Quote. [voting] (1908)

From the November 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The only way to guard against throwing your vote away is to vote for the party that stands for what you stand for. To vote for something that you don’t want in order to avoid something else that you don’t is to do worse than throw your vote away."—The Call.

Blogger's Note:

My educated guess is that The Call cited above was The New York Call, which had been launched in May of 1908. There was a British 'socialist' paper with the title of The Call but that dates from 1916-20.

Anybody else think that the quote is reminiscent of the following famous Eugene Debs' quote?:

“I’d rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don’t want, and get it.”

Correspondence: Electoral Tactics in the Potteries. (1908)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Electoral Tactics in the Potteries. 

Sir,—Can a worse case of faking and compromise be found than the following ?

At the recent Municipal elections the A.S.R.S. put forward a Mr. Robinson for the South Ward, and his candidature was endorsed by the North Staffs Trades and Labour Council. He is a member of the I.L.P., but did not mention that fact in his election address. Another member of the A.S.R.S., an ex-signalman named Leese, an expelled member of the I.L.P., who poses as a “Labour” man and who has acted as election agent for Mr. John Ward, M.P., undertook to serve in a similar capacity for Mr. Robinson. The Mayor, who was also running in the same ward, called upon Mr. Leese, threatened that he should be opposed next election, reminded him that his (the Mayor’s) class gave liberally to the Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund of the A.S.R.S., that he (Leese) did not altogether depend upon the working class for his livelihood, and also that the railway companies were objecting to their servants contesting elections. The result was that a notice appeared in the Sentinel the following evening stating that Mr. Robinson had withdrawn, as he did not wish to oppose the Mayor !

In the Wellington Ward of Hanley, Mr. J. Lovatt, member of the S.D.F., and secretary of the Potters’ Union, was put forward by his union as a Labour Candidate, although as he won Justice claimed the result as an S.D.F. victory. At an indoor meeting Mr. Lovatt said he was a Socialist but was putting that on one side and was running simply as a Labour candidate in order to be at peace with the non-Socialists in his union. On Oct. 30th he was supporting Mr. A. Stanley, M.P., an anti-Socialist, at a public meeting !

Thus do the place-hunters obscure the issue.

Yours faithfully,

J.T. Skelton.

[Do figs grow on thistles ?—Ed. T.S.S.]

Greasy Pole: On tactical voting (2005)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here is something else for all those bewildered and dispirited Labour supporters to blame on Blair and his government. In their glory days of 1997 and 2001 voting was a happily uncomplicated business, requiring them only to go to their local polling station and plonk their cross against the name of their New Labour candidate, then go home congratulating themselves on participating in the drive to raise living standards, make everyone healthier and more secure, tackle global poverty and climate change.

But since then it has been borne in on the most starry-eyed Labourite that their party is not only unable to make good on its promises but has carried through other, unpromised and unwelcome, policies like cutting single parent benefit and hounding those on incapacity benefit, imposing student tuition fees, introducing the market into the NHS and other public services, taking part in the invasion of Iraq. All of this makes voting, for many a Labour supporter, a matter fraught with indecision. There has been an anguished debate from which has emerged – or rather re-emerged – the concept of tactical voting. This means voting for a second choice candidate – like a Liberal Democrat – in the hope that this will influence the Labour government to change its policies. This is a sight more complex than simply opting for their first choice candidate.

A jolt

The case for tactical voting has recently been stated by John Harris in his book So Now Who Do We Vote For?, in which a Labour ex-minister outlines his dilemma:

  “And why don’t we like Michael Howard? Partly because of his right wing record when he was home secretary. But we’re more right wing than Michael Howard was. I’m not saying I want the Tories, but how bad would it be? The thing is, the Labour party needs a fright.”

Harris concludes that in Labour heartlands like Scotland, Wales, South Yorkshire and London “the Blairites need a jolt”. He discusses some of the other parties – the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Green, Respect – which, if they amassed a considerable vote, would administer that jolt. This line of reasoning does not recognise the futility of voting for one unsatisfactory party in order to disturb another. After all it is not so long ago that voting Labour was sometimes used to give a Tory government a jolt. There must be another, more hopeful, more enduring method.

