One of the key elements when deciding whether it is rational to vote is whether you can calculate what Anthony Downs calls your ‘party differential’. This is, broadly, the value (not necessarily just in terms of money) of the differential between your favourite party winning and your next favourite.

If you don’t have a major party preference, your ‘party differential’ could be quite small. However, if you hold views which are aligned with just one political party, you might find your ‘party differential’ is quite high. It’s important to you that one particular party wins the Election.

Will yours be the decisive vote?

How likely is it that the outcome of the General Election will be decided by one vote?
This situation requires that the winning party gets in by a majority of one seat and that the parties in your constituency would tie were it not for your vote. It’s not a very likely scenario, is it?
Working out the ‘value’ of your vote

Let’s say that the likelihood of a one seat majority of 1 in 500 and that the likelihood of a tie in your constituency of 1 in 30,000. However important it is to you that your favourite party wins; it is still a fraction of a chance that your vote will be the one that makes a decisive difference.
If you weigh up the cost of the shoe leather or petrol to take you to your nearest polling station, and the time it takes you to vote (and what else you could be doing with that time), then surely it is totally irrational to vote?

Three reasons you should vote

Another well-known political theorist, Howard Margolis, says ‘no’. He outlines three counter arguments why voting is a rational behaviour. These are:

1. If you expect your chosen party to do good things, you aren’t just expecting them to do these things for you; you expect them to do them for everyone. You’re doing something for the greater good

2. You are participating and encouraging the democratic process

3. You get a feeling that you have ‘done your bit’. Even if a donation you make to a famine charity doesn’t solve the problem, at least you can feel that you did your bit. The same is true in an election whether your party wins or loses

So, vote!

Very few of us will be able to say that it was our vote that made a critical difference to the outcome of the General Election on May 6th. Even in marginal seats, the majority creeps into hundreds and thousands and so one solitary vote is unlikely to decide the outcome.

However, the feeling that we have contributed to our party’s efforts, that we’ve tried to do the right thing for everyone and that we’ve upheld the democratic process should be more than enough to encourage us all to get our boots on and head to the polling station on Thursday.

General Election Turnout Betting

2. Apparently, it’s the same old Conservative party. Yes, the same old Conservative party. Yes – the same old Conservative Party. We get it, PM

3. David Cameron’s ruddy face clashed really badly with the background. He should have gone for a more orange all-over fake tan

4. Nick Clegg doesn’t want to claim his tax credits. Bless

5. ITV and Sky might have had a decent stab at this politics stuff, but the BBC is the natural home for this sort of heavyweight debate. David Dimbleby is a legend

6. Do you think that President Obama is glad that David Cameron agrees with him? If I were Obama, I’d sue

7. Nick Clegg would like to stop ‘freewheeling casino investment banking’. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds like James Bond might be out of a job

8. If Gordon Brown doesn’t win the General Election, he could well have a career as a new weight loss guru. I reckon I’d lose a stone on his ‘deficit reduction plan’

9. Nick Clegg must be a qualified doctor. It’s only medical experts that understand that your body ‘will sort of stop’ if you don’t have any blood circulating

10. If you are a teacher, David Cameron promises to patronise you with treacly, insincere platitudes if he becomes Prime Minister

11. It is the second time Cameron has mentioned the Government ‘massage suite’. Is he just upset that no-one has ever invited him to use it?

12. Why did Cameron not have a proper shave? He wants to be Prime Minister and he had the most awful porn star moustache

13. Lord help you if you are on unemployment benefits and you don’t take a job. Cameron and Brown are going to personally come round to your house and frogmarch you to the Jobcentre

14. David Cameron might bang on about the environment, but the product he’s applied to his hair has almost singlehandedly created the entire hole in the ozone layer

15. It is all very well telling children that they can go ‘all the way’ if they go to the best school in the country (Eton costs £28,000 per year)

16. The entire TV schedule between now and polling day is going to be filled with TV debates between every single combination of regional and smaller political parties (If you only get BBC1 Wales, I’d probably unplug the telly and come back after Election day)

17. Children of the 80s are a wasted generation? Blimey, Gordon, that’s a sweeping generalisation

18. David Cameron doesn’t know whether houses valued at less than £250,000 exist

19. Are we going to drive a Chevvy to the bank levy, or perhaps the levy is dry…?

20. 270 minutes of television – and this final debate included – has fundamentally changed both the election process in the UK, and the political landscape for good. We never thought that three weeks ago, did we?

