UK General Election 2024
Yesterday around 17:00 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave a short speech in the rain in front of 10 Downing Street. Most of it was a campaign spiel for the Tories. That was weird, considering that as Sunak got to the electrifying part where he announced a general election, Things Can Only Get Better by D:Ream was prominent in the background, blaring from a protester’s sound system. (That was Tony Blair’s anthem for New Labour.)
The UK is having a general election on the 4th of July. Independence Day for the American part of me. I’ll have to think about what to call that day with the British part of me from now on. Much will depend on the results.
Elections can only sway voters who aren’t locked into multigenerational family allegiance to one party, which is commonplace. Campaign efforts will be heavily targeted at the swayable voters. Americans would think of them as swing voters.
First Past The Post is a terrible election mechanism in a country where more than two political parties contest each other.
Sometimes political parties make a deal in which only one of the stronger parties from its end of the spectrum puts forward a candidate for a seat and the others refrain. But if a party makes too many such deals in which it holds back, it undercuts its own potential power. More often, most of the parties stand a candidate for a seat. There tend to be more parties toward the left than toward the right, so liberal votes are often more split and FPTP gives an advantage to the conservative end where the vote is not split so much.
The main way voters can try to combat this is tactical voting. Voters try to figure out which party’s candidate is not only palatable to them but also has a good chance of getting at least one more vote than the next most popular candidate. It’s tricky. Media and polls can’t give a good picture for tactical voters to use for decisions. Websites have begun to spring up to help people figure out which party to go for in their area if they want to vote tactically. That makes it somewhat less a matter of groping in the dark than it was when I first became a citizen. Even so, it is still muddy and iffy.
In the recent local election, FPTP re-elected the Police and Crime Commissioner for our area. There wasn’t a clear tactical voting push. If there had been a runoff system or a ranked choice voting system, the vote totals per party indicate he would likely have lost as votes from the other end of the political spectrum consolidated behind one of his opponents. That’s how FPTP awards wins to candidates whose policies are only aligned with a minority.
At 20:22 the first campaign email from my MP hit my inbox. She is Liberal Democrat Helen Morgan, who upset the apple cart to replace Owen Paterson when he had to resign in disgrace. This had been a Tory seat for all but two years about a century ago. I’m not a member of any political party here, so this isn’t about party for me. It’s entirely about what type of representative she has shown herself to be. Morgan is everywhere, getting involved in everything in our constituency. We didn’t have that before. Her policy stances are mostly compatible with mine and I have been relishing the novelty of having our MP pay attention. I’d like to keep her in this post.
For many others, it won’t be so clear. But practically every metric about the UK shows deterioration and decline since 2010. This is our chance, as a country, to make a serious course change. I was resigned to the Tories clinging to power until the last minute, pushing off this election as late as the law allows. I am delighted to get it a few months sooner.
More than half the world’s population are having big elections this year. Now the UK knows when our big national election will happen. I hope we will make good choices.