A rather desperate-sounding parliamentary group under the name of “Impeach Blair” has campaigned to get Blair on trial for his part in the Iraq war and the deceptions he practised in that cause. The idea made very little progress, which is probably just as well because Blair may have been able to defend himself successfully on the grounds that he was only following precedent. For example there was Neville Chamberlain who in 1938 came back from Munich holding a piece of paper which, he claimed, was a guarantee of peace in our time, although even as he spoke this country – and quite a few others – were busily preparing for war. Then there was Anthony Eden, who in 1956 lied to the House of Commons when he denied that, in order to justify the attack on Suez, there had been a conspiracy between Israel, France and Britain to collude in the Israeli invasion of Egypt. Blair might point out that Eden, far from being prosecuted, was elevated into being Lord Avon. An acquittal would undoubtedly follow.

Standing in Sedgefield

As a result the group turned its attention to an idea dreamed up by Adam Price, a Plaid Cymru MP who is threateningly rumoured to be a brainy maverick, to persuade someone to stand against Blair in his Sedgefield constituency. This person would need to be – rather like Martin Bell in Tatton in 1997 and Blair in his younger days – of impeccable character and antecedents and to be allowed a clear run by the other parties, to focus the anger against Blair effectively enough to unseat him. As we write nobody has been found to take this on. Sedgefield has been rock-solid Labour for over 90 years; the people there are apt to refer to Blair as “our Tony” (perhaps as the people of Tatton called Neil Hamilton “our Neil” before they threw him out in 1997) and in 2001 they gave him a majority close on 18,000.

It would be highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for a sitting prime minister to be opposed at an election by a single candidate. This did happen in 1945, when Winston Churchill’s seat at Epping was contested by Alexander Hancock. The other parties had agreed not to stand in Epping, as a “mark of respect” for Churchill, but there were unacknowledged advantages for them in allowing “the man who won the war” to have a free ride to Westminster. However there were people who did not accept this; most prominent among them was William Douglas-Home whose brother, then Lord Dunglass, was Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, closely involved in the Munich negotiations which effectively handed Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. Douglas-Home was an ardent fan of Chamberlain and a bitter critic of Churchill; during his time in the Army in the war he fought three by-elections in opposition to the manner in which the war was being conducted. In September 1944 he refused an order to participate in the “mopping up” of the German army in Le Havre, on the grounds that this would result in heavy civilian casualties – which, when the attack came, did happen. Douglas-Home was court martialled, discharged from the Army and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment with hard labour.

Contest in Epping

With this background Douglas-Home was an obvious possibility to ignore the party truce and stand against Churchill at Epping. He did at first intend to do this but then withdrew, which allowed Arthur Yates, another soldier (although not one who disobeyed orders; the Daily Mail affectionately described him as “an earnest, hardened and freckled young man”) to stand in his stead. The Army flew Yates over from Austria for his nomination but he arrived too late, which left the field to Alexander Hancock, who got his name on the ballot papers as an Independent. Hancock was a local farmer; Churchill dismissed him as “somewhat crackpot” and it is true that he did have an unusual approach to politics.

To begin with he confessed not to have any desire to become an MP or to deny that to Churchill. When he was asked about his chances of defeating Churchill he shrugged “could anyone?” His principal objective was to publicise his “philosophical plan” under which “able bodied” people would do about an hour’s compulsory work each day to provide the essentials of life and spend the rest of the time producing non-essentials. It might have occurred to the more reflective voters in Epping that the plans put forward by the other parties for trying to control British capitalism had little more than did Hancock’s to commend them in terms of relevance and effectiveness. At all events over 10,000 of them voted for Hancock, or perhaps that was, in fact, tactically against Churchill, who survived with a majority of around 17,000.

