Floating voter

From East Street

With some help from Microsoft

Back at reference 1, I announced by intention of becoming a tactical voter, that is to say not voting for my own party, the Labour Party.

Before I get into the serious business of voting, a little levity from East Street, where I noticed this morning a row of five small blocks let into or stuck onto the south western flank wall of Rosebery House. Possibly owned by the Rosebery Housing Association, but I cannot find anything like a catalogue of the property they own on their website. Perhaps next time I pass, I will pop in and ask. In the meantime, the small blocks are revealed by Microsoft to contain reverse relief images of bats. Someone, somewhere has a sense of humour. Pity they did not think to glaze the images with some contrasting colour so that they were more visible from the road.

Back with voting, there was a rather sad looking huddle of Labour people canvassing for the upcoming election outside Metrobank, at the main cross roads in the middle of town. I told a rather tired and dispirited lady that I proposed to vote Liberal, as their flier had told me that in the recent European elections they had done much better than Labour in this area and that their chap stood a much better chance of toppling failin' graylin'. But this lady mustered the energy to tell me that this was not right. Their chap stood a better chance, a well presented railway driver whom I think I met on the last occasion, if an unfortunate occupation given that the upcoming strike on Southwestern Trains is going to annoy a lot of people who live in the constituency but who work in town. I said I would check, which I have now done, at least up to a point. The results of this checking follow, but the bottom line seems to be that the Liberal flier - or at least my reading of it - was rather economical with the truth.

Tactical

I find that there are lots of people out there who want to help with tactical voting. The people at reference 2 for example. With their answer seeming to be that there was not one in Epsom. And I failed to find out what 'TBC' stood for. Next stop one of their references, the databank maintained by the Houses of Parliament research people. And from reference 3 you can download an Excel workbook which gives all the general election results going back to 1919 or so.

Excel

A well presented spreadsheet, with just two catches so far. First, it is organised by year of election rather than by constituency, so I had a bit of work to do to produce the above snap for the Epsom constituency. Second, they do not always list the parties in the same order. Hopefully I have straightened that out.

UKIP no show

And the story seems to be that while the Liberals might have been the runners up in the past, they appear now to have been overtaken by Labour - provided that UKIP are not running, which they are not on this occasion. The bad news is that the combined progressive vote is well short of the Tory total and has been since 2005. Indeed, the Tory vote has been climbing since its low in 2001: failin' graylin' might be failing in other respects, but he does know how to work his seat. So where did the Liberal figures come from?

Europe - Epsom

Europe - Southeast

So allowing that these Epsom figures may not be quite the same as the Epsom parliamentary constituency, on a low vote, the Liberals did indeed beat the two large parties. But they also just lost to Brexit - who as a single issue party, clocked up an impressive vote - being in a minority on that single issue notwithstanding.

Free debate

So I think the numbers are for the Conservatives and that it is not at all clear that voting Liberal is a better use of my vote than voting Labour. So voting Labour is today's intention; back in my ancestral home, where I am comfortable. And to prove that we are serious, we shall be attending the debate put on by UCASU - that is to say the Students' Union of our University of the Creative Arts. We need to participate if we want to get a result! And it will be interesting to see the inside of the place once again, it being more than twenty years since I was last in there.

It is perhaps worth repeating that I think that Corbie's present line on Europe is OK in the situation we now find ourselves in: 'I will negotiate the best deal that I can, then put it to the vote'. Not exactly leading from the front, but OK.

PS: depressed this afternoon by yet another article in the NYRB about how the party of the rich men, that is to say the Republicans, has managed to capture and hold onto a large proportion of the votes of the poor men, who ought to be voting for the Democrats, the people who do not do big tax breaks for the rich and who do do health care - and other goodies - for the poor. A trick they manage in part with help from gerrymandering of a sort and on a scale not seen in this country. In fact, about the only thing we do in that way is play politics with the timing of the implementation of the recommendations of the successive Boundary Commissions, which have more or less determinant effects on the makeup of the House of Commons. The other depressing snippet is that, somewhere along the way, I learned that the Biden hopeful, the chap at the centre of the Ukraine row, is also the chap who made Delaware one of the best places in the world to look after your dodgy money. Well in front of Juncker who did much the same thing for Luxembourg, before going onto to greater things at the Commission. Is it any wonder that rank and file voters are a touch cynical?

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/politics.html.

Reference 2: https://tactical.vote/compare.

Reference 3: https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-8647#fullreport.

Reference 4: https://www.fatsoma.com/discover. Who knows who these people are, but they now have my email address.