Don’t ignore them, mobilise the SDNVs

I often have two thoughts when I see all those Labour types tweeting about being out on the #labourdoorstep. The first is a tad uncharitable; are they actually out there on the streets or are they really just sat in the pub? It always makes me suspicious. I mean, if you’re going canvassing, just get on with it; we don’t need a running commentary.

My second reaction is to wonder who they are canvassing and what they are saying. Well that’s pretty obvious isn’t it? They’re out there in the community talking to the electorate. Regrettably, however, in many areas the electorate and the community are no longer one and the same.

Before the 2010 general election, the Electoral Commission reckoned 3.5 million adults were missing from the electoral register. Now, it says the figure could be six million. That’s more people than happen to live in Scotland.

Of course for our canvassers, seeing a long line of houses with no-one registered simply means they scuttle past. That housing estate isn’t worth bothering with, no one votes. That high rise tower is a bit difficult to get into and hardly anyone’s on the register, let’s miss it off.

Of course politics is all about cold, hard arithmetic. It’s a numbers game and if you don’t vote, you don’t count. This is why the poor are usually ignored and there is no electoral mileage in putting their concerns centre stage, as they’ve no doubt found out this past week.

The Electoral Commission found that just 56% of people living in privately-rented accommodation were registered to vote, compared with 88% of homeowners. Meanwhile just over half of 19-24 year olds are registered, yet 94% of pensioners are.

Worryingly, 44% of those not on the electoral register mistakenly assume they are. (And of course the situation is likely to deteriorate further next year when the government switches from household to individual voter registration).

Yet there are around two and a half million adults claiming incapacity benefit. A million and a half  more are on jobseekers’ allowance. Five million or so are claiming housing benefit. Nearly six million eligible for council tax benefit.  And five million earn less than the living wage threshold.

Aggregated from all this is a class of state-dependant non-voters (SDNVs for short), whose world is about to be shattered by the government’s various benefit changes and threats to the minimum wage but who may, if properly mobilised, form a powerful electoral bloc. Some of these people will of course vote, but many of them do not and account for those six million missing voters.

Registering them isn’t merely about party advantage. Not all SDNVs would vote Labour even if they were signed-up en masse. Many would, however, readily vote against the government’s reckless proposals and demand policies that led to a fairer society. And no appeal to class solidarity is needed; pure, naked self-interest should do the trick.

Unlike Mr Cameron today, Mrs Thatcher’s great electoral trick in the 1980s was to make a decent offer to aspirational working class voters. She stuffed their mouths with gold. They could buy their council house and then trade up. They could buy shares in privatised utilities for a knockdown price and make a quick killing. They were brought into the middle class fold. Where is the Tory offer today? Driving-up voter registration would compel the Tories to also pay heed to our SDNVs and refocus our entire political debate away from appeasing a narrow group of middle class floating voters in a few dozen marginal seats.

Labour’s dilemma at the moment is that the party is honour-bound to defend the poorest in society but gets less and less support from them at election time. To my mind, this makes an excellent argument for compulsory voting, (or at least compulsory registration), but given community organising is supposedly all the rage these days, why not combine the two?

Let’s get the #Labourdoorstepers tooled-up with a wedge of electoral registration forms and urge people to get on the register. Rather than whizzing past the non-registered and non-voting, why not stop to gee them up? In fact the party could do worse that set-up a taskforce looking at how it can energise the potential of the SDNVs ahead of 2015.

It’s worth bearing in mind that if 30% of the currently unregistered were signed-up that would be an extra two million voters. It also happens to be precisely the gap between the Conservatives and Labour at the last election.