Tactical voting was not then much talked about. It was the age of conviction politics, or so we thought. You voted for what you believed in. Certainly, I have never been able to vote anything other than Labour - not even for friends standing for the residents' association in local council elections - since I announced to my shocked parents at 18 that I had joined the party. Nor, I imagine, could my parents ever have voted tactically. I was the first of my family in three generations, I was sternly informed, to desert the Conservative Party, though my grandmother was thought once to have voted for Lloyd George on the grounds that he cut a dashing figure.
Now, people are seemingly more sophisticated. I have before me lists of constituencies where tactical voting, or the lack of it compared to 1997, could make a difference; these are to be plotted on a giant map for this week's New Statesman. Billy Bragg, the musician and long-standing Labour supporter, has already informed our readers of his plans to expel the Tories from Dorset. He will cast his vote for the Lib Dems (who are within 2,000 votes of overthrowing the Tory Eurosceptic, Oliver Letwin, in West Dorset) in exchange for a promise from a Lib Dem supporter to vote Labour elsewhere in the county. This swap is to be arranged through Bragg's own internet website, though another site (www.tacticalvoter.com) allows similar deals on a national scale.
All this arouses great excitement among the commentating classes. But does it also represent a great leap in voter sophistication? In one sense, many people have voted tactically for more than half a century. Public approval of Liberal policies and Liberal leaders has usually far exceeded the party's performance in general elections. But, it was said, a vote for the Liberals was a wasted vote. They had no chance of forming a government. So people didn't vote for them. National newspapers have taken a similar view. To recommend a Liberal vote, it was always felt, was to brand the paper as marginal and frivolous. And yet the leader writers very often expressed the view that a large Liberal vote - to come from who knows where - would be a jolly good thing.
Here we get to the nub of the matter, and a point that is not easily understood by political activists. As a rule, people do not vote out of enthusiasm or hope or idealism. Fear, hate and cynicism are greater motivators. They fear governments that will muck things up; they hate those that will interfere with their lives too much; they cynically believe that all politicians are much the same. They do not vote for politicians they admire, but against those they fear or despise most. Whatever their leaders may have said, the masses never believed that democracy offered the chance of Utopia. The vote was simply a means of controlling the worst excesses of the ruling class. That is why the most ambitiously idealistic regimes found it necessary to abolish voting.
Tactical voting, therefore, is neither more nor less sophisticated than abstention. Indeed, the two go hand in hand. They are merely alternative ways of putting arrogant politicians in their place. In 1997, many people voted tactically, not because they were enthused by New Labour, but because they wanted to humiliate the Tories. This time, I suspect, many of the same people will abstain. Note that, despite all the excitement created by Ken Livingstone in London last year (a clear protest against the established parties), his vote was far exceeded by the numbers who didn't vote at all.
All this strengthens the argument for some form of proportional representation. The objection to PR is that it turns politics into a matter of backroom deals, horse trading and cold calculation. That may be true for the politicians who, faced with permanently hung parliaments, have to negotiate with each other in order to form stable governments with agreed programmes. But PR allows the voters to follow their passions and beliefs, in the knowledge that their vote will still count in some way. It can pro vide a far more accurate snapshot of public opinion than any number of focus groups or polls.
No system is perfect. In Australia, minority parties (of which there may be as many as 20 or 30 on the ballot papers) routinely advise their supporters on how to use their second and third preferences. Smart operators in the big parties invent 'dummy parties' to scoop up support from people who might otherwise vote for the opposition or not at all. Suppose Labour wants to get votes from the dopeheads and the pensioners. It finds somebody willing to stand under the banner of a Legalise Marijuana Party and somebody else willing to stand as a Senior Citizens Party candidate. These 'parties', which are likely to be eliminated fairly quickly, then advise their supporters to cast their second preference votes for Labour.
It is all utterly cynical, but at least the cynicism is reserved to the political class, where it belongs. Ordinary voters rarely feel passionately about the ragbag programmes of the established parties, with all their fudges and compromises. They feel passionately about single issues: animal rights, the pound, nuclear power, the countryside and so on, as well as drugs and pensioners. Our system gives them no vehicle to express such passions without 'wasting' their votes. A good PR system would allow people to vote for what they really believe while still, through second or third preferences, casting a 'serious' vote for a future government. There is then no need for tactical voting; we leave the tactics to the politicians, who are the experts.
That still leave us with the problem of what to do in the forthcoming election under an unreformed, first-past-the-post system. As it happens, I live in a Tory seat where Labour comes a not very close second, so I have no dilemma. But would I vote tactically? Isn't the Tory party weak enough as it is, without us trying to expel it even from strongholds like West Dorset or Michael Howard's Folkestone and Hythe? If all Labour and Lib Dem supporters followed Billy Bragg's example, there would hardly be a Tory MP left in the House of Commons.
I have two answers to that. One is that it is worth voting tactically to persuade the Tories that they have no future under William Hague, and they need to change radically if they are to form an effective opposition. The other is that the Lib Dems, in any case, would make a better opposition than the Tories.
So for now, tactical voting it is. But I'd still rather express my passions for, oh, I don't know, the Ban All Motorcars From Anywhere Near Me Party or the No Music in Restaurants Party, under a better electoral system.
Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman
