Voters aren't fish, and don't always choose the 'right' angler

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A couple of weeks ago, following a by-election in the Vale of Glamorgan, this blog post talked about the need to count, rather than assume, voters’ second choices. The question about making assumptions came up again on Thursday, in this article by Ben Wildsmith on Nation.Cymru, calling on Gareth Hughes and the Green Party to withdraw from the Caerffili by-election. I’m something of a fan of Ben’s writing: his articles are well-argued, make good points, and are often humorous to boot. But on this occasion, I cannot agree with his logic. The idea that parties seen as outside chances should ‘stand down’ to avoid ‘splitting the vote’ and letting (insert your bête noir of choice here) win is not one I’ve ever been keen on, although my view might be slightly coloured by having been on the receiving end of such expectations on more than one occasion.

There tends to be something of a belief amongst those performing mathematics on polling numbers that there are only two pools of voters. One contains only progressive fish, with Labour, Lib Dem, Plaid and Green anglers all trying to catch them, and the other contains only reactionary fish, with anglers from the Tories and Reform Ltd trying to haul them in. Since the number of fish in both ponds is limited, any caught by one angler are unavailable to the other anglers, and if one of those anglers is better at catching fish than the rest, his total catch is still limited by the number of fish caught by his competitors. And, obviously, the more anglers in one pond, the harder it is to match the catch of the best angler in the other. I’ve knocked enough doors and spoken to enough punters to know that life really isn’t that simple. Voters don’t always stay in their allotted pond, and if the Green angler lays down his rod, some of the fish are as likely to swim into the other pond as they are to leap onto the Plaid angler's waiting hook.

There is a convenient and comfortable myth to which many involved in Welsh politics cling, in which the electorate in Wales is of a radical disposition and finds the Tories toxic. Would that it were so; but whilst it may have been a couple of decades ago, it isn’t today. And the rise of Reform Ltd shows us that Tory toxicity isn’t about policies or personalities anyway, it’s just about branding. Take the same people and the same policies and give them a different brand name, and many voters will, apparently, flock to the cause. To a very large extent, I blame Labour for that. Firstly, because they’ve ceased to be particularly radical or even progressive, and secondly because they’ve depended for so long on one simple attribute rather than arguing for any particular policy platform: being 'not-the-Tories'. It turns out that even those who have voted for them for years, if not decades, have come to believe that Reform Ltd, despite being largely composed of ex-Tories, are also now ‘not-the-Tories’, with the additional advantage of being untainted (as a brand, even if not as individuals) by having failed in the exercise of power.

And that’s the point about the Green angler and his rod. Laying it down simply gives credence to, and reinforces, the idea that all self-identified ‘progressives’ essentially share a perspective, and that ‘progressive’ voters should support the ‘progressive’ candidate most likely to win. I doubt that the Green Party candidate will receive many votes in the by-election (sorry, Gareth), but even if the total votes cast for him is more than the difference between the first and second placed candidate, there will be no way of knowing that his absence would have made a difference – in a first-past-the-post election, his votes cannot simply be added mathematically to those of another candidate. And he will be putting a different perspective and agenda before the electorate – can giving the voters more choice ever be a bad thing?

There is actually a very good case for politicians to come to an agreement on which party will stand where, but it applies only to a single issue and is only relevant in a Westminster General Election. It relates to the question of electoral reform. A short, single issue parliament which passed such a law and then dissolved itself for a new election under new rules would be well worth while. The problem is that that single issue doesn’t neatly split itself between self-styled ‘progressives’ and ‘reactionaries’. And whether Farage will still be as keen on electoral reform if an election under FPTP gives him absolute power on a minority vote is an unanswered question. Not one to which I really want to discover the answer the hard way.

Depending on character rather than formal rules could be even worse

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Perhaps it was, as some around Trump like to believe, an act of deliberate sabotage when that escalator ground to a halt; perhaps it was an accident – an aide or a member of the press corps running on ahead and accidentally triggering the emergency stop. My own alternative theory is that Trump was feeling thirsty, saw a big red button, and thought that if he pressed it, someone would bring him a diet coke. Stupidity usually beats both accident and conspiracy.