Take this from Cameron last week: “A hung parliament would be a bunch of politicians haggling, not deciding. They would be fighting for their own interests, not fighting for your interests. They would not be making long-term decisions for the country’s future, they would be making short-term decisions for their own future. The way we are going to get things done is to have a decisive Conservative government.”
And from Ken Clarke: “”I simply fear an inconclusive election result, a situation where the three politicians who have such genuine disagreements are asked to lead parties into somehow cobbling together an approach to an economic crisis. If the British can’t form a proper government and people believe we can’t manage our debt then the IMF will have to do it for us.”

Politicians fighting each other and the IMF coming in to run our economy for us? It’s absolute nonsense.
Coalition government

Elsewhere in the world, countries don’t use the term ‘hung parliament’ – they call it ‘coalition government’. Rather than paralysing the political system in the way that David Cameron would have you believe, many flourishing, progressive countries have been in a ‘hung parliament’ situation for years. The Nordic countries, Israel, Austria, New Zealand, Italy and India all regularly operate with a coalition government.

Take Germany, for example. Coalition government is the norm, as it is rare for either of the two main parties to win an unqualified majority in a national election. They frequently side with smaller parties although, on occasion, there is a ‘grand’ coalition when the two largest parties rule the country in partnership.

In Ireland, coalition governments are quite common with a single party not having ruled for over two decades. Coalitions are typically formed of two or more parties always consisting of one of the two biggest parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and one or more smaller parties or independent members of parliament.

The current government consists of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, supported by independents.

Indeed, the UK has a minority government of its own at present. The Scottish Nationalist Party won just 47 of 129 seats in the most recent Scottish elections, meaning that the support of other parties is essential for legislation to be passed.

Hung parliament

The notion that the British economy and government will suddenly grind to a halt if there’s no overall majority on 6th May is utterly preposterous. Many advanced Western democracies operate under coalition government, and such a result in the UK would also precipitate a change to our electoral system that would almost certainly make majority government a thing of the past.

Hung Parliament Betting

2. If Cameron mentioned that there was a big difference between the Conservatives and the other parties, he must have said it seven dozen times

3. We might have thought Alistair Stewart was hapless last week, but Adam Boulton took useless moderation to a whole new level

4. Cameron wants to ‘secure the future, for the future’. Glad you have clarified that, Dave
5. Nick Clegg must be comfortable with the size of his manhood, as he understands the concept (to coin a phrase) that ‘size does matter’

6. One minute David Cameron is claiming that a hung parliament would be the end of days, and the next minute he believes we should work together. He supported a Tony Blair bill, you know
7. Gordon Brown doesn’t know what the Labour campaigning leaflets say

8. Clegg repeatedly claims that the others are form two ‘old parties’. That’s an interesting point considering the Liberal party was basically born out of the Whigs who were formed around 1680

9. Gordon Brown is not interested in point scoring, he is interested in doing the right thing. He’d be a rubbish table tennis player

10. None of the party leaders want to have a pop at the Pope when he arrives for his visit

11. Gordon Brown can identify a woman. During a question about pensions, he told an 84 year old lady “women, and you are one of them….”

12. According to Nick Clegg, buses are warmer than pensioner’s houses

13. David Cameron has mates who are ‘nutters’, ‘right wing extremists’, ‘homophobes, ‘anti-Semites’ and people who ‘deny the existence of climate change’

14. Gordon Brown wants to deport 900,000 illegal immigrants. How does he know how many illegal immigrants there are or where he might find them?

15. Our economy has lots of shadows where illegal immigrants live. If there are 900,000 of them, they must live somewhere quite sunny as that’s one hell of a shadow

16. Apparently, the Labour party are going around ‘frightening’ people. Perhaps they are all in Gordon Brown masks

17. David Cameron is a risk to our economy and Nick Clegg is a risk to our security

18. The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland believes that it is acceptable to use the phrase: ‘it should not have been got rid of’. It’s a good job the voting is not based on grammar

19. Even David Cameron doesn’t support the blue team any more. He was wearing a purple tie

20. It remains a three horse race. Cameron may have just about pipped this one, but Clegg is still well in the hunt….

The Daily Mirror went as far as calling the Tory leader a ‘fraud’.

