Election Notes 2024: E-Day!

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Today is finally here!

In the same way that yesterday happened yesterday and that tomorrow will probably happen tomorrow, it seems fitting that the arrival of new day should seem as tediously inevitable and as boringly predictable as the almost certain Labour government.

I get that we now live an world where to get properly excited about anything other than an incredibly expensive piece of branded gadgetry or a ‘celebrity’ scandal isn’t seen as that exciting, but I can still remember the palpable sense of excitement that summed up Labour’s 1997 election campaign.

After the Conservative election victory in 1992 there was an understandable feeling of utter bewilderment at the fact that so many people had still voted for them. Knowing first hand of the  the carnage that Thatcher had wrought upon the country all through the 80’s, still they voted for them. Despite the miners strike, the privatisations, the whole ‘greed is good’ culture, the sheer callous disregard of vast swathes of the country being decimated, despite all this, inexplicably, we had another five years of this to put up with.

One realises how utterly useless words are sometimes when attempting to describe the mood of positive emotions that seemed to grip Britain in May and June 1997. The whole nation was genuinely excited by the prospect of a Labour government, and that by voting Labour, it expressed a collective sense of optimism, that Tony Blair embodied a newer type of politics, dynamic and transformative, the kind that that Britain hadn’t had for so long and so desperately needed 

Of course, we know better now, we know what actually happened, we found out the hard way that ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ wasn’t just an anagram of Tony Blair MP, that it was, in fact was the truth. But back then there was there was real hope, that better future was now a very real possibility and that after 18 years of Conservative rule, that that possibility might finally be shared by everyone. But do I get that feeling now, do I a detect similar tsunami like surge of optimism for a Plonker. 

No.

Instead, there’s an almost nationwide yawn, a yawn moreover that feels as if the jaw hasn’t opened wide enough for it to fully escape and leaves you with a vague sense of frustration. There isn’t a sense that there’s a fundamental ideological divide that both unites the individual parties and at the same time presents voters with a clearly unambiguous choice between between the Britain the Conservatives offer and the one Labour envisions.

It has been said that it isn’t so much that Labour are popular, but more than the Conservatives are so massively unpopular, and that’s what that accounts for their imminent victory.

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What certainly hasn’t hurt is how, just like in 1997, the UK media have divined the mood of the nation and judging it to be deeply discontented, have ceaselessly told us that we’re deeply discontented, have run stories and news items telling us why we’re so discontented we are and then report on opinion polls which confirm this.

This isn’t some kind of tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theory, one that is full of shadowy cabals, rich old white men, dimly lit rooms thick with cigar smoke and brandy fumes. Just like everyone else, the media wants to be on the winning side, borne out of a sense that this is the right thing to do. 

For their business, nothing else. Why else do you think that, just like in 1997, ‘The Sun’ is supporting Labour, as it is exhorting its readers to do today? If anyone seriously imagines that Rupert Murdock gives two fucks about anything other than his bottom line, then I’ll put you in touch with this prince in Nigeria who keeps emailing me wanting my bank account details so he can transfer his fortune out of there.

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Today is election day and it is incumbent for as many people as possible to vote even if in the vast majority of cases that vote would be wasted.

This flaw in our voting system is one that none of the two main parties seem willing to address and why would they? It works perfectly well for them, as the 2019 general election result illustrates only too well.

First off, there was only a turnout of 67.3%. You might think that quite good, but what is good about a democracy in which just under a third of the electorate don’t even bother. But okay, lets go with it being a good thing, and so that 67.3% now becomes 100% of all the votes cast. 

The Conservatives, who got 43.6% of the vote and got 365 seats. Labour got 32.2 % of the vote but only 203 seats, but the system has worked much better for them in the past, but this time it didn’t. Slightly less than 10% of the vote difference but over 150 seats less.

Am I missing something?

Even more absurd is the idea that the Liberal Democrats got 11. 5% of the vote and 11 seats, but the SNP got 3.9% but 48 seats.

Don’t get me wrong the first past the post system has a lot to recommend it.  

In horse racing. 

But in the context of a fully functioning democracy, one that aspires to involve every citizen in it, this method of voting is as outdated as the quill is to writing.  

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As is my custom, I’ll be watching the BBC’s election night coverage with my usual cheeky snackers, champagne and pickled onion Monster Munch crisps. 

Very possibly, I’ll be pickled by the end of it.

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Writing about how 1997 finally ended 18 years of Conservative tyranny, brought me up short as I realised that all of the 1980’s, and most of the 1990’s, were lived in Conservative Britain is  bad enough. Reflecting that this was my adolescence, all teenage acne, wet look hair gel and Paco Rabane, raving and choons makes it embarrassingly so.

But what tops the lot was the fact that Mrs Thatcher was our MP and that my mum wouldn’t hear a bad word said against her.

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