Think about the News 4

The general election candidates who stand no chance ofwinning makes a few important points. It notes that high-flyers nowadays are parachuted to safe or marginal seats without even proving themselves first; they are marked as high-flyers through other methods, typically SPADing for a senior figure or being friends with them. This makes local party branches even less relevant; they are merely unpaid lobbyists, being taken advantage of by better-connected outsiders. As the article notes, ‘no-one in his right mind would stand in a safe seat unless he saw it as a stepping stone’. Of course, famous politicians have taken the opportunity to tell their stories, to appear humorous, humble and forgiving and make it seem like it was hard work that got them there. That doesn’t mean it’s how things work now, or even how they mostly worked back then.

It also notes at the end that it would look a bit odd if no-one stood against safe candidates. That’s the problem. By concealing the oddness of our electoral system, these losing candidates are supporting the major political parties in general, because it is the major parties that benefit from the obscenely undemocratic system we have. One such candidate said ‘it’s about making sure that there’s a voice for people with a different point of view’. Yet that’s precisely what does not happen. One person gets elected, and that’s it. If one candidate stood, representing all other possibilities, people would think it strange, but that would be the ideal solution to the FPTP system. That one candidate should stand, and then resign on victory, triggering a vote for candidates from the constituent parties he represented.

So not only do these losing candidates get no chance of winning, their hopes of stepping on to something else are smaller than they think, and they’ll get no support from party HQ. But despite needing sympathy, they are still doing democracy a disservice. This news story helpfully conceals that disservice, because it’s so hard to have sympathy for a person’s plight and also think that the person has made bad choices that shouldn’t be made. It is much easier to be sympathetic to the situation and the choices that got a person there.