Cameron told the debate: “Our death rate from cancer is actually worse than Bulgaria’s.” However, Department of Health figures show for Bulgarian men under 65, mortality from cancer is 121 per 100,000 compared to 65 per 100,000 in England. For women, the figures are 70 per 100,000 in Bulgaria and 63 per 100,000 in England.

Mr Cameron also told a story about a new £73,000 Lexus bought by Humberside Police. However, Chief Constable Tim Hollis said it cost less than the £53,381 on-the-road price and is used for frontline policing. Mr Hollis said: “It’s used by Road Crime Section with damn good results.”

The Metropolitan Police were also angry at claims they had 400 people in HR. There are 398 - with 350 to train officers on arrests. One senior officer called Cameron’s comments “ignorant”.

’40 year old black man’

In addition, the ‘40-year-old black man’ referred to by Cameron in this week’s televised election debate has hit out at the Conservative leader for getting the story wrong.

Cameron referred to Neal Forde, who runs a business supplying kitchen worktops, while discussing immigration during Thursday’s TV debate. The Conservative leader said: “I was in Plymouth recently and a 40-year-old black man … said, ‘I came here when I was six, I’ve served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, I’m incredibly proud of my country. But I’m so ashamed that we’ve had this out-of-control system with people abusing it so badly’.”

Unfortunately, the Tory leader got the 51-year-old businessman’s age wrong by 11 years. He also told the audience of 9 million viewers that Forde had served in the Royal Navy for 30 years (which would have been interesting considering he thought the man was 40 years old), when in fact he served for six.
He said he had been teased by his friends and colleagues because of the inaccuracies in Cameron’s anecdote.

Crosby

Cameron also recounted a story of when he recently visited Crosby “and I was talking to a woman there who had been burgled by someone who had just left prison and he stole everything in her house and, as he left, he set fire to the sofa and her son died from the fumes and that burglar, that murderer, could be out in four-and-a-half years.”

He was referring to the killing, in March 2008, of Ryan Dugdale, 21, by Liam O’Brien. The crime actually took place in Anfield, causing a number of angry calls to the Crosby Herald after the debate from people who felt Cameron was unfairly branding Crosby – part of the new Lib Dem-Tory marginal seat of Sefton Central – as a dangerous place.

Jack Colbert, a local Liberal Democrat councillor said, “I don’t mind anecdotal evidence, but they’ve got to get their facts right.”

And so say all of us.

Will Cameron Perform Better or Worse in the 2nd TV debate?

2. At the next debate, when David Cameron asks “Which family hasn’t had to save money [in the recent financial crisis]”, someone in the audience needs to yell “YOURS!”

3. A party leader finishing a sentence that would ordinarily command applause standing back to hear absolutely nothing (thanks to the gigantic rule book that governs these debates) is a little bit strange

4. Gordon Brown should probably drop the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ gags

5. The next time ITV host a political debate, they might as well get Fern Britton to do it, as she can’t be any less competent than Alistair Stewart

6. The whole shebang needs a swimwear round about half way through….

7. ….or the studio audience need to give the party leaders marks out of 12 in both French and English in the second half of the show. “David Cameron, 12 points. (Davide le Camerone), douze points”.

8. The rules need to be expanded to outlaw tedious personal stories about going to Hull and finding out the police are ordering a Lexus, or chatting to pensioners in hospitals who want more Rich Tea biscuits on the NHS. It’s like having to sit through someone’s holiday photos

9. Can we please talk about the need for improved kit, helicopters and resources for the armed forces without having to use the word ‘brave’ in every sentence? Or, if not, perhaps we should insist that every time we talk about the NHS we have to call everyone ‘our clean doctors’ and ‘our clean nurses’? Or perhaps all debates about policing we should call them ‘our blue constables’?

