How to vote

This is the final week of campaigning before British voters head to the polls to elect a new government on 12th December, that’s plenty of time for more dramatic developments in the Brexit saga to make voters change their minds in key constituencies. It wouldn’t be particularly useful to try to predict any outcomes at this point, but I am struck again by the enormous differences between elections around the world, so much so that it doesn’t even seem right to call them by the same name.

Compare the following. Back in 2010, I mentioned to a Philippine friend who had been educated and lived overseas and worked in several important roles for transnational organisations that I was considering voting for X (presidential candidate). We didn’t discuss comparative platforms on healthcare, education, economic policies or the environment, those were not important. “Why?” she asked. “He isn’t going to win.”

Meanwhile, a few days ago in conversation with another West London friend, we discussed the way “tactical voting” may make the difference between the ruling Conservative Party or Tories staying in office with their leader Boris Johnson’s plan to leave the EU (Brexit) and the opposition Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn getting into power and holding a second referendum now that voters know much more about what is involved in leaving the EU. Tactical voting would be when a voter chooses to support a candidate they wouldn’t normally support to stop another candidate from winning. There are a couple of websites that are doing the maths for voters and recommending how to vote tactically in their constituency. For example in my constituency it is more likely that the Labour rather than the Liberal Democrats candidate will win (the Lib Dems say a vote for them is a vote to remain in the EU, therefore they would simply cancel Brexit), so one of these websites recommends I vote for the Labour candidate rather than the Lib Dem candidate so as not to split the votes to “Remain” in the area. My friend however lives in Kensington where one website has no recommendation for a tactical vote, precisely because the vote is so close. The thinking goes that this is a three-way marginal seat, with an uncertain outcome, so voters may as well vote for whoever they would vote for normally.

The first view of elections sounds more like betting rather than voting and there’s a lot of history and geography behind the attitude. In a society where survival is uncertain, rights unprotected, corruption and crimes go unpunished, the winner takes it all and siding with him or her is a matter of survival. “Who cares what their views are, whether they’re trustworthy or anything else that might improve conditions for people? It doesn’t matter if it means me and my family don’t get disappeared/killed/impoverished/ exploited,” the voter thinks. The voter has everything to gain and everything to lose in this scenario.

In the wealthy United Kingdom, a G8 member and a former imperial power, many more voters can afford to think beyond just surviving, though this isn’t everyone by any means – at least 135,000 children will be homeless and living in temporary accommodation this Christmas and 32,740 households were considered homeless in March. Brexit in the post-truth or fake-news age has exposed a stark division in the country that’s disrupted traditional politics and threatens the split-up of the UK. So the vote is very important and existential in a different way. The Tories are casting themselves as more democratic because they want to honor the result of the 2016 referendum and promise to “get Brexit done,” they’ve also cast the leader of the contending Labour party as a radical leftie and anti-Semite. The Labour Party are recognising that opinion over leaving the EU is pretty even and are promising sweeping reforms to the economy, education and social care and casting the Conservative party as elitist, responsible for austerity measures that have decimated welfare, untrustworthy and unable to deliver on their promises. The UK voter has everything to gain and possibly something to lose.

Like comparing apples with oranges, both fruit but so totally different that it seems pointless to compare them, the election scenarios in the UK and the Philippines may have some common characteristics but there’s so much more that’s different that comparing them needs some context.

I happen not to agree at all with the idea that the United Kingdom as a society is further down some sort of linear evolutionary timeline than the Philippines is. Elections take place in wildly different contexts and countries, to the extent that I am at a point where I tend to think that the result is actually nowhere near as interesting or important as what the process reveals about the relationships between people and power where it takes place.

My sense is that people in the UK think their vote actually matters, whereas people in the Philippines think their vote might matter. It’s a bit like believing in God – might as well believe in case He does exist. The attitude to elections in the Philippines is embedded in a sense that life itself is so deeply contingent on factors beyond an ordinary person’s control that we cannot afford to vote for someone just because their vision for the Philippines is similar to our own.

An unspoken, uneven and cynical pact is made in the voter’s mind perhaps, that goes something like: “I am voting for you because you are like me but much stronger. You can set up house in the Palace for now and show me how you make power provide some kind of peace, truth and justice, how you terrify Fate and Nature into submission and impose some kind of order to the uncontrollable chaos. I don’t need a stairway to heaven, I want out of hell.”

It’s not Brexit.