Tories: suburban swingers are not your friends

When the Tories announced that they were going to go for hi-tech Machiavellian psephology, some witches brew of rightwing populism and computerised number crunching, an ominous shiver went around the anorakorati, convinced as they tend to be by the example of the Republicans in the US that this is an unstoppable formula.

I wasn’t so sure. It sounded like a classic example of people using technology to solve their problems for them, rather than applying technology to the solutions they’ve worked out. Claiming to be able to pull a victory out of the Voter Vault is exactly the same as claiming to be able to pull a victory out of your arse.

That’s sort of how it worked out, though the Tories voter targeting operation seems to have let them fend off the Lib Dems without too much trouble. Yet I’d argue that this approach has taken them down a dead end, because it tends to reduce the election as a whole to a contest to grab a comparatively small group of suburban swing voters in marginal seats across the UK.

What’s so hard about that, especially for the Tories? To put it crudely, the main or only salient point with this group of electors is: what’s in it for me? – an entirely legitimate question for any elector to ask and one for which historically the Tories have had the best answers.

Yet it’s not such a simple question. It doesn’t, for instance, imply a settled affinity for small government. It implies, economically, the attitude of “a welfare state for me, free enterprise for everyone else”. Politically it implies that your inability to exercise restraint is damaging my freedom to do as I please.

Such voters decry the sixties and all its works, but the missus is a regular at Ann Summers Parties and there’s a gimp suit in the closet for special occasions. They say that the state waste’s everyone’s money, which is to say that it spends it on other people apart from them. But the kid’s doing well enough at the state school he or she goes to – under New Labour, bad schools are reserved for Old Labour voters – and frankly they’d rather not pay for that particular service. They don’t like the EU, but are aware that messing with it on a point of principle might have unintended consequences. They’d like the queen’s head on the money, but it’s the money they really want. When your kid gets caught with drugs, bang him up – it’s a crime. When my kid does, it’s a tragedy – cocoon him in therapists. The Daily Mail tells them that the world’s falling down around their ears. They get a kick out of this, but their experience tells them differently. They are proud of being self-reliant. For that reason, they believe that the taxpayer should pay to park granny in a home, so they can keep the value of her property when they sell it.

If this is your core target group, there’s only two things you can do. You can do nothing in a busy and appealing sort of way, or you can make it into a legally and economically privileged class, which gets you in trouble with everyone else. So really, it’s only the first option that’s viable.

This was where Tony Blair came in, by what I believe was a happy accident. New Labour renounced old Labour and all its works. The message that this sent to the suburbs was: we’re not going to actually do anything. And for the first term that’s what happened. Tony didn’t wipe his nose on his sleeve when he met foreign leaders, he bounced around appealingly enough and his visions were so vague and flatulent that there seemed to be no danger of anything actually changing.

In his second term he started doing things. Large amounts of money began to churn around in the public sector, and our suburban swinger began to feel disturbed about waste, ie that more wasn’t wasted on him. He wasn’t upset about Iraq. But he was pissed off that Tony had made foreign policy matter in a way in which it had not before. What’s this crap got to do with me?

So, Tony, it’s the naughty step for you. Just go to the naughty step and think about what you’ve done. Eventually someone will come along and take you to the House of Lords or give you the chance to fuck something up in the private sector.

As I say, it’s also a bit of a dead end for the Tories. These folks might say that they want less regulation and smaller government. What they want is more regulation for other people and more public money spent on them.

But this is ultimately an argument about why Tories should embrace proportional representation. Right now, politics rewards those with the best skills in managing public hypocrisy as epitomised in the suburban swinger. In a system where parliament registered the actual support enjoyed by parties around the country as a whole then Tories could get on with spreading whatever they decide the current incarnation of Toryism is – likewise everyone else.