Trump’s Press Secretary’s response to the incident was to say that “If someone at the U.N. intentionally stopped the escalator … they need to be fired and investigated immediately.” The order of events there is important: start with assumed guilt, implement the punishment, and then investigate to determine the facts. It’s very much a Queen of Hearts approach to justice. It’s certainly an approach that Trump has adopted elsewhere. He’s regularly declaring the guilt of people without having a shred of evidence, and demanding that they be punished immediately and then prosecuted. And if the prosecutors can’t find any evidence, then they should be fired and replaced with people who can. The evidence is probably hiding in the same place as those 11,780 votes that Trump demanded that Georgia’s Secretary of State should ‘find’ after he lost the 2020 election. When you ‘know’ that someone is guilty of breaking a law that you’ve just invented, it surely can’t be that hard to prove it.

The Queen of Hearts was, of course an absolute monarch. ‘Off with their heads’ was an instinctive response to just about anything. To date, the formal written constitution of the US has not proved to be the barrier which I had naively expected that it would be. Partly, that’s because Trump has managed to capture all three branches of government power; and partly because the US system of law grinds exceedingly slowly and no legal ruling ever seems to be final until an overwhelmed supreme court, tilted heavily in one political direction, eventually gets round to ruling. Maybe a written constitution doesn’t provide the protection that some of us might have imagined. On the other hand, just imagine how much more freedom a Trump might have in the UK where so many of the ’rules’ depend simply on precedent, the assumed good character of the incumbent, and the royal prerogative. The same applies, of course, to any Trump surrogate who might happen to come along.

What happens to migrants' property?

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If Nigel Farage were ever to become UK Prime Minister and implement his policy of reversing the residency rights of just about anyone who had migrated to the UK in the past, what would happen to any assets which those migrants had accumulated? I mean, just supposing for a minute that you were a French politician who had found £885,000 down the back of the sofa to buy a house so that your boyfriend could claim to live somewhere that he rarely visited, what would happen to the house if you were forced to return to France so that your boyfriend could implement a wild promise he had made whilst campaigning?

Maybe Farage’s policy has some unstated loopholes, such as excluding French people in possession of valuable homes, although nothing he’s said so far implies any great willingness to make exceptions; he’s even ready to split families as part of his plan, so getting married and having kids doesn't work either. Maybe the assets of those expelled would simply pass to any convenient partner who was allowed to remain. That would make it quite a cunning plan – Farage would end up with a house in his constituency after all, and (unless he was the one who happened to lose £885,000 down the back of the sofa) he’d have got it for nothing.

Starmer and Reeves are feeding Farageism

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Imagine for a moment a different world in which the UK managed to solve its endemic problems. It’s vanishingly unlikely, of course. As long as governments of whatever hue insist that the constraints on what they can do are a lack of money and the need to abide by a set of fiscal rules which they themselves have devised, rather than the availability of physical resources and the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, there is no real prospect of meaningful change.

But, for the sake of argument, bear with me for a moment. Suppose we could get to a situation where the NHS could provide the help that people need, when they need it, with negligible waiting lists; suppose that we had an educational system which produced consistently good results and was the envy of much of the world; suppose that everyone had adequate housing suitable to meet their needs. Suppose also that we had ‘full’ employment: in realistic terms, everyone of working age who was able to work could get a decently-paid job that they wanted to do; suppose that that included not just UK citizens, but also those who had come here from elsewhere; and suppose that all those who arrived from elsewhere spoke impeccable English (or Welsh, of course). In such an ideal world, do we believe that Farage, Badenoch, Starmer, Mahmoud etc. would stop banging on about the need to block migration and remove some or all of those already here?

Sadly, I don’t think it would change their position one iota. There are those who argue that they simply hate migrants per se – I don’t believe that they do. I suspect, rather more cynically, that they believe that a sufficient proportion of the electorate hate migrants so much that there are large numbers of votes to be had by being seen to be tough on migration. It’s not that the politicians themselves are racists or xenophobes, they’re simply willing to appeal to voters who are in order to win elections.