Sadism and masochism

If someone is willing to offer themselves as another Alexander Hancock it will be in response to the widespread anger and disgust at Blair and the fact that his party’s record in government has led to many ex-supporters feeling they are disenfranchised. Labour’s election manipulators are already worried about the possibility that they will lose some seats by default because a lot of its supporters will be unable to summon up enough enthusiasm even to vote. To such people the prospect of a candidate taking on Blair one-to-one in his own territory has its attractions. If the unthinkable happened sadists might find pleasure in the downfall of a politician as plausible, dishonest and obsessive as Blair. But what then? Blair was after all once the great young hope of the Labour Party and of millions of people outside the party. What reason is there to suppose that a successor would be any different, any more acceptable? Why should we believe that another party, brought to power through tactical voting, would be any more successful? What hope is there that it would be useful to concentrate on one problem, one leader, one election? The working class persist in choosing between different versions of the same weary, discredited palliatives for capitalism’s problems. This is not sadism; it is masochism and it will be a massive relief when it stops.

Ivan

Lesser evil or lose-lose situation? (2020)

From the June 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the face of it, the lesser evil argument seems only common sense. If you have a choice between something bad and something worse, who would choose the worse? In fact, in everyday life, who does?

In politics it is rather more complicated as there are not just two options since, even if there are only two candidates, you can always choose not to vote for either of them by not voting at all. And there is not always agreement either on what is ‘evil’ or on what is ‘lesser’.

In Britain at election time we socialists come up against this argument from those who want us to vote Labour on the grounds that it is the lesser evil compared to the Tories. But it is not just socialists who are confronted with the lesser-evil argument. For instance, in Northern Ireland if you are a Unionist living in a predominately Irish Nationalist area you may find yourself in a situation where only Sinn Fein or a moderate Nationalist has a realistic chance of being elected; in that case you might be open to persuasion to vote for the moderate Nationalist. On the other hand, you might consider a united Ireland so ‘evil’ that you wouldn’t vote for either of them.

Socialists feel the same when confronted with a choice of two (or more) candidates standing for capitalism. For us, capitalism is the ‘evil’, which is why it is a matter of indifference to us which particular party forms the government under it. This is based on the nature and lived experience of governments under capitalism. On paper the programme of the Labour Party seems more attractive – offering more reforms to benefit working people – than the Tories. However, as everyone knows, what a party does when in office is not the same as what it says it will do.

There is a reason for this. Any party that takes on the job of being a government under capitalism in the end has no choice but to bend to the economic laws of capitalism and give priority to profits and conditions that facilitate profit-making. Thus we have seen Labour governments cut benefits, impose wage restraint, oppose strikes, bring in racist immigration controls, prepare for wars, etc, just as Tory governments have. This makes choosing between them irrelevant. Changing governments changes nothing; capitalism continues and it is capitalism that is the problem.

In the US, as it’s a presidential election year there, whether or not to vote for a perceived lesser evil is a big issue. A veteran leftist, Mitch Abidor, in an article in the New York Times (13 May) subtitled ‘Many disappointed fans of Bernie Sanders would prefer a quixotic display of principle’, urged them not to make the same mistake his generation of leftists made in 1968. Then they voted for third-party candidates rather than for Hubert Humphrey the Democratic Party candidate, so helping Nixon to win (though actually Nixon would have won anyway). He summarises their argument as:

  ‘The two major parties are merely the right and left wings of the capitalist system. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.’

This is true and a view we can endorse. Note, however, that those Abidor was criticising are planning to vote for the Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins, as opposed to not voting for any candidate who stands for capitalism (after all, they were planning to vote for Sanders and his programme of more state intervention in the capitalist economy), as does the Green Party, even if it wants to go back to an idealised smaller-scale capitalism.

As a sexist, racist, xenophobic loudmouth Trump is the perfect bogeyman, the ideal ‘greater evil’. Who wouldn’t want to vote him out? Quite a few actually. Ok, how could any ‘progressive’ not want to vote him out? Yes, but who are they going to vote in instead? The Democratic Party is indeed ‘the left wing of the capitalist system’. If he wins, Biden would be presiding over the affairs of the US capitalist class and, in accordance with the past policy and record of Democratic presidents, would defend its interests abroad. The form might change (he might be more polite) but the content (defence of US interests throughout the world) would continue. It really would be half a dozen of the other.

