Mark “NONE OF THE ABOVE” on your 2024 ballot
Get fit, quit smoking, or take up a new hobby? Why spoiling your ballot in this year’s upcoming election is the most important New Year’s resolution you can make…
By Alan Story and Uther Naysmith
The year 2024 will bring with it the promise of another election season. Political parties will trade blows in speeches, spill vast quantities of ink across the columns of major newspapers, and jockey for popularity in televised interviews and debates on issues from immigration to the health service to climate change.
Yet for socialists and progressives, there is one bold voting option that will make a lasting impact long past 2024: write across your ballot paper - NONE OF THE ABOVE.
Why? Here are three reasons:
1) General elections are supposed to be an event where voters make a choice about what type of government they want. However for progressive voters, there is no significant difference between the only two parties which have a chance of winning. So what is the point of choosing one instead of the other? We should support neither. We should not endorse one brand over another when the end product is essentially the same with both.
2) Liberal democracy is based on the idea of equal votes for all. Seats won in Parliament should match votes cast. But the U.K.’s voting system, created in the 1880s, operates like a stacked deck. It ensures that an electoral duopoly prevails and all but guarantees that, among other things, socialist voices go unheard. We cannot even start to have fair elections until we win the far fairer voting system of proportional representation (PR).
3) Simply relying on electoralism achieves very little. Building a robust mass movement must remain our constant preoccupation. Yes, elections do hold out the possibility of spreading a socialist message and exposing pro-capitalist parties in the process. But in the absence of a serious socialist party to spread that message, what better way to protest than spoiling your ballot?
Let’s unpack this.
GAZA IS BIGGEST GLOBAL ISSUE
As we launch THE LEFT LANE, there is no bigger issue on the global stage than Palestine. At a recent session of the United Nations General Assembly, a total of 153 countries from around the world voted in favour of an immediate ceasefire.
What was Britain’s position? The same as that of Israel and the United States. Keep bombing. No ceasefire whatsoever. What of Labour’s view? Keir Starmer is walking in step with Netanyahu, Biden, and Sunak. As journalist Jonathan Cook wrote earlier this week:
‘The west will stand in the dock alongside Israel at the genocide court;
Israel’s allies aren’t just turning a blind eye to Gaza’s killing fields. They have cheered on the bloodshed, provided diplomatic cover and supplied the arms.’
Come election day, socialists and progressives cannot look at Starmer and his Labour Party and say, “all is forgiven, it was okay for your party to have cheered on the Israeli killing machine.”
Politicians must learn that their actions come with firm consequences. And so, instead, we must say to Labour in 2024 what we told that party in 2005 after Blair led the country to war in Iraq: “you will not get our vote.”
STARMER IS SHIFTING LABOUR EVER RIGHTWARD
Starmer’s stand on the side of Netanyahu and against the Palestinian people mirrors his right wing stance on many other issues. Mind you, no one should be under any illusions that Labour was ever a socialist party. As Tony Benn once famously remarked, ‘[Labour has] never been a socialist party, but there have always been socialists in it …’
Yet under Starmer to even call Labour a “social democratic” party is a stretch. And today it has even fewer and fewer socialists in its ranks.
But “so what?” say some self-proclaimed lefty pundits at election time. We’re told it is the duty of all socialists to put aside their differences and rally round the Labour Party banner in defence of the exploited working class, the poor, and ethnic minorities. To do otherwise, they continue, is tantamount to voting Tory, and allowing the fount of all evil to reign evermore over this green and pleasant land.
We reject this advice, and we think you should as well. Transformed into New Labour by Tony Blair in 1997, Labour has come to accept all of the dogmas of neoliberal ideology: deregulation, private enterprise and the free market, capitalist innovation and growth, a flexible labour market, public-private partnerships, and a repressive state apparatus that cracks down on dissent and opposition. The Post Office “scandal” reminds us of all of this. Starmer has NOT said bringing Royal Mail back under public ownership would be at least part of the solution.
In fact, things have got so bad that former Labour shadow cabinet minister, John Woodcock recently suggested that campaigners marching by the hundreds of thousands to protest the continued heavy bombing of Gaza should pay the costs of policing pro-ceasefire demonstrations. No dissent from ex-prosecutor Starmer to that crackers idea.
So where did it come from? Straight from the mouth last month of Argentina’s new far right president Milei.
What are Starmer’s priorities then? Doing things like telling former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that he is barred from standing for re-election as a Labour MP in his London constituency. Or expelling a record number of Jewish members from Labour. Or telling Labour MPs they are forbidden from joining the picket lines of striking workers.
It’s time to hand out a red card on this charade. It’s time to spoil your ballot.
SCRAP OUR DECREPIT ELECTORAL SYSTEM
As we have already said, our decrepit First Past the Post (FPTP) system perpetuates unfairness. This was exemplified in the 2019 general election when the Tories under Boris Johnson won 43% of the overall vote. But that was enough for a landslide 80-seat majority in Parliament and 100% of the power.
