhelmingly negative election, with no real enthusiasm either for the present government or for the official opposition. And they know that as well as I do.

Enough navel-gazing – out to get on with another sort of roundup.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again

Tweet I sometimes wonder if people inside the Labour Party really understand the effect that Peter Hain can have on their political opponents. For such a tribalistic and antagonistic individual to suddenly discover that there is a 'progressive consensus' with Plaid to such an extent that Plaid's supporters should hold their noses and vote Labour is simply not credible. If it's a deliberate Labour tactic, they would have been better advised to deploy a more consensual politician to deliver the message.

His appeal is wrong on three levels.

His appeal is entirely one-sided. He suggests that people should switch to Labour where necessary to defeat the Tories; but nowhere does he accept the converse - that in other seats, Labour voters should similarly switch to other parties. (Adam Higgitt at WalesHome has defended this in the comments thread, arguing that there are many fewer seats in this category. Maybe – but if you want to project the idea that you're talking about any sort of 'consensus' politics, at least presenting it as a two-way street would surely be more likely to succeed).

It's ultimately a very negative approach to politics. Vote against what you don't want, rather then for what you do want – that's the nub of the message.

But most of all, if the Labour Party want to depend on people's second or third choice vote, then they've had 13 years in which they could have introduced a change to the voting system which might actually achieve the result that they want. They've chosen not to do that – and not even to talk about it until it's too late to be more than a vague promise for the future.

The net result is that, instead of opening a possible conversation about the extent of any consensus and how it might be possible to capitalise on that, Hain has managed to project Labour as an arrogant party who feel that they are entitled to the votes of anyone who doesn't like the Tories. The fact that that was probably done unconsciously rather then deliberately serves only to underline how far the attitude of some people in that party needs to change if they want people to believe that they are serious about working with others.