184. NOT CONVINCED BY POLITICAL ARGUMENT - On the UK General Election 2024
I don’t think I’m going to convince you to vote one way or another in the upcoming UK General Election. Not only because some of you reading this will be too young to vote in the election on July 4th, or you might live in other countries and are therefore ineligible to vote in the UK election. I don’t think I’ll convince you to vote one way or the other because the moment I signposted that this post would be about the UK General Election, those of you who have already picked a side in this contest immediately raised up your defences. You’ve already thought about it. Heard all the arguments. You already know that Party A has your vote and that Party B would be disastrous for the country. The lines in the sand have been drawn and nothing that I have to say will break through. At least not in time for the election.
And if you haven’t decided yet - you’ve already had more than enough information to make up your mind. Your indecision is your decision, whether you can see that or not. Not knowing who you will vote for is you telling yourself that you don’t want to vote for any of the available options. If a random philosophy blog post like this sways you one way or the other, you were probably already leaning that way on your own before you started reading.
At least that’s how it feels. Politics as a team sport. We pick our colours - red, blue, green, yellow, other - and we put our cross in the appropriate box on the ballot to show our support for the team. Not just the voters, but the politicians running for office too. See how Kier Starmer once publicly endorsed Jeremy Corbyn to be our Prime Minister. The same man he now says he knew was always unfit to be Prime Minister. Or how Conservative candidates across the UK are currently rallying around Rishi Sunak’s self-evidently failing campaign. They have to, and Starmer had to about Corbyn, because it’s the General Election and you’ve gotta support the team! Arguing, debating, disagreeing - that’s all pre-campaign stuff. Once the election is called then it’s all hands on deck.
So as soon as you saw the subtitle to this post was ‘On the UK General Election 2024’ you either ignored it entirely (and I’m now talking to myself), or you read it not to have your mind changed, but to have your pre-existing beliefs confirmed. You will either agree with my view already and nod with approval at anything I might say, or disagree with it already and be ready with your objections. Any argument I make for my position will have absolutely zero impact on your own views after reading because such arguments never do with a ballot looming on the horizon.
At least that’s how it seems.
And yet…
This July 4th, the polls (though let’s remember these same polls once told us Brexit was an impossibility and Trump could never be president of the United States) seem to be suggesting that after fourteen years of Conservative rule we will be likely be seeing in the first Labour government since Gordon Brown vacated Downing Street in 2010. And of course 2010 gave us the first Conservative government since 1997. Which was when we got the first Labour government since 1979…etc. And in a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all election system, for these shifts in government to happen (which they appear to periodically do) people have to change their minds. For the Labour Party to win the election this July, people who previously voted Conservative will have to now choose to vote Labour. Just as, in 2010 (well, rather 2015, following the coalition years), people who once voted Labour had to change their minds and vote Tory.
So both ideas can’t be true:
1) That politics is a team sport and we always support the same team because they’re our team, regardless of any arguments against them;
AND
2) The winning team is changing every decade or so in our first-past-the-post system.
When my football team is not having the best season (I’m looking at you the Aston Villa Women’s team!) I don’t stop supporting them and decide to support a better team. But when the political party I have previously supported stops representing my interests, or causes damage to the country, or can’t be trusted with public finances, or is embroiled in scandal (etc…), history seems to show us that, quite consistently, many previous ‘supporters’ of the currently winning team swap shirts with the other side. So the analogy with team sports can’t be quite right.
Or at least it isn’t quite right for all voters. Some voters actually are ride-or-die lifers for their party. They really will never ever change their allegiance. I know, for example, one person in their seventies who is a lifelong Conservative even though they have fundamentally disagreed with their position on Europe since long before the Brexit debacle. They think Johnson was a disgrace, they were appalled by Partygate and Liz Truss crashing the economy…but they would never vote for anyone else. They are team Tory till the end. They’ll be voting Conservative on July 4th. Likewise, I know people appalled by the centrist shift Kier Starmer has taken with the Labour Party since taking over and who and railed against Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq back in 2003, but who have stuck with the party through all that and will still be voting Labour in a few weeks even though what they are voting for is a far cry from the manifestoes of Jeremy Corbyn or Michael Foot which really reflected their true values. These voters exist, and are not uncommon. But they are not the majority. The analogy to sports teams works with these voters. They forgive far more than a few bad seasons. They are with their team for the long-haul. But because of their rigid loyalties, these are seldom the sort of voters elections that change things actually turn on. It is the other kind of voters who make the difference. The ones who are capable of seeing beyond Party loyalty to something bigger - morality, patriotism, whatever it is - which allows them to sometimes make a switch when it feels the Party they last voted for no longer represents them or the perceived needs of the country. This is how electoral swings happen, after all. The same old core constituencies vote for their team, but need to appeal to these switchers - swing voters - in order to gain the necessary majority. They may keep them for eighteen years, thirteen, fourteen…but their vote is never guaranteed.