Whether their faith in the innate prejudices of a significant part of the electorate is justified or not is an unknown. For the reasons outlined at the beginning, it’s not a theory which is ever likely to be tested. And for as long as UK governments refuse to fix the problems which they can then blame on migrants, they will get away with pretending that anti-migrant feelings are based on what they choose to call ‘legitimate concerns’ rather than on prejudice and racism, and claim that expelling people rather then improving conditions is the way to solve those problems. Actually, it’s worse than that. By refusing to address the underlying problems and concentrating instead on deporting people, they reinforce the idea that migration is the source of the problems; in other words, the Reeves/Starmer fiscal rules reinforce the narrative about migration. Their ideological blinkers are directly aiding the Farages of this world.

How and why does something become a moral issue?

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The UK’s Prime Minister has described his decision to recognise the state of Palestine as being a ‘moral responsibility’. It’s a nice rhetorical flourish to justify something which should have been done a long time ago, but it doesn’t explain how and why something which was apparently unacceptable to him last year suddenly became a moral imperative. Was it the non-stop killing of Gazans by Israel which tilted the balance? Maybe, but that doesn’t explain why so many had to die before it became a ‘moral’ issue. Perhaps it was the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the driving out of Palestinians from the areas being settled, but that, too, has been going on for a long time. ‘Morality’ isn’t a numbers game; there’s no magic threshold at which deliberately killing civilians, including children, moves from being a practical issue to a moral one, no magic threshold at which the seizure of land becomes a moral issue. Framing it as a moral issue might sound good, but it also avoids serious action to bring about change.

The recognition is, in any event, more limited than it appears. No-one in their right mind would want to see Hamas forming the government of the newly-recognised state, but if the Palestinians have the right to a state (as Starmer argues), by what authority can the UK declare in advance that the people may not choose a government which includes a specified group or party? Although, on reflection, an international order which precludes certain individuals or groups from ever exercising power isn’t such a bad idea – there are a number of regimes across the world which I think we would be better off without. But who decides what is or is not acceptable, and how is it to be enforced? And if it is not a general rule, why should one ‘independent and sovereign state’ be singled out as uniquely having no right to choose whatever government it wishes? There are practical issues as well – banning an organisation is all well and good, but it’s easy enough for any organisation to disband and reform under another name.

There is one simple truth underlying what is happening in Palestine, and it applies to other conflicts as well. The world is not and never has been run on the basis of morality, and there isn’t even a single set of moral standards on which we all agree. It is actually run on the basis of raw power – in effect, ‘might is right’. He who possesses the power and armaments imposes his will on others. It’s a philosophy to which most of the world’s leaders (including Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, and, yes, Starmer himself) subscribe, in their actions if not in their words. As long as that remains true, those leaders talking of ‘moral responsibility’ is just window dressing.

Reinforcing migrant blame only keeps us on the same trajectory

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As something of a parting shot yesterday, Trump told Starmer that immigration “destroys countries from within”, and advised him to deploy the military to stop migration. How that would work isn’t clear, but perhaps he means a few extra-judicial killings of the sort which he is implementing himself. Trumpland tends to see absolute destruction on all sides – his response to an unfavourable court ruling on his imposition of tariffs was to suggest that the court’s decision “would literally destroy the United States of America” as well. The threat of ‘absolute destruction’ is key to his regular invocation of an emergency of one sort or another. It’s hyperbole of course: a good general rule of thumb is that any sentence containing the word ‘literally’ is probably going to be more hyperbole than fact. Even when it isn’t from Trump.

I can’t think of any actual historical example which would lend support to the idea that immigration destroys countries; on the contrary, immigration has made many countries what they are today, with the US being perhaps the most obvious example. What immigration can do, however, is change the culture of a country, sometimes in small ways, and sometimes – especially when the ruling elite are drawn entirely from the immigrant population – much more drastically. Once again, the US stands out as a particular example of cultural replacement as Europeans marginalised, and at times massacred, the former population. The world’s greatest exponents of cultural replacement have been the European colonial powers, foremost amongst them Spain, England and France, but with dishonourable mentions for Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy as well. And here in Wales, we are not exactly unfamiliar with the idea of cultural replacement either, albeit as victim more than perpetrator.

Does the current level of immigration – either into the US or the UK – really threaten that sort of cultural change? There’s no evidence to suggest that it does. Unlike a true invasion where the ruling group is replaced, attracting migrants into the general population really doesn’t have that much impact. Historical evidence says that, after two or three generations, the descendants of immigrants tend to absorb the majority culture more often than challenging or changing it. The economic impact of migration is disputed; most objective studies suggest that it has a net positive effect overall, but for those who are not being well-served by the economy at present, immigration is a convenient scapegoat. Especially when exaggerated by those who seek to use people’s fears and prejudices as a route to power. One of the main elements of those prejudices – we cannot avoid this truth – is a form of racism; not always based on skin colour, although that’s certainly a factor, but often on a fear or dislike of anyone seen to be ‘different’.

I seriously doubt whether the likes of Trump or Farage (or Starmer or Badenoch come to that) really care very much about immigration at all. Playing to perceived prejudices is just a route to power, and dividing those over whom they seek power is a bonus. The result is that, rather than challenging or changing those prejudices, they reinforce them. Those who seek to rebut the arguments generally highlight facts and statistics, but it’s an approach doomed to fail. People will not be swayed by facts and statistics from a view which was never based on facts or statistics in the first place. There is a certain inevitability about the destination if we stay on the current trajectory. A standard piece of advice to writers is ‘show, don’t tell’, and a good starting place for governing politicians would be to create and then demonstrate economic success for all rather than verbally reinforcing blame. I’m not holding my breath.

Identifying tyranny

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Can I have been the only one watching the news last night when Charlie Windsor started talking about how ‘we’ defeated tyranny in the past and needed to stand up to it today who initially wondered whether he was talking about Trump rather than to Trump about Putin? Maybe it was one of those cleverly-crafted diplomatic criticisms which seem to be about one thing, but are actually about something else. If it was, such subtlety would have completely gone over the head of the target. Maybe one day we’ll find out who wrote Trump’s speech in response – it certainly wasn’t Trump himself – which, somewhat amazingly, he managed to read out without digressing into one of his lengthy rants about stolen elections, losers and morons.

One of the things that has become clear from the visit is that the much-lauded trade agreement allegedly reached back in May hasn’t really been agreed at all. The detail is still under discussion, with the US president free to renege on anything (such as elimination of tariffs on steel) if he feels like he may have given too much away. And from what we have seen of the man so far, even if he had agreed it, there’s no certainty that he wouldn’t change his mind on elements of it at any time – a trade agreement with Trump is an essentially worthless document. That knowledge won’t be enough to stop Starmer giving way even further as and when necessary.

The remaining potential flashpoint is this afternoon’s joint press conference where the probability that Trump will go off at a tangent remains high, particularly if he’s asked a question that he takes a dislike to. In theory, Starmer is the host; in practice, he’s already banned one broadcaster (the Australian broadcaster ABC) whose Americas editor upset Trump earlier this week by asking some difficult questions about conflicts of interest with Trump’s personal enrichment schemes business dealings. The reason given was some mysterious ‘logistical’ problems, an excuse also used for banning Al Jazeera, in whose case the weather was also mentioned as a factor. How the weather only affects outlets not necessarily friendly to Trump is a question which we probably are not supposed to ask. The underlying point is that a press conference, on UK soil, hosted by the UK’s Prime Minister, is excluding legitimate journalists at the behest of a man who thinks a free press is such a bad thing that he’s suing one US newspaper for having dared to support his opponent in last year’s election.

