UK Elections 14: Tactical Voting

I’m not really a great tactical voter; that is to say, positioning my favourite parties in order 1,2,3, I might vote for No.2 rather than No.1 because No.2 has a better chance of beating the likely winner, No.3.

I am not really in favour for two reasons. The first is that I might have got it wrong, and that in fact No.3 was down in the dumps with no takers, but the opinion polls hadn’t cottoned on. No.1 might have had a chance if only its own supporters had voted for it. Having stood as a minority candidate I am well aware that your biggest danger is that people don’t vote for you because they think you can’t win.

The second reason I am against tactical voting is that it seems to make a nonsense of the whole thing. The reason we are voting is that we want a government which does what we want it to do, and voting for something else sends the wrong message to the rest of the electorate and in particular the pundits they read.

But it seems to me that a new aspect to this has turned up for this election. Let me give you an example. I, I make no secret of it, am tempted towards UKIP because I think it important for both democratic and economic reasons that we leave the EU. But in this election, the Lib Dems are hoping for a big result. If they don’t get it, that is to say if, after scoring the second highest percentage of the vote, this has merely resulted in them coming a very close second in a lot of constituencies as opposed to simply second, they will complain that the system is unfair and that we should change to a proportional system. And some in the media will take them seriously.

I am against a proportional system because it involves party lists rather than voting for a candidate you identify with (thus strengthening the power of the political class: they decide who goes into parliament), because it doesn’t allow a single representative for your constituency and because it involves a stitch up after you have voted so that no one gets the set of policies they have chosen: we get what the political class would like.

So there is pressure on me to vote not for UKIP but for the Conservative Party (my second choice) so that if the total number of votes cast for each party is taken into account by the media, at least my No.2 choice won’t have done so badly that there is pressure to change to a system (not just a party) that I don’t want.

So even the smell of PR produces an unjust result.