Election

Simon and Garfunkel sang,

May, she will stay [but will she?]
June, she’ll change her tune
August, die she must

In the same vein, John Wyndham, in The Chrysalids, wrote the obituary for her defunct parrot Strong’n’Stable:

Soon, they’ll obtain the stability they strive for, in the only way it’s granted: a place among the fossils.

(I quote from memory, that may not be quite right.)

It was interesting being in a constituency where the result was decided by two votes after three counts (giving different results, so I have very little confidence that the last recount was correct). Here is my theory of what happened.

North-east Fife was always going to be close between the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, with perhaps the Lib Dems having a slight edge. Then, shortly before the election, the Tory candidate woke up and started flooding the constituency with campaign literature. This didn’t give any policies; the only thing he said was that only a vote for him would “stop the SNP”. This of course was not true, but it possibly scared a few people thinking of voting Lib Dem to vote Conservative instead. So the result of his campaign was that the SNP candidate won.

This in my view is because of the “first-past-the-post” electoral system (misnamed, since there is no post which candidates have to pass), which encourages tactical voting rather than support of policies.