Events | 2010.03.21
The obsession with swing voters is strangling politics | Jackie Ashley
Targeting marginals is logical sense for Ashcroft and Whelan. But the system sucks all fire and clarity from party lines
Back in the old days, they used to make ceramic caricatures of the political villains and heroes. Michael Ashcroft and Charlie Whelan are today\'s unlikely pair of toby jugs, the Belize-based peer and the ruddy-faced Unite official grinning at one another from opposite ends of the mantelpiece. Both are being credited with almost supernatural powers in winning over marginal seats.
Ashcroft long ago realised that parties didn\'t win or lose elections in a uniform way across the country, but through street-level battles in clusters of swing constituencies. After the 2005 election he published a call to arms, Smell the Coffee, and began to channel money and energy into these seats. Running the Tories\' target-seat campaign, he brought the kind of focus you would expect from a buccaneering entrepreneur, badly spooking Labour MPs and candidates.
Whelan, now political director of Unite – a key Labour funder and the parent union of British Airways cabin staff – got the same point. He has been working to use the union\'s contacts and membership to shore up Labour voting in many of the same key marginals.
In many ways, the two men are opposites – not just in politics but in character. Ashcroft is a tightly controlled figure in public, austere seeming, obsessed by military history and his collection of Victoria Crosses. Whelan is seen as a cheery bully: once the ultimate Brownite enforcer, he has become strangely tweedy since decamping to the Highlands and pursuing salmon rather than political opponents.
If Ashcroft is held up by the left and much of the media as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the Conservatives – an unaccountable, shadowy figure who hasn\'t paid his fair whack of taxes and exerts a puppet master\'s influence – then Whelan is getting it in the neck as the embodiment of all that\'s wrong with Labour under Brown – a ruthless conspirator, using trade union money to sideline opponents and build new power bases.
You could call this the Dan Brown school of politics: we love to believe in secret conspiracies – private cabals directing things behind the scenes to their own agenda. But in neither case have things gone smoothly.
Ashcroft\'s non-dom status caused David Cameron and William Hague acute embarrassment and made them look naive, or worse. You can\'t say the Tories\' stick, or slide, in the polls was caused by the Ashcroft story, but it didn\'t help, and contributed to a sense that Cameron was less in control than he would like us to think. Ashcroft is clearly a more traditional, rightwing Tory than Cameron, so how much influence has he really wielded in those target seats?
But now the right is using Whelan to make a link between travel-disrupting strikers and Labour\'s re-election campaign. A leftwing union is pushing aside Blairite or moderate candidates in winnable seats, so the theory goes. Unite, holding the purse strings, is now pulling the strings. It is a mirror image narrative. Tit for tat. But is it fair?
At one level Unite\'s critics have a point to make about the union\'s influence in politics. What is it trying to achieve? Perhaps at a local level it is helping Labour, using trade unionists to speak to fellow unionists to get the vote out. But nationally the strikes will be the worst possible pre-election headlines for Gordon Brown. No wonder ministers are frantically twisting arms and begging the brothers and sisters to desist.
But it is hard to get worked up about the union\'s local campaigning. If the Tories have the money, near-broke Labour has to respond in any way it can. And getting Unite members to knock on doors is far closer to a traditional idea of democracy than the focus groups and expensive internet-based campaigns the Tories are using. Furthermore, as the Conservatives hold to a belief in faster, deeper cuts and public-sector pay freezes to repair public finances, then don\'t public-sector trade unions have a right, even a duty, to warn their members and try to prevent a Tory victory?
Of course, if we do get a hung parliament, then the nature of the new Labour parliamentary party will matter very much. It may be symbolised in a fight for the leadership between David Miliband and Ed Balls if the left wins. And if the central political agenda is all about public-sector cuts, then it\'s a final goodbye to New Labour and perhaps a return to a more traditional left-right divide in the Commons. That would be a Labour party far less likely to do some kind of deal with the Lib Dems; the centre-left could remain split. These may be really important arguments. The people who should be worried about Whelan and Unite aren\'t the Tories so much as Mandelson, Miliband and co.
However, there is a much more serious and damaging political consequence of this focus on target seats by both Ashcroft\'s team and Whelan\'s one. They are behaving entirely logically, given our strange electoral system, but homing in on swing voters in marginal constituencies must inevitably narrow the range of messages the parties send out.
We get political rhetoric shorn of fire and clarity, converging in a damp, bland place. We get mealy-mouthed, mumbling politics – despite the huge issues facing the country – on everything from war to climate change and the debt. The more politicians obsess about target seats, the less they speak boldly to the country. This is presumably why the parties are so cagey about expressing clear views on the economic dilemmas ahead.
But the obvious effect is to turn off most of the electorate in the rest of the country, who have cottoned on to not being told the truth about what Labour or the Tories would do if they won a majority. Whatever happens to turnout among the uncommitted groups in certain "battleground" areas, the overall turnout and enthusiasm is being dampened. The irony is that, in their different ways, Ashcroft and Whelan have stronger, clearer views than most people in politics.
So don\'t get too worked up about our toby jug villains. Ask instead about the voting system producing this strange mix of expensive, narrow tactics and bland public discourse. The sickness in our democracy is a lot deeper than one tax exile splurging his millions around Conservative central office, or a tweeting trade union official doing favours for his old mates.
We need reform. If, out of a hung parliament and a certain period of political confusion, we got real change in the voting system – goodbye to sugar daddies and sweetheart union deals – that would be the best outcome of all.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ling-marginals-whelan-ashcroft