In the past, FPTP has worked even better for Labour. In its most recent electoral victory in 2005, Tony Blair won a sizeable majority (55% of the seats) on a mere 35% of the overall vote … and that is even less than Johnson secured. Without the crutch of FPTP, Labour would likely have sunk like a stone decades ago.
The documented statistics about the unfairness of FPTP could fill a PhD. In the 2019 election, every Tory vote was worth more than 20 times the value of a Green vote. According to Dr. Jess Garland, head of policy and research with the Electoral Reform Society, ‘10% of House of Commons seats haven’t changed hands since the end of World War One and a staggering total of 192 seats have not switched since World War Two ended.’
Unlike the situation in many European countries, only two parties have won in the US (since 1848), in Canada (since 1867) and in the UK (since 1922). It is no coincidence that there is no serious socialist party in any of these three countries adopting a FPTP electoral system, and in contrast to many European systems adopting PR.
In the UK, nearly 14 million voters reside in constituencies where the same party has won every election since 1945. Untold millions of votes are wasted in every election.
On and on its goes. But this is not a PhD dissertation. We won’t keep piling on the stats. The point is clear: we live not in a democracy, but in an electoral dictatorship, a duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives. We live in a one-party state with two parties, both agreeing on all the issues that matter from Gaza to public ownership, and both rejecting out of hand the possibility or desirability of fixing our rotten representation.
The UK urgently needs proportional representation, an idea that both PM Sunak and Starmer oppose.
That of itself is reason enough to decide: “at the 2024 general election I am going to spoil my ballot.”
ELECTION FEVER A DEAD END
Our inaugural Substack is on the issue of how socialists and progressives should respond whenever Rishi Sunak decides that we should go to the polls. In later columns, we plan to return to the subject of the role of elections in a liberal democracy like the UK.
One reason we have concluded that we should spoil our ballots is because there is not a serious socialist party to vote for. Why should we have to vote tactically?
The demand of the 18 workers killed in a cavalry charge during the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 was NOT: “Give us tactical voting.”
But we do want to emphasise one point here. Even if there was a serious socialist party today in the UK, it will take far more than electing such a party into office to win the battle for socialism.
For the 60,000 people who gathered in St. Peter’s Field in 1819; and for the working class Chartist movement of 1838-1857; and for Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation of 1914, voting was not an end in itself, but a means by which the working class could take political power, and end once and for all their exploitation under the capitalist system.
We vote for them precisely by spoiling our ballots, turning – as they would do if they were here today – our noses up at a political elite that, whether Red or Blue, Yellow or Green, represent the same economic system that despoils our planet and keeps the working class trapped in a cycle of never-ending exploitation.
Thus we would like to end on these words, attributed to the American socialist, Eugene Debs. Debs ran for President five times from 1900-1920, receiving hundreds of thousands of votes each time from 1904 onwards:
‘I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it, than for what I don’t want and get it.’
IF NOT LABOUR, THEN WHO?
Spoiling your ballot does not mean apathy. Unlike staying at home, choosing to spoil your ballot is a positive act, and the number of spoilt ballots is counted by the Electoral Commission. In the 2017 general election, almost 75,000 people spoilt their ballots; in the 2015 general election, over 100,000 people did so.
Spoiling your ballot is a formal registration of your unwillingness to give a mandate to a political elite who, when the moment for decisive action arises, will always put the interests of the capitalist class over and above those of everybody else.
But more than that, spoiling your ballot is a commitment you can make to yourself, to engage in the real movement to change the present state of things. Not tomorrow, not after the election, but today.
So in 2024, the centenary of the first Labour government, make this your new year’s resolution: to break with the ghosts of elections past; deny a mandate to the political elites who want merely to manage problems, not to solve them; and do your part to build up the movement that will transform society and end exploitation for good.
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This is the inaugural issue of THE LEFT LANE. Our “brief” is political journalism from a left wing point of view. We are already inviting other writers to join us here and we welcome your comments on our first effort; there is a comments box below. We do not plan to make a profit from this Substack column. Most of its content will remain free. But if 30 or 40 of you could take out a paid subscription it would assist us in taking care of the assorted editorial and admin costs. Do feel free to share our Substack column and “see you again” here soon.
Email us at theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com.
Denis: 1) as it says in the article, spoiled ballots are counted and the numbers are recorded and made public. 2) I am NOT saying it will happen, but hundreds of thousands of voters deciding "NONE OF THE ABOVE" would be effective and send a very clear "we are fed up" message.
No one notices the spoilt ballots. Much better to vote for whichever candidate is most likely to help deliver PR. Lib Dems, Green - even Reform - are committed to electoral reform, as are some Labour and even one or two Tory MPs.