Democratic renewal and the product of primes

During one of the recent elections – I think it was 2018, so it must have been the London council elections  – I helped out.  My job, Samantha persuaded me, was to collect information from each polling station on Election Day itself.  There are several polling stations across the patch, and I cycled from one to the other, finding out how many people had voted.  This is something that the polling stations record as they go along and will share with the various parties standing in the election.  They can’t and won’t say how people have voted, of course; but they will tell you that, in the past two hours, 55 people (or whatever) have gone into the booth with a polling card.

Once I’d found out from each polling station how many people had voted in the past couple of hours, I cycled back to the local Labour Party HQ and told them what I’d discovered.  I did this pretty much all day and cycled about 70 miles.

The point of this – I learned – was to help manage the process of ‘getting out the vote’.  Getting your vote out is the very business end of an election.  There’s no point having loads of people support you if, on the day itself, they stay at home.

In the days and weeks and months before the election, volunteers and candidates and Labour Party officials had been knocking on doors throughout the borough, finding out who might be intending to vote Labour (and, wherever possible, persuading waverers to vote Labour).  (This isn’t something just the Labour Party do, of course: all parties do it.)  So by the time of the election you (the Labour Party) have (hopefully) a rough idea of how many people in each ward of the constituency are intending to vote for you.

So if you learn that the number of people turning up to vote in a particular ward has so far been low, you can consult your lists of voters and Labour supporters in that ward and make a decision on whether to deploy your resources (that is, your volunteers and activists) specifically to that area to encourage your voters to actually get to the polling station.  Given that the polling stations are open from 7 in the morning until 10 at night, if you keep tabs on the numbers voting at regular intervals you can (potentially, at least) have a significant impact on your vote.

I noticed, however, that the people at local HQ to whom I gave my data were markedly less interested in some wards than others.  Eventually I figured out why.

In some wards, local voters are so overwhelmingly Labour, or Tory, that sending your troops there is a waste of time.  The places that really matter are where it’s tight, where a handful of voters voting one way rather than another might really make a difference.  So if you discover that turnout is low in a place where a few more Labour voters might make a disproportionate difference, that’s where you go.  (Equally, if you conclude that your vote has been disproportionately high in a particular place, you can divert your resources elsewhere.)

This might all seem well and good, except it is a story in microcosm of the weakness of the first-past-the-post system.  Only in a first-past-the-post system does it make sense to focus your effort geographically.  It is most obvious at national level.  I was born in a seat where the Tory majority is substantial.  The Tory candidate – any Tory candidate – knows that they are going to win, irrespective of their efforts.  What would be the point of sending scarce volunteer resources to a place where you know you’re going to win?  Those resources can be – and are – sent instead to ‘marginals’, the places where minor changes in voting preferences or turnout can make the difference between victory and defeat.

But what does this mean between elections?  It means a Tory MP treating (in that case) his constituency with near contempt.  He need never even visit.  (I certainly never saw him, or heard anything about him, when I was growing up.)  Similarly, and as the Labour Party found out in 2019, if you simply assume that the people who have ‘always’ voted for you will continue to do so indefinitely… Well.  One day you come unstuck.

Back to my wards.  Over here, bits of town where the vote is (perceived as) tight and where, as a result, political activists (from all parties) spend their time.  Over there, the ‘safe’ bits, where ‘your’ vote is assured.  Live in a ‘tight’ area?  Well, weirdly, you have the experience of being noticed, of attention being paid, of being politically important.

Live in a safe seat, a safe ward?  You never see anyone from a political party.

And herewith the problem.  In a first-past-the-post system, every vote does not matter.  All votes are equal, but some are more equal than others.  In a first-past-the-post system, political attention is focused, not just on Election Day but systematically, in some locations rather than others.

In a system of proportional representation, however – and I really don’t care precisely what kind of PR I mean – any vote anywhere has the potential to be the one that matters.  And that would mean political activists, of all persuasions, engaging with voters everywhere.  Often.  Not just at election time.

That would in turn mean greater political sensitivity.  At the moment – and, again, as the Labour Party has found out to its cost – if you spend year after year after year not really paying attention to the people in a particular place, because you simply assume that they’ll vote for you, there will come a point when you no longer really know who they are, or how they live their lives, or how they think or feel, or what really matters to them.  And one day you’ll say things or offer things that simply don’t make sense to them any more – and they’ll either turn off completely or vote for someone else.

If, as we must, we are to have some sort of democratic renewal in this country – and by that I mean a politics not which obliges everyone to be endlessly ‘involved’ but one which is structurally sensitive to the lives people are actually leading – then some sort of PR is, I conclude, essential.

It’s my birthday (a product of primes!) so I’ll rant if I want to.