After watching Sadiq Khan retain the position of Mayor of London and watching council after council fall to Labour across England, Rishi Sunak must be looking ahead to the next British General Election with a sense of fear and loathing and dread of impending doom; as well he might. For basically ever since David Cameron promised to send Britain to a referendum on Brexit, the office of Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury has been a poisoned chalice. Only with the help of the very tory trashmedia, have the tories been able to hang on to power for the last decade. It is not because they have been able to demonstrate competent leadership or any ability or desire to do the basic job of governance. If the revolving door at the top (which has seen Cameron, then May, then Johnson, then Truss, then Sunak, all come and go (or look like they will)) is demonstrative of the trouble below, then the Conservative Party and the Unionists if they still exist, are facing political oblivion. To which I say "Good. If you vote tory, you are not peoples' friend."
The question then is not if the tories will lose government but by how much. There are suggestions in the right-wing tory trashmedia that there will be a hung parliament but this appears to be a wish list in the face of their worst case scenario. This election as far as Labour is concerned, is their equivalent to the 1983 Australian General Election which "a drover's dog could win"; and then did. If the polls are correct, then Labour will canter into 326, maybe walk as far as 400, and depending on how much the tory durian has rotted by then maybe 500 seats is a possibility. As it is, we already have rats jumping from the sinking ship; which is also on fire as it is preparing to sink beneath the waves.
If you saw all of this and knew that it was coming, what would you do? I personally think that the best option would be to quietly admit defeat now, make a half-hearted election campaign, lose, and then collect the parliamentary pension which would be due because you lost the seat rather than quitting. Or else you could do some very visible and ultimately meaningless but very public gesture, like promising to put up a statue for all of the horses killed in World War I, then hope to get an ermine parachute into the House of Lords like Lord David Cameron, the Lord of Much Dribbling and Pork Scratchings did. If however, Sunak does actually want to fire one last dog bomb of fabulousness into parliament before he leaves, then the best option is to call the election for the 12th of December. Why the 12th of December? The answer may surprise you.
As the United Kingdom still hasn't properly worked out how to to democracy, despite and in spite of the fact that other countries like Australia modified the Westminster system to be a million billion godzillion times better, with compulsory voting, voting on a Saturday, paper ballots, voting for the upper house, preferential voting, proportional representation et cetera et cetera et cetera, then it still retains a full-bore thick as mince voting system which was perfectly adequate for the 1680s but not for 340 years later. Calling a General Election for the 12th of December would make excellent use of the fact that the British voting system is so incredibly rubbish, that democracy can be gained merely by setting the date.
The United Kingdom has voluntary voting. This means that the United Kingdom makes practically no effort at all to obtain the consent of the governed when selecting who will be a Member of Parliament. The parties dictate who appears on the ballot paper and then the electorate shows up once every five years to put a cross in a box to decide whether or not they want to eat from a selection of three kinds of manure, or two kinds of animal vomit. Because the United Kingdom has voluntary voting, then it is really easy to dissuade people from showing up at the polling station, just by making use of the date.
The 12th of December, is already after the point where it has turned cold in Britain. If you wanted to launch a nuclear attack and kill as many people as possible, then doing so after the 1st of December, would mean that people would die of cold and exposure within their own homes. This is key. By deciding on the 12th of December as the date for holding an election, then only the most motivated people will come out to vote. Nobody really wants to stand out in the cold and possibly the rain and sleet and snow, just to put a cross in a box, when the idea of staying at home in the warmth with a cup of tea and Emmmerdale on t'telly seems like a good idea. Would you rather go out to vote, or watch The One Show?
Using the weather itself to suppress the vote, on the surface sounds like a dastardly thing to do. However, when you have a proven track record of cutting funding from health care services, from housing services, and actively doing nothing when people literally die in a building fire, then suppressing the vote through the use of the weather starts to look almost saintly.
Also, as the 12th of December is a Thursday, then the people who actually do real work for a living, as opposed to the people who are more likely to be older, and richer, and more interested in voting, are less likely to venture out to polling stations. Voluntary Voting is often defended on the basis of free choice but often the people who need to have their voice heard the most, are simply less likely to exercise that voice when the barrier to entry to vote, might actually be whether or not someone is able to pay the rent that week.
Here's the really fun thing about so-called First-Past-The-Post voting. It really isn't. It merely is Most Votes Wins voting. Most Votes Wins by making sure that your enemies do not vote, still achieves the same outcome. The ballot box cares not an iota, not a jot, about how the numbers got there. Also, as parliaments are swung by the number of votes upon the floor of the House Of Commons, then it really doesn't actually matter about the seats which will never vote for you, nor the seats which will always vote for you. The only thing that matters from a games perspective, is how many seats flip one way or the other in the flippable middle. If you are the Conservative Party, then you do not want Labour voters to turn out to vote.
12th of December is also just sufficiently late enough that the electorate will not think that you are intruding on Christmas. An election on the 19th would be electoral suicide but the 12th falls just outside that lovely window of 10 days, by which time they will have forgotten about the problem. You may even get a slight boost in the tory turn-out if people think that they will get the rest of the day off to do Christmas shopping.
I still think that Sunak is staring into the abyss and should expect to see nothing but just a tiny about of applied game theory might mean that at the end of the year there's a golden sky, and the sweet silver song of the lark. If you are Rishi Sunak, you will probably lose government and your seat and then retire to a lovely seven consulting figure job in The City; having made ample use of the friendships that you gained by torying your way through parliament for the last while. Why else would you become an MP if your are already independently very very wealthy, if not to change the rules for your tory mates and hope that they'll give you a kickback after the electorate has called time on you.
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