The consensus is…no consensus!

Letters from a Swing Voter

There’s a joke doing the rounds at the moment: if we end up with a hung parliament, who do we start with? It makes us laugh because, ho ho, don’t we all wish we could string the damn bastards up by their Aquascutum silk ties. But I think there’s something a little more telling about this jibe. So steeped are we in our thickly clotting political history, that hung parliaments sit in the annals of history alongside rotten boroughs and corrupt patrons. A hanging was all MPs were worth, back then. But aren’t we so very cutting-edge these days, haven’t we reached unequivocal fairness and decency in our politics? Ho ho. Tell-tale safe seats and Ashcroft’s squillions are just shades of grey from the days of yore, and contrary to what some might have us believe, I think a hung parliament might be the very modern making of us.

After yesterday’s media feeding-frenzy, two debates and countless polls, we’re running before we can walk – why must we announce winners daily, when we’re only halfway through the race? If we’re talking numbers, then Cameron inching ahead 2 points to 36% in one poll doesn’t mean he’s won – you don’t win when it remains that over 60% of the people polled still don’t think you’re good enough, no matter how many times Kay Burley yaps the question. In the same way, need I be at pains to add, a third of the seats in the House of Commons will not Cameron a Prime Minister make. What the polls do show, even the ones where it wouldn’t surprise me if Murdoch had picked up the phone himself, is that the general consensus is…for no consensus.

Last night’s debate began to expose that sore. Cameron said he believed Brown was deliberately, and irresponsibly, scaring people into voting Labour. Whether you agree or not, what’s clear is that he’s picking at a bigger problem. We’re all being told that indecision is the mugger in the alleyway – he’ll have off with your money and your dignity. If we can’t even decide who should run the country then what’s to stop us careering off the tracks of democracy all together, steaming towards some Hieronymus Bosch version of hell where anarchy rules and we live in crippling fear of the IMF Orcs raiding our homes in the middle of the night to pawn our furniture and our children to pay back a deficit with so many zeros it would take you thousands of years to count from 1 to the end. This isn’t going to happen. For no reason other than the fact that nobody will let it.

The point is, of course, no one wants a hung parliament; it’s an outcome we deal with, not a path we select. Nobody would choose to live in a state of indecision a hung parliament evokes, but we do want the change it might pave in how these decisions will be made in the future. I’ll bravely hold my hand up and admit I’m not an expert – I can just about draw a line between a coalition and a minority administration, and I can proffer a handful of pros and cons for us sitting somewhere between halcyon plurality and basket-case autocracy. But I am a voter and I represent a growing number of people who believe that three perspectives – more, even – might be better than one, given this choice.

In a matter of years, our economy will be rebuilt, deficits filled, taxes broken and credits given where credit’s due. But what about political change? Britain’s parliamentary system is too anarchic to go without reform sooner or later, and short of sending poor Guido in as a stooge to re-enact his namesake’s thwarted fireworks party, we bloggers, thinkers and voters have only one way of doing that: conceding in the instance there is no single, clear winner on May 6th, we have the beginnings of something really exciting on our hands. We can remove our trembling fingers from the panic button, watch another dawn rise and accept that maybe – just maybe – it is better to bring several imperfect minds together, than squeeze one through the slim marginal doors of Westminster.

Of course, I still only get one vote, but I’ve started to think of it as the ultimate buy-one-get-one-free deal. As the Dodo said to Alice, “everyone has won, and all must have prizes”. Perhaps we’re not so far away from our own Wonderland, after all.