Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 18 May 2001
Warning! This column is now the subject of a directive from Labour headquarters at Millbank instructing Labour activists to give it a complete ignoral. And just so no Tribune reader has any excuse to do otherwise, here is the memo in full:
“The Daily Mail are contacting candidates about Paul Anderson’s piece in Tribune exhorting Labour supporters to vote Lib Dem to keep out Tories.
“Line to take: We do not endorse a campaign of tactical voting. We have Labour candidates in every seat and urge all voters to vote Labour.
“Background: There is a mythology about tactical voting which would have us believe that we only won in 1997 because a lot of people voted for us who are really Liberal Democrats. In fact there are very few committed Lib Dems, their support has a huge turnover from one election to the next, and nor do Lib Dem supporters necessarily believe in Lib Dem policies like proportional representation. But often Lib Dems are very organised at a local level and people who are natural Labour supporters, but believe they don’t live in a ‘Labour’ area, think it’s best to keep the Tories out. But it should never be an option.
“Probably less tactical voting took place in 1997 than it ever had before and to our gain — we won eleven seats from being in third place. So our task is to make sure all our supporters know it’s worth voting Labour wherever they live.”
My first thought on reading this was that it was quite an honour to be taken seriously enough by the powers-that-be to warrant an official (though not very rapid) rebuttal. My second was that the directive was what a spin doctor would call a load of bollocks.
And I’m not just talking about the tortured syntax or the strangely (and I think unintentionally) Orwellian undertones of the statement that “it should never be an option” to “think it’s best to keep the Tories out”. The truth is that every single survey shows that there was more tactical voting in 1997 than ever before — and that it benefited both Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
Throughout the country, voters who wanted to get rid of a sitting Tory decided not to vote for their first-preference candidate but for another who was better-placed to win. Indeed, so marked was the phenomenon that the Liberal Democrats won 46 seats, up from 20 in 1992, despite winning a percentage point less of the popular vote in the country as a whole. Nearly all the professional psephologists agree that Labour won at least 40 more seats in 1997 than it would have done had voters not voted tactically for Labour whose first-preference party was the Lib Dems.
It is utterly barmy for Labour to make a big thing about how bad tactical voting is on principle – for the simple reason that it needs all the tactical votes it can get itself. And that means tactical votes not just from Lib Dem supporters but from loads of others as well – from voters whose first preference is the Greens or the Socialist Alliance and, just as important, from those whose lack of enthusiasm for the government is tempting them to abstain.
Tactical voting is nothing more or less than voting for the lesser evil – and, as a regular Labour voter who has more often than not voted in the belief that the party is the best of a bad bunch, I don’t have any problem with that. Nor will the millions who vote Labour on June 7 thinking “Well, they’re dreadful, but at least they’re better than the Tories” – who will include, I guess, most readers of Tribune who are not standing as candidates.
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Finally, a riposte to Steve Platt, who argued last week that the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Socialist Party will be irrevocably converted to pluralism and democracy by their experience of working together and with non-aligned socialists in the Socialist Alliance.
I’m sorry to disagree with an old pal — well, actually I’m not — but I simply don’t see why the Trots can’t revert to authoritarian revolutionary sectarianism whenever they choose. After all, it is what has happened every time before when Leninists have adopted the tactic of setting up “fronts” with democratic socialists, from the old Communist Party’s flirtation with the TUC in the 1920s through to the Anti-Nazi League and the anti-poll tax movement.
Of course, individual members of the Leninist sects will undoubtedly have their eyes opened by the Socialist Alliance experience. But the organisations are a different matter altogether. They remain undemocratic in their internal organisation, in their methods and in their ideology. And until they renounce all that, democratic socialists should keep a wide berth.
