Working out how to vote

Has anyone ever done this starting from a totally open mind? I doubt it - such superhuman detachment is, well, not really human at all. I claimed to, but was pretty much certain that if I reached the conclusion that I was a Tory, it would represent some sort of defeat. "Retiring overpaid City derivatives expert concludes 'It's the Tories for Me'". Hmmm.

But where do you go if you want to find out how to vote? None of the blogosphere, and very little of the newspaper commentariat, cater for the sceptical politically motivated objective outsider. Blogs compete with one another in shrill attention-seeking - with millions of them out there, all of them commenting on the same stories, this is hardly surprising. There are no marks awarded for reasoned consideration of opposing views, not if you are trying to gain points with your target audience (i.e. your own tribe). Policies are only criticized insofar as they undermine the great objective of the tribe's political aggrandaisment. Allegiance means unswerving allegiance, and Service to the Cause. This, at least, is how the Left-Right 'debate' appeared to me.

Unswerving loyalty, in crude Darwinist terms, is probably a superior strategy for organisational success. That is why armies are not designed to function like university common rooms - no debates in the ranks. However, it is a lousy way of sharpening ideas. Popper and the defeasibility of the proposition strongly guide my approach to difficult questions. So those answers that seem true-by-definition - i.e. The view of the Party - have little conent for me.

This is why I thought 'swing voter' would be a longer-running affair. I thought I floated amidst the fluidity of ideas, whereas political parties are solid bodies - particularly as consistency over time is seen as such a great virtue. However, I swiftly realised that this conclusion stemmed from a mis-characterization of how people actually decide to vote or follow a party allegiance. This mis-characterization might be crudely described in this way (I call it the Policy Market Stall):

First you work out what policies you like. So you make a scale of 1-10 for issues like Immigration, income tax, state control of education, importance of inequality, the risk of environmental meltdown/Islamic terrorism and so forth. Self-interest is normally assumed to operate; so if you live under a flight path, you oppose more runways - if you are a high-earner, you hate high taxes. Then you mesh this with each political party's avowed views and manifesto. The degree of 'fit' is what makes you vote a certain way. As you age or change, and the parties change, you might change vote. But you may well be rigidly stuck with one party your whole life, owing to an overwhelming set of preferences (i.e. the very rich never shifting from property-defending Toryism).

Maybe this approach is a fair description sometimes. Perhaps it worked when parties fell much more squarely around class lines, and the two class-parties took 95% of the votes. When it was a straight matter of the rights of Labour over the rights of Capital, you could perhaps show politics moving in great tidal sweeps, according to some kind of Marxist juggernaut. But for me, and for now, I think it fails terribly for several reasons:

- Most of what a Government will do cannot be anticipated - it will constitute a reaction to unforeseen events - like 9/11, Foot and Mouth, Financial crises. Here you need to know the character of the Party - it's DNA - the basic personalities of its leaders, the pressure that really tell upon it. This cannot be divined from a policy shopping-list

- Most policies are still in gestation. What the Civil Service works out are not mere details but often the real substance of the policy. Just spouting "Regionalisation" or "Localisation" will mean nothing without the details, which can render the policy meaningless and weak (Prescott's Regions) or not. The huge process of turning kitchen-cabinet thoughts into laws and actions will turn out all sorts of trade-offs, where the DNA of the party will again be paramount.

- Even supposedly similar policies mean different things in the mouths of different political actors. Reforming Incapacity Benefit means different things to Tories and Liberals - the former are more likely to come from the angle that the benefits system is a scam, and the latter that its systematic weaknesses are benefiting nobody. Similar recipes from the Lib Dems and the Tories to the IPPR/Labour Party's recent work on it, but meaning different things and, under political stress, likely to fly off in different directions.

- the actual personalities of political parties matter when you might end up working with them in a career move. The self-righteous whinging and vocal anti-capitalism of Left-leaning students really put me off Labour grassroots at the LSE. From the half-dozen recent meetings of thinktanks etc, I did not like the company of nostalgic socialists like Mark Garnett, and even less the paranoid Islamophobes that turned up to the Civitas lunch on "Why I am not a Muslim" (The Spectator, not Civitas, made the running here; I still respect Civitas' work with supplementary schools). I find Tories declaiming on Tradition, Nation, Queen and Our Culture under Threat about as annoying as anything I can remember since The Word was on Channel 4.

Hence, the way I reached my political decision cannot (thankfully) be put down to a long list of worthy policies. There are great Lib Dem policies, but ultimately it came down to the character and values that could be discerned from the party, in its representatives I met, reading the debates online, the articles (Orange Books, policy briefings), the conduct of their MP's in debates, and so forth. Liberalism means something. Nick Clegg, obviously, explains this better than me. It is the Liberal character of Britain's past that makes me proud. And my reading of political history has the Liberal side consistently being on the right side of the important questions - on Reform, Irish home rule, the introduction of a welfare state, on voting reform, on Internationalism and progressive taxation. It is a generous doctrine, not a self-serving, drawbridge state or nanny state doctrine. Unlike Labourism, it does not favour a particular class, or have illusions about its superior ability to tell people what is good for them. Unlike Toryism, it does not make a fetish of property, nor have that gloomy rose-tinted view of the past that denies the possibility of progress, and fears every new or foreign thing. This is all woolly. It is meant to be. But every time a specific policy comes out - Tory tax giveaways to the ultra-rich, Labour micromanaging toddlers - I know that these principles make a difference.