Tactical Voting



The Herald's letters page gave short shrift to Jenny Hujul's shallow arguments in support of tactical voting in the May general election and I especially liked the comment about 'standards' from Alastair Kidd in Melrose.

Electoral reform would obviate the need for tactical reform

JENNY Hjul covers 30 column inches with her piece on tactical voting without once even hinting at the real problem with the forthcoming Westminster elections ("Tactical voting can be crucial in uniting against the SNP", The Herald, March 3).


Tactical voting is necessary only because of the gross deficiencies in the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system used to elect MPs to the UK Parliament.

The FPTP voting system discards the votes of half of those who do vote. This is not the fault of the political parties or of the candidates - it is inherent in the voting system. And this defect has been obvious at every UK Parliamentary election for many decades. Sometimes more than half of the votes are discarded (53 per cent in 2010), sometimes fewer, but always around one-half. So tactical voting is an attempt to make our votes count.

Even then we nearly always get an unrepresentative Parliament, where a single-party government, with an overall majority of 66 seats, can be elected with only 35 per cent of the votes And it's no better at the local constituency level either. More than two-thirds of the MPs elected to Westminster in 2010 were elected with only minority support.

But we do know how to give effective representation to nearly all of those who vote. And we do know how to ensure local representation with every MP directly accountable to a constituency of local voters. The simplest way of achieving both of these desirable ends would be to replace FPTP with the single transferable vote system of proportional representation (STV-PR). We know that STV-PR can deliver - we have seen it in operation for more than a century in Australia and it was the UK Parliament that gave STV-PR to both Malta and to Ireland (north and south) in the 1920s and it was the UK Parliament that re-introduced STV-PR to Northern Ireland in 1973. STV-PR was good enough for parliaments in Ireland but perhaps it is too good for Great Britain?

With STV-PR there would be no need for tactical voting because the overwhelming majority of voters would get the MPs they really wanted and the Parliament would be properly representative of the voters.

Dr James Gilmour,

24/12 East Parkside,

Edinburgh.

THE significant aspect of Jenny Hjul's article is that it mentions nothing about what we would be voting for in the forthcoming Westminster election if we were all to adopt tactical voting, leaving aside hatred of the SNP and support for the Union.

In declaring her hitherto support for Labour at both Holyrood and Westminster, she unwittingly owns up to some responsibility for the mess that Labour in 2010 left the economy. In that capacity she should be well placed to disclose how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown spent their £160bn of borrowing (their "deficit") - because , being in denial about their responsibility, no-one is prepared to offer an explanation. Yet we have daily reminders about the effects of repaying the deficit, with the cuts that undermine both the Westminster Coalition and the Scottish Government.

The perspective of Labour's spell from 1997 to 2010 is that they had 21 parliamentary years in government - 13 at Westminster, and eight at Holyrood, with every conceivable power at their disposal, devolved and reserved, to achieve much, yet, in Scotland, such was the extent of their failure that they literally handed power over to the SNP, courtesy of the votes of the electorate, who had had enough.

It is obvious that it is not really tactical voting that Ms Hjul covets - that is feasible only if there is a choice between two or more non-nationalist candidates. She requires the less-likely Unionist parties to actually withdraw their candidates in favour of the one most likely to thwart the SNP, or in the case of Gordon, to spike Alex Salmond. In any event, imagine the scene at Unionist parties' candidates selection procedures, with the prospect of their own party, say Labour, recommending that their supporters vote for the Conservative candidate to keep the SNP out, because "if you vote SNP you'll get Cameron". It's all going to be a bit of a pantomime.

They could get away with it only with the system of first-past-the-post. They absurdity is that, with the alleged certainty of no party achieving an overall majority, consideration should be given to bringing in to the equation the number of votes each of the top two parties achieves to establish which should form the government regardless of the number of seats - except that the "victorious" party would have to be able to "carry the House of Commons", as they say in the trade.

The challenge for Labour is to adopt the slogan: "Vote Labour - get Miliband".

The big joke would be if Labour themselves are the victims of the very same tactical voting they are recommending for others, thus depriving them of a Westminster majority.

Douglas R Mayer,

76 Thomson Crescent, Currie.
I THOROUGHLY enjoyed Jenny Hjul's detailed explanation of why one should abandon one's principles, politics and self-respect when voting in the General Election.

The thrust seemed to be that one should join up with other scaredy cats and vote for whichever team seems to have Westminster's best interests at heart - in case the bogeymen/women that have been doing such a dreadful job of running the country should somehow be successful.

Ms Hjul is obviously an avid reader of Marx (Groucho): "These are my standards, if you don't like them, I've got others."

Alastair Kidd,

56 Eildon crescent,

Melrose.

Popular posts from this blog

SNP - Conspiracy of Silence

LGB Rights - Hijacked By Intolerant Zealots!