In Britain, over time fewer and fewer people are being convinced by the lesser-evil argument and at election time are refusing to choose between Labour and the Tories as the only two parties with a realistic chance of forming a government. They vote instead for the party that best expresses what they do want. In this, they follow the advice of Eugene Debs, a leader of the pre-WW1 reformist Socialist Party of America:

  ‘It is better to vote for what you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don’t want, and get it.’

We agree with that too but there is another reason why we in particular refuse to vote for any candidate or party that stands for capitalism or wants to try to reform it. The capitalist class are the ruling class – the class that controls political power – because the excluded wage-working majority class acquiesce in this by, among other things, voting for politicians and political parties who accept the capitalist economic system and the right of the capitalist class to live off incomes ultimately derived from the exploitation of the majority class.

From this perspective, voting in an election where all the candidates stand for capitalism is a lose-lose situation. There is no lesser evil.

Adam Buick

Bye-Elections (1987)

Rosie Barnes

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Greenwich groan

There is one way in which the SDP/Liberal Alliance, self-proclaimed mould breakers of British politics, are set rigidly in tradition. Whenever they win an election they elevate the result into an historic event which will change the face of politics.

So it was in Greenwich where Rosie Barnes, ex-Labour Party and straight out of the Posy Simmonds mould of a Blackheath liberal, won a by-election famous for making an issue over whether the Labour candidate's father had been a drunken wife-basher. Another enduring tradition ensures that elections should concern themselves with such irrelevant nonsense.

The Alliance claimed their victory was evidence that the working class are fed up with the established two party system and are looking for another way, a third party. This does not square up with another well used Alliance ploy, to encourage people to vote "tactically" to keep one party out rather than let another one in. Tactical voting — if it ever happens — could be used to the benefit of the Labour and Tory Parties; it does not indicate any disillusion with the two party set-up but a strong revulsion against one or other of those parties. And there is nothing new, or mould-breaking, in that.

In any case it is the depth of negative thinking to argue that workers should vote for a party they don't really support rather than another which they like even less. That is a cynical misuse of workers' political power to change society. The Alliance, which is a re-arrangement of the failed leaders and policies of other capitalist parties, is bound to feed off the cynicism and disillusion which those failures have nurtured.

The two Davids, then, offer nothing that is new or hopeful. On economic policy they deal in the same sterile ruses of trying to make British capitalism more profitable by holding back wages. On war weapons they concern themselves with trivial debates about which method of mass annihilation they favour.

The authentic mould breakers of politics aim for a fundamental change — for a different social system with none of the desperate social ailments which are the stuff of capitalist politics and of the parties, like the Alliance, which seek power to run the system.

. . . Truro Tremble

In Truro, "tactical voting" had a different meaning for the Alliance. There they urged voters to support the candidate of their choice — because they always assumed they had victory in their pockets. The big issue was the "Cornishness" of the candidates with the Labour man. who comes from decidedly un-Cornwall-like Hillingdon in West London, upstaging the rest by speaking Cornish. A famous victory for the Liberals, they say; a typically cynical and irrelevant contest, we say.

Editorial: Tactical Voting (1983)

Editorial from the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who remembers the days of “consensus” politics, when Butskellism was rife in this country (which means when the Conservative and Labour parties made no secret of the fact that they were in basic agreement over the running of British capitalism) will be familiar with the slippery image of the floating voter. All manner of electoral bait was cast on the muddied waters to entice the floating voters into the net, as they moved shoal-like between the bed-rock support for the two big parties. Many dirty tricks disfigured the great angling contest between Labour and Tory, for the floater was in many cases considered to be crucial to the outcome of an election.