However, these voters - these switchers - they, too, are seldom swayed by political argument. Certainly not at the point of the election campaign. Once the election is called, their dissatisfaction and desire for change has already long been nurtured. Their decision to vote one way or the other is already determined. They enter the election campaign well-aware that they can no longer vote for their previous ‘team’ and already aware of the chosen Party they will be betraying them with. Like a person in a failing relationship who has already fallen for their next partner but won’t admit it to themselves, these voters may go through the motions a bit, pretend they’re still giving their old Party a chance, but their choice has already been made. The relationship is doomed.
So, again, when someone like me tries to give them an argument about who to vote for in a General Election, at the time of the General Election, they’re not really listening. They’ve already gone through all the arguments in their heads. They’ve reached their conclusions long ago.
Which brings me (finally) to the point I am trying to make: changes of mind and position in politics clearly do occur, and can occur…but not during the time of an election campaign. Or at least not when the argument presented is presented as an explicitly political argument or endorsement/critique of one of the specific Parties running.
And this makes a lot of sense. Once the decision to vote one way or another is made, you have to live with yourself, after all. So you have probably told yourself a story about why you are voting for who you have chosen to vote for and why this is the ‘right way’ to vote. And that story probably ties in with your self-identity. Because (of course) you are a good person. You are (undeniably) the sort of person who cares about the right things. For me (or anyone) to come along and tell you that you have perhaps got something wrong in your thinking on such an important issue - that what you are proposing to choose might actually have disastrous outcomes, not positive ones - you are, of course, most likely to go on the defensive. Especially if that identification with a particular Party or position has been said out loud in public, and friends and family connect that choice with the kind of person you are. Plunging it deeper as part of your identity. That decision and you.
So whether a team-player for life, or a switcher, the argument I think I am making is that your voting intentions around any General Election become, at least for a limited amount of time, part of your identity. And once part of your identity, they stop being the sort of thing easily subjected to rational argument, facts and figures, etc., and become something else. Something emotional, perhaps? Something intuitive? Something representative of something more than mere logic; representative of our deepest held commitments and beliefs. A part of our narrative.
Consider the following example as an easy illustration of how logic and reason doesn’t always come into voter intentions:
Jo lives in a constituency which has never voted in a Labour MP before and where the Conservative Party has historically held a safe seat. Jo, however, does not support the Conservative Party and Jo wants them out. Jo is a lifelong Labour supporter. However, polling data strongly suggests, even with general dissatisfaction with the current government, the Liberal Democrats, not Labour, are the second most popular Party in her particular constituency. It is suggested that she should vote tactically, for the Lib Dems, to get the Tories out. But Jo does not want to do that. Jo believes her vote has some important symbolic value. That it represents her views and her voice. The Labour Party speak for her and she supports their policies. The Liberal Democrats do not. They are certainly more in line with her beliefs than the Conservative Party…but there are one or two areas of significant disagreement. So Jo, ultimately, votes with her heart, for Labour, and not for the Liberal Democrats, even though by doing so she makes it less likely that the Conservative candidate will lose.
In the example Jo has a perfectly rational argument put before her about why she ought to vote tactically rather than with her heart, yet her decision to vote for what she truly believes in does not necessarily seem wrong, even if it is illogical as a method for achieving what she says she ultimately wants. This is because Jo seems to want two things - the Tories out and to vote for what she truly believes in. She is forced to make a choice to prioritise one of those wants over the other, and the choice remains understandable even if it isn’t traditionally ‘logical’.
The point of this example is not to talk about tactical voting (what’s the point? After all - what I say here won’t change your mind one way or the other), but to talk about the fact that other motivations and drives influence our political decisions than mere reason and logic. There is an emotional component to our political ideas too. An intuitive one about what we feel is right or wrong according to a range of different, and potentially competing, principles. There is a psychological component, linked to notions of self-identity. And all of these complicated and entangled factors mean that explicitly political argument is ill-disposed to actually change anybody’s minds. Once identified as a ‘political’ argument, all of these other factors come into play alongside logical thought, and make our minds close and the barriers go up. Politics is so ‘us and them’ that the possibility of listening to ‘them’ is drowned out by all the internalised cheering for ‘us’.
