Marginal No More

"But we are still well ahead in the marginals," bleat the Cameron groupies and the people who wish that they were. Are we supposed to be impressed that our electoral process can be warped by the money that a single individual has refused to pay as tax in this country?

Well, who cares? Seats are only "marginal", just as others are only "safe", because it suits the media and their political creatures to treat them as such. They decide where and who matters. They decide where and who doesn't matter. If we let them. In which case, we have only ourselves to blame.

For as long as I can remember, I have been hearing people in this area complain that the Tories and the Lib Dems do not put up remotely credible candidates or do any campaigning work worth speaking of, and that they might pick up support if they made more of an effort. "What has the Labour Party ever done for us?" may be a particularly loud refrain after the last 13 years, but there is nothing new about it. However, even now, when Labour's appeal here is based on ancient history, and when the later half of the intervening generation has been lived under a less than spectacularly successful Labour Government, voting for anyone else still depends on having anyone else worth voting for.

But the truth is that, while there must be any number of people in the country at large capable of being MPs, the three parties cannot find from among their members anything like the collective two thousand or so that they would need in order to field a serious candidate in every constituency, giving every voter a meaningful choice. It is this, rather than the electoral system, that needs to be addressed. It demands, not a new way of voting, but new people for whom to vote, selected by new means that involve the whole electorate.

In the meantime, those of us not fortunate enough to live in what has been decreed from on high shall be a "marginal" seat, and therefore important enough to command the attention of Lord Ashcroft and the BBC, should be organising, supporting and electing candidates of our own, rejecting both whatever the party in possession can be bothered to give us, and whatever the other parties can be bothered to put up on paper but in no other way. We certainly won't be marginal to anything once we have done that.