But all that was in the days of Macmillan, Gaitskell, Butler and the like; interest in the floating voter has declined and attention is given instead to the tactical voter, who is now said to be the deciding factor. There are contrasts between the two types. The floating voter could be an apathetic creature, liable to stay in its shell if the bait was not enticing enough to get it out to the polling station, while the tactical voter is essentially someone who votes. When the floating voter did vote, whether under inducement or threat, in the end it was for the party of its choice; the whole point about tactical voting is that it is for the party you don't really support.

In the famous Bermondsey by-election, for example. Labour supporters who were persuaded that Peter Tatchell stood little chance of winning might have voted for the SDP/Liberal Alliance candidate as the one most likely to keep the Tories out. This tactical vote would have been cast, even if the voter had been aware that the Alliance is a bunch of unprincipled opportunists.

Tactical voters try to be on the winning side, which means that they will be affected by preconceptions about the result. Electoral forecasts, then, are important; if Tatchell had looked likely to win in Bermondsey he should have attracted tactical votes rather than, as was the case, repulsed them. In that event many supporters of the Alliance, although they regarded Tatchell as a dangerous revolutionary (which he isn't) and the Labour Party as discredited and impotent (which it is) should have voted for him. In the past this process was known as a bandwagon which, as it gathers speed, picks up more and more people eager to be taken for a ride.

Although it seems to have been only recently discovered, tactical voting has been practised for a long time. Ever since the twenties the Labour and Conservative parties have argued that, as the Liberals could not hope to win an election, to vote for them was a waste; for tactical reasons. Liberals should vote Labour or Tory, even if they were opposed to those parties. This is not an argument about principle but about a squalid expediency. As the Liberals once suffered through the use of the tactical vote, it might be expected that they would be still opposed to its use now and would still be protesting that people should vote in accordance with their ideas; but now that they think the tactical vote is favouring them, the Liberals have no difficulty in accepting it.

Of course this is causing the Labour and Conservative parties a great deal of anguish and they are turning their ire on to the opinion polls on the assumption that, by forecasting the winner, they help to attract the tactical vote to that party and so to energise its bandwagon. A bruised Labour Party asserted that this happened in Bermondsey and one Labour MP — the ridiculous Doug Hoyle — wants to ban the polls from operating during the crucial period of an election. Hoyle sits on a thin majority having won a by-election almost as disastrous for his party as Bermondsey so it is natural that he should be anxious to find a picturesque excuse for Labour’s failures, to add to those which litter their history. A pollsters' conspiracy may now take its place alongside the bankers’ ramp, the economic blizzard and the winter of discontent.

Hoyle’s spluttering symbolised how seriously these matters are taken by the big parties whose business is to amass enough voters, whether sinking or floating, tactical or suicidal, to get them into power. None of them need be concerned about what the votes are based on — about what informs the voter who can be persuaded, during the brief couple of weeks of an election, to switch their support from one candidate to another. It is clear that no part in this is played by elements of political maturity or class consciousness or an awareness of the power of the vote to transform society.

Those votes are determined by inconsistency and opportunism and an ability to ignore the historical fact that it is useless to change from one of the capitalist parties to another. Workers in Britain have been swinging from Labour to Tory and back again since the twenties without producing any effect for the better; to add the SDP to the game will make no difference to its futility. All these parties represent the interests of the minority who own the means of life and they have no plans or intentions — or any conception — other than to run the social system in which that minority dominate through their ownership. They stand for the society which produces war, nuclear weapons, famine, poverty and disease alongside class privilege. They all stand for the decadence of capitalism and it matters not one whit if the vote swings from one to the other of them. The real issue is to get rid of capitalism.

This cannot be brought about through the crazy oscillations of the floating voter nor by the expedient manoeuvres of the tactical vote. It needs a stable political awareness that capitalism cannot be reformed out of its nature. A voter who has that knowledge does not drift or wriggle; they cannot be tempted to vote for any of the capitalist parties under the delusion that this is a useful thing to do because it keeps one of the others out or lets another in.

In contrast to the floaters and the tacticians there is the socialist, whose vote cannot be bought or manipulated or netted. Socialists vote on their knowledge, which means they use their vote to the limits of its awesome power to establish the society of freedom.