10. Someone in the audience needs to leap up in the air half way through and yell “OH, WHO EFFING CARES.”

11. David Cameron’s tie needs to look less like he’s wearing school uniform. Does he only recognise one shade of blue?

12. There needs to be a break half way through the debate so we can all have a valium and so the party leaders can all swear loudly at one another for a couple of minutes to get it out of their system

13. David Cameron has proved that it is possible to be airbrushed in real life, not just on giant billboard posters

14. There is actually a chance that the Liberal Democrats might do pretty well

15. They should have to perform one karaoke song at the end of each debate, in the way that I once had to when I stood at my Student Union

16. David Cameron’s continued desperation to use the word ‘quango’ indicated that he was in the middle of a giant game of Scrabble

17. Nick Clegg was the clever one who wrote the questioner’s names down so he could reel them off at the end. Nice touch

18. The next two debates are going to have to hit the ground running as we can’t sit through half an hour of boring politeness again

19. Gordon Brown’s hand gestures make him look like he is riding an invisible horse

20. David Cameron is going to have to up his game in time for the next one, otherwise he is doing more damage than good…..

Labour, famously, shot to power in 1997 on the back of D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ – a song which could have been played at every single General Election since the Second World War, if we’re honest.

The inextricable link between that track and Labour’s triumph is clearly not lost on Dave Cam, which is why he soundtracked his manifesto launch this week with a popular top Ten hit from 2004 – Keane’s ‘Everybody’s Changing’.

In a way, this choice shows everything that’s wrong with the Conservative Party. Firstly, they were arrogant enough to use it without permission (drummer Richard Hughes was ‘horrified’ that the Tories had hijacked the song).

Secondly, it’s a choice of song that describes the Tories perfectly – they’ve not bothered to check the details of the content but have simply gone for a great headline. Cameron clearly hasn’t bothered to read the lyrics to ‘Everybody’s Changing’ or think about what relevance they might have to his party’s ambitions for the nation – he’s just gone for a title that includes some vague notion of ‘change’.

Considering it is a song about being stuck in a lonely place whilst the rest of the world are moving on positively with their lives, some might say it’s not a great choice….

Idiot.

That’s right; ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ is back.

Oh, and before the return of Cowell et al, we have to endure ninety minutes of Gordo, Dave Cam and, er, ‘the other one’ as the first Prime Minister TV debate hits the ITV screens.

Lest we forget, it has taken six months of careful horse trading and negotiation to come up with a set of rules for the debates, never mind get the three of them to agree. As one of the newspapers said this week, the result is “a set of preconditions that makes the Treaty of Versailles look like a hastily scribbled shopping list.”

There are 76 separate rules to follow ranging from the mundane ‘the moderator will introduce the leaders’ (inserted, presumably, so the watching millions know who Nick Clegg is) to the rather formal ‘at the end of programme the three leaders will shake hands’ (it’s a 5/1 chance that one of them doesn’t shake another’s hand after the event).

The rule that has caught most people’s attention is Clause 40 which is at risk of making the whole programme look like something a 1950s China would have considered staged. “In order to maximise the time available for viewers to hear the leaders discussing election issues with each other, the studio audience will be asked not to applaud during the debate. There will be opportunities to do so both at the beginning and at the end of each programme.”

So, if you are in the audience; no clapping, no cheering and no heckling please. It’s 11/8 that this rule will be broken first by someone applauding, but considering the lack of enthusiasm anyone has for this Election, the 7/4 on someone booing looks a better bet.

As Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, says, “People are used to watching Question Time on the BBC, and are used to seeing bad answers being booed at and testimony from the audience that can throw a politician, and here we are with something resembling 1970s set-piece Soviet television. The audience will be mere scenery.”

So, the best we can hope for is that someone’s mask slips or that one of the candidates drops a bit of a clanger. If not, with rules limiting each answer to no more than a minute, and the audience having to sit in the studio not saying a thing, the whole thing looks less like the cut and thrust of modern day politics and more like a stunt dreamed up by TV channels desperate for ratings.

Who Will Win The First TV Debate?

Michael Portillo’s shock Election defeat in 1997, when the Labour candidate Steven Twigg secured a staggering 17.4% swing to oust the then Defence Secretary, came to symbolise the sea change from the Conservatives to Labour thirteen years ago. Now, similar high profile politicians are desperately hoping to avoid ‘doing a Portillo’ and not only avoid losing the General Election, but also avoid losing their own seat.