At what point does ‘mere’ elected autocracy become the sort of tyranny about which the king of England probably wasn’t talking after all? When attempts are made to silence a free press? When broadcasters are bullied into axing programmes or sacking presenters? When people are disappeared from the streets by masked government agents? When law enforcement is deployed to pursue and prosecute political opponents? When universities and museums are told what they may or may not teach or display? When law firms are compelled to donate their services for free to causes chosen by the president as a condition of being allowed to continue operating? When companies are compelled to give a share of their profits – or even their share capital – to the government in exchange for export licences? Tyranny doesn’t always arrive in a single giant leap; sometimes it comes in a succession of small steps, making it difficult to draw a line between tyranny and non-tyranny. Are the Starmers of this world looking on with fear as they comply – or with envy? I’m not entirely sure that I want to know the answer to that one.

Gambling with the future

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For just about the whole of my life, mankind has been on the brink of creating controlled nuclear fusion; it’s always been just ‘thirty years away’. There is no doubt that the technology offers the potential to generate huge amounts of electricity, with fewer of the problems (such as radioactive waste) associated with nuclear fission, although the link between ‘peaceful’ research and the development of ever more powerful weapons remains. Similarly, there is no doubt that progress has been made in many of the technologies involved in building a working reactor, and that some of that progress has benefits in itself, apart from energy generation. Most experts in the field believe, however, that there is still another thirty years or so before remaining problems can be resolved, and the process scaled up and commercialised.

None of that is to suggest that work shouldn’t continue, but using the ‘imminence’ of a breakthrough as an excuse to avoid taking other actions would be folly. Which brings us to the recent words of the US Energy Secretary, Chris Wright. Not only is he considerably more optimistic ("The technology, it'll be on the electric grid, you know, in eight to 15 years") than people actually working in the field, he also sees that as an opportunity to continue to pursue maximal exploitation of fossil fuels in the meantime. By coincidence (?), he happens to have founded and run fracking companies, and believes that the fracking process will "bring back manufacturing and blue-collar jobs and drive down not just electricity prices, but home-heating prices and industrial energy prices".

He doesn’t seem to believe that anthropogenic climate change is as complete a hoax as some opponents of the concept of aiming at net zero do, but he clearly does believe that it’s not as imminent as the scientific consensus suggests, and that we have generations in which to do something, so we can continue to use, and profit from, fossil fuels in the meantime. However improbable it might seem, it’s not entirely impossible that he’s right – scientific consensus has been proved wrong in the past in the light of new discoveries. It’s a gamble, though, and the stakes are incredibly high. Neither he nor I will be around to see the full outcome of decisions being taken today, although he and his mates probably will be around long enough to enjoy the profits they make from oil and gas. That, I suspect, rather than any real concern for the planet or the people living on it, is the real driver of his selective take on climate science.

Second choices need to be counted, not assumed

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Following the result of a by-election in the Vale of Glamorgan last week, some partisan commenters have attempted to make the argument ‘vote Green, get Reform’, or ‘vote Labour, get Reform’. There’s certainly a mathematical basis for such suggestions: added to the vote of the second-placed Plaid candidate, either the votes cast for the Green candidate or those cast for the Labour candidate would have been enough to secure a victory for Plaid had one or other of those parties chosen not to stand. By the same token, however, if the Conservatives had not stood a candidate and all of those votes had gone to Reform Ltd, then Reform Ltd would have won, even if there had only been two candidates in the race. Whataboutery works both ways.

The bigger problem with the argument that voting for one party ‘allows’ another to win is that it makes assumptions about what people’s second choices would have been and about how voters choose a party. In an ideal world, maybe we would all sit down with the detailed manifestos of the various parties and assess which one most closely represents our own views, which comes second and so on, and then assess which of our acceptable choices has the best chance of winning before casting a vote. In the real world, the first doesn’t happen and the second requires a degree of knowledge about what other voters are going to do which owes nothing to science and everything to guesswork and rumour.

Years of direct doorstep experience tells me that, whilst those 85 who voted Green should logically have put Plaid as their second choice (both parties favour Welsh independence, and both have strong environmental credentials, although Plaid is somewhat shaky, to say the least, on energy policy), it is highly unlikely that they would all have done so. Some would have chosen Labour, some the Tories, others would have stayed at home – and I’d be very surprised indeed if at least a couple hadn’t opted for Reform Ltd. Similar considerations apply to those who voted for each of the other parties: the basis on which people choose a party to support is much more complex than an analysis of policy positions.

