What did it mean?
July 10, 2001 12:00 AM
By Stephen Williams in Bristol West End News
By Stephen Williams in Bristol West End News
There is a saying of the Dalai Lama and other faith gurus of which I am rather fond - "When you lose, don't lose the lesson." Since June 7th I've spent much time pondering on why I failed to take Bristol West. It certainly wasn't due to a lack of effort. Our message appeared to be popular. There was a sense of disappointment with Mr Blair's government and real dismay with the record of the Labour controlled city council. And yet Labour won the parliamentary seat.
To find the lesson we have to dig a little deeper. In the local elections that took place on the same day the Liberal Democrats took about 23,000 votes in Bristol West, Labour got about 13,000. If people had voted the same way in the general election I would have been elected with a large majority and Bristol West would have its first Lib Dem MP. Now, some people quite genuinely vote in different ways at different elections. As a former city councillor I am a passionate believer in local government and know that many of my local council colleagues work hard for their constituents and deserved their victories. But when speaking to people on the doorstep there was quite clearly a more potent factor at work.
Every day during the campaign a small number of people said to me "I really want to vote for you but am afraid that the Tories might squeeze back." The Labour campaign seemed designed to prey upon this fear for all it was worth, telling people that if they voted Lib Dem they would get a Tory MP. This was, of course, a fallacy. The Conservative vote had been falling for 20 years in Bristol West. There was nothing to suggest, either locally or nationally, that this trend was about to be bucked.
But Labour's fallacy worked. Valerie Davey had a majority over me of 4,426. If just 2,300 of the people who wanted to vote for me but voted Labour out of fear of the Tories, had voted for their first choice, I would now be their MP. The Tories, incidentally, came third.
So the lesson for me is a rueful one. No matter how hard you work, in our electoral system factors beyond your control can snatch away victory. For Labour both locally and nationally the lesson is that their victory was as much a rejection of a worse option (a return of the Tories)as a positive endorsement for a second term. They had better start delivering fast on schools, hospitals and pensions. For the Tories the lesson is that if they don't reform and embrace 21st century social attitudes they risk being sidelined for a generation. For all of us as voters the lesson should be that if you want a particular result, you must have the courage of your convictions and vote for it.
But the big lesson is about the health of our democracy. There has been much silly talk of a second Labour "landslide". It's true that Mr Blair has over 400 Labour MPs out of 650 in the House of Commons. But, as in 1997, Labour got only 42% of our votes. Tactical voting, where people felt compelled to vote for their second choice in order to keep out their least favoured candidate, again loomed large. Turnout was down as many people felt that there was little point in voting. Cynicism with all parts of the political process is on the rise.
One way to strike at the heart of this problem would be an early introduction of proportional representation. There would be no wasted votes, no need to vote for your second choice and no landslides without the votes to back them up. Happily, on this point Valerie Davey and I are in agreement. But PR for the House of Commons would lead to about a third of her colleagues losing their jobs. One lesson we all learnt a long time ago is that turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
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