And yet, as I have said, political views do still change. People are frequently swayed to vote for someone different. People switch allegiances and go from ‘us’ to ‘them’ and from ‘them’ to ‘us’ all the time.
My hunch, therefore, is that this can only happen when the arguments which cause the change are not presented to us politically. As political arguments. We are changed in our political views when new ideas or arguments confront us in our every-day, non-political, life. Often these ‘arguments’ are experiential rather than logical: something seen, heard, witnessed or experienced first hand which have no formal logical structure but imprint some deep shift in values nevertheless. We change our minds because we are changed. Not because we are convinced by arguments.
Consider, for example, the politician on the ‘other side’ from you, making an argument that we need to increase welfare and stop people from going hungry in modern day Britain. If you already think we spend too much on welfare and people should take care of themselves, you’re unlikely to be convinced. But if you, instead, encounter someone who was struggling with food poverty and witness their struggle firsthand, without any formal argument at all, you might find yourself starting to rethink your views, even without being fully aware of the shift.
We saw this with same-sex marriage and rights for LGBTQ+ people. There were no new political arguments for these things which weren’t already being made back when people were more prejudiced and intolerant at the time that laws and majority viewpoints changed. But what there were, were more people starting to know LGBTQ+ people personally. Lives, previously hidden, lived out in the open and transforming the parameters of what was understood. Couples who we didn’t need logical argument to make the case that they were in love and would make a good partnership together but whose very existence made that argument instead. The more that people experienced LGBTQ+ people in their lives, the more their views evolved and changed. When the politicians finally started advocating for it too, they were simply falling in line with what they could already see that people wanted. The minds were changed away from politics and from arguments signposted as being explicitly ‘political’, but rather over tens of thousands of small conversations over kitchen tables and break rooms at work. Over cups of coffee and pints of beer. Interactions and experiences. Hundreds of tiny seeds of ideas sown in non-hostile and non-threatening chats that were about reaching a shared truth about something tangible in front of someone, or simply about nothing more than passing the time, but never explicitly trying to convince or win an argument.
The minds that polling seem to suggest are changed in the UK since 2019 and will be getting rid of the Tories in July, have not been changed by anything they have heard in the current campaign. Nor have they necessarily been changed by any of the specific and intentional Party communications from either side since our last election in 2019. Instead, they have been changed, as they always are, by everyday discussions with friends and family that is not intended to be political. The stories about our lives, our experiences, what we are going through and what our struggles are. The films we watch, the TV and theatre we consume, the books we read and music we listen to. The important pieces of the cultural and interpersonal puzzle which make what our politicians say either ring true or feel like a lie. The framework of a worldview which needs to be in place prior to the people in power (or vying for power) either seeming to be part of that worldview, or not.
I guess what I’m talking about is the epistemological equivalent of ‘soft power’. Not knock-down argument made through rigorous analysis and seeking victory, but a gradual shifting of opinion due to hundreds of tiny ideas and suggestions which all take a while to take root and grow. Notions which can be kicked around and not wholly accepted or rejected straightaway, but played with and tested. Ideas explored that don’t even seem like ideas at all. Just conversations or experiences. But they sit with you. They nudge you and they shame you. They question and they accuse. They prod and they fester. And then suddenly, before you know it, four or five or even fourteen years have passed and you suddenly realise you’re a different person than you were before and the Party-line which once used to resonate so well with you now sounds wrong-headed and even dangerous. How did you ever think it would be a good idea for clowns like this to run the country?
I don’t think I’m going to convince you to vote one way or another in the upcoming UK General Election because I think I’ve already done it. Not today, not now. Not even last week, last month, or last year. But at all of those times and none of them. I have been convincing you (or not) in all the things you’ve heard me say and not say, both in this essay and anywhere else, for years and years and years. All the things you’ve disagreed with me about, or agreed with me on. All the arguments we’ve had together in your head. You surely know by now which way I will be voting on July 4th to ensure the best positive outcome for the most amount of people (and especially those most vulnerable) and ensure a better tone to our oppression that the one we have been suffering under for the last fourteen years. You surely know my reasons, and my objections to the government of the day. If I’m ever going to convince you who to vote for, I’ve already done it. Long before Rishi Sunk stood out in the rain and gave us his departure date. And if I haven’t, I’m not going to change your mind now.
At least - not for this election. Your mind is too closed for that now. The defences are up and the campaigns are underway.
But the next election? Or the one after that?
I’m already working on that as we speak…
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.
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