Potential high profile casualties

Several of Labour’s highest-profile MPs face humiliating a defeat on May 6th, ahead of potential defeat for the Government. Tipped as the biggest casualty is Gordon Brown’s closest political ally, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls in what would be the biggest election shock since Portillo’s downfall in 1997.
Mr Balls defends the new seat of Morley and Outwood with a notional 8,669 majority. It would need a swing of almost 10.5 per cent to unseat him, but the Conservative candidate, Antony Calvert, has been campaigning diligently and Labour crashed to fourth place at the local council elections in 2008.

Mr Balls is one of a string of big guns, including former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, ex-Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, Chancellor Alistair Darling, Justice Secretary Jack Straw and Olympics minister Tessa Jowell who all face a desperate battle to cling on to their seats.

Marginal seats

Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who has only a 2,163 majority in Redditch, is the most likely Labour casualty, especially with the memories of her husband’s dubious satellite television usage fresh in voters’ minds.

Alistair Darling is another senior Labour figure in danger and the Chancellor may find it a challenge to hold on to Edinburgh South West. With a majority of 7,242 over the Tories, and the Liberal Democrats just a thousand votes further back in third, the challenge to unseat the Chancellor will come from both sides. However, Darling may be saved by the split in the Opposition vote working in his favour.

Whilst he is a local boy and a supporter of his home town football club, Justice Secretary Jack Straw cannot be completely confident of holding his Blackburn seat. As a former Foreign and Home Secretary, he is one of Labour’s most high profile and well-recognised MPs but local Tory councillor Michael Law-Riding only needs a 9.8 per cent swing to overturn Straw’s 8,048 majority.

Another high-profile target is Olympics minister Tessa Jowell, who holds a notional 7,853 majority over the Conservatives in Dulwich West and Norwood. With the Liberal Democrats just 500 votes further back, the former Culture Secretary could also benefit from a split in the opposition vote.

It is 3/1 that all six of these Cabinet members lose their seats on May 6th, and an 8/1 chance that seven or more of the current 23 Cabinet members fail to be re-elected.

Election Cabinet Crash

Many people believe it was one of the best decisions the Labour government made, as it allowed the Bank of England to set interest rates without any political pressure being brought to bear. However, it also set up a chain of events that, over a decade later, made Nick Leeson’s losses at Barings look like some loose change you dropped down the back of the sofa.

The 2010 General Election will be held on the thirteenth anniversary of the decision to hand independence to the Bank of England and, coincidentally, it could well be the ramifications of that decision that decide the outcome of the election this time.

“Britain is on the road to recovery and nothing we do should put that recovery at risk,” said Gordon Brown on the steps of Number Ten as he announced the election date of May 6th; “probably the worst-kept secret of recent years”.

Dissolution

Earlier in the day, the PM had driven the mile or so to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, who had been helicoptered in from Windsor Castle (quite what the carbon footprint of this morning’s announcement is, one can only speculate). Brown said, oddly, “The Queen has kindly agreed to the dissolution of Parliament and a General Election will take place on May 6.”

(Kindly? What did he expect? Did he think Her Maj would stomp around complaining that the Election clashed with George Clooney’s birthday and so she’d have to choose between a Hollywood bash for Cloono and being around to sign important Election paperwork?)

Opposition reaction

DaveCam began the first day of the campaign with a half-hour jog, leaving his west London home at 6.30am. On his return, he said, “pffffftttthhhhhhhhh – Lucozade, inhaler, pant, pant, pant, pant” before getting his breath and announcing, “I think the Conservatives - the modern Conservatives - have got the energy, the leadership, the values, to get things done in our country and that is what we need - a fresh start.”

As he left his south-west London home, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said that he was looking forward to the month-long campaign, and insisted that the race for Number 10 was “wide open”.

Campaign trail

So, after three more days of Commons debate (the so-called ‘wash-up’), all politicians will head out on the campaign trail ahead of polling on May 6th. One Labour politician who will be celebrating on May 6th, come what may, is Tony Blair. The former PM won’t necessarily be toasting the demise of his embittered former Chancellor on that day – he will be celebrating his 57th birthday.

Who Will Win The Next UK General Election?