Back in the days when Plaid would have been seen as a ‘no-hope’ party in places like Barri, I and other candidates (I did once stand in a ward in Barri itself) used to argue that people should vote for the party they most want to see win, rather than against the one that they most want to see lose, whilst those parties seen as having a real chance at winning argued that people should vote for the least distasteful of them rather than ‘wasting’ their vote. Now that Plaid is seriously in contention in such seats, it’s no surprise (even if a little disappointing) to find those positions reversed.

The real lesson of the by-election is that an electoral system based on first-past-the-post where more than two parties are involved can deliver seats to a party which enjoys only minority support – and the more parties in serious contention (there were four in this case), the lower the percentage of the vote needed to win. If we really want to know about people’s second choices, we need to count them. A system of proportional representation wouldn’t necessarily stop the rise of Reform Ltd (I suspect that a number of people in all parties would be unpleasantly surprised to see how many of their supporters would give their second vote to Farage’s lot), but it would be likely to deny absolute power to any party which cannot demonstrate broader support. The question is whether the government in Westminster is able to understand that, and make the change before the next UK-wide parliamentary election. Rueing the day afterwards will be too late.

Rushing to judgement

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No-one yet knows exactly what drove Tyler Robinson, allegedly, to shoot Charlie Kirk last week, although that hasn’t stopped various people declaring the reason with absolute certainty. Trump, along with Musk and sundry other unhinged Americans, have claimed that it was the ‘radical left lunatics’ (which seems to be code for everyone from ‘only moderately right-wing Democrats’  to actual socialists). Some even went so far as to demand the designation of the Democrats as a terrorist organisation and the immediate incarceration of all party members, on the basis that the action of one man who probably wasn’t a Democrat anyway was enough to make them all guilty. Others have suggested that the shooter was a Groyper (no, I’d never heard of them either) and that Kirk was shot for not being right wing enough. A third theory is that the killing was much more personal and less political than that, because the shooter may have been in a relationship with a transgender person, something which was anathema to Kirk. Time will tell.

If only half of what I’ve read since the shooting is true, Kirk seems to have held what many of us would consider to be some deeply unpleasant and hateful views. They don’t justify shooting him, of course – we shouldn’t even need to say that – but he was highly polarising, and made plenty of enemies. There are, though, some double standards at work here. It’s only a matter of days ago that Trump openly celebrated the extra-judicial killing of 11 people aboard a boat which he claimed was trafficking drugs to the US. Even if he was right about their intentions (and the only thing stopping me giving him the benefit of any doubt about that is his usual inability to tell the truth about anything), the crime which they were committing was not one which would be punishable by death in the US itself. Arbitrary application of capital punishment by presidential whim without any process at all does not sit well alongside a condemnation of an assassination on US soil; it implies that the objection is not to killings per se, but is based on drawing a distinction between victims based on the president’s opinions.

The argument for the warning-free attack on the alleged drug smugglers is that killing 11 of them will prevent many more deaths from drugs amongst US citizens (of whom, apparently, around 300 million out of a total population of 340 million were killed by drug overdoses last year – according to Trump). Balancing good and evil is a thing which governments do, but the problem is around certainty. There’s a parallel with the old historical dilemma: if someone had assassinated Hitler in 1936, or Stalin in 1924 – before either of them had presided over mass murder – would history see the assassin as a hero or a villain? We can never know whether, or to what extent, history would have been changed, because we can only ‘know’ about the history that actually happened. Killing people as a precautionary measure against the drugs they are smuggling, or the hate they are spreading, in an attempt to prevent harm which might or might not be caused in the future, is a dangerous approach which ultimately leaves all of us open to an arbitrary application of ‘justice’. That’s as true for actions taken by governments as it is for those taken by lynch mobs or lone individuals – trying to draw distinctions merely blurs a clear moral line.