23 June 2016
A Jolly Voting Day
Quiet, too damned quiet!
by John Watson
In most parts of Britain, voting day is an oasis of peace. Before it, came the last stages of the campaign, the opposing factions shouting their wares like coster-mongers in a Victorian engraving. Afterwards will come the recriminations and the wrangling over the implications of the result. In between there is nothing to say. The nation has heard the debate and goes to cast its vote. No one wants to hear anything more from the politicians and for that reason nothing more is said. What is the point if it will only irritate the voters?
With a referendum, voting day is especially quiet. There has been no canvass, so a number of the activities which we are used to seeing on election day become pointless. You will look in vain for activists knocking on the doors of those supporters who have not yet been to the polls. With a referendum nobody knows who their supporters are so you would not know which door to knock on. Nor is there any need to collect voting cards as electors come out of the poll booth. In a general election it is customary to hand your card to the representative of the party which you support so that they will know you have voted and will not waste their time reminding you to do so later. No canvass though makes this pointless and if in some areas there are representatives of Remain and Leave standing in the street it will only be for show. They will have no more function than the sentries who pace to and fro in front of Buckingham Palace.
This absence of activity may be a relief in some ways but it is also something of an anti-climax. Standing at a voting station always makes a pleasant culmination to campaigning at a general election because convention has it that, the campaigning being over, the representatives of the different parties do not talk about politics. Instead there is a collegiate atmosphere and sometimes even an element of cooperation.
Many years ago I was standing outside a school in southern Islington. It was desperately cold and, the returning officer having ruled that we must stay outside the building, the only shelter was a sort of open porch. There were three of us there. I was representing the Conservatives and there were representatives of Labour and the Liberals (as they then were). I knew Pat, my Labour opposite number, fairly well. He was from the extreme left of his party and claimed to be the most senior member of the militant tendency who had not been expelled from it. He was also amusing and good company and occasionally, after canvassing the same block for our different parties, we would go off to the pub for a beer. Naturally we discussed our respective canvass returns and, oddly, we always found that the same people had agreed to vote for both of our parties, giving credence to the theory that there are those who always offer or refuse their support, regardless of who they are talking to.
Anyway, as I said, it was bitterly cold and so Pat and I came to deal. I would go off and get coffee and mars bars but, while I was away, he would wear a Tory rosette as well as a Labour one and would gather information about who had voted on behalf of both parties. Eager not to be left out of this somewhat unorthodox agreement, the Liberal man cut in by offering to get newspapers as well, if Pat would increase his count of rosettes from 2 to 3. It was an odd feeling, walking down the street, hearing a booming voice behind us saying “I welcome you to the poll on behalf of all three parties”. The electors, who knew nothing about what had been agreed, must have been very surprised.
All would have gone well but for the fact that at that moment the sitting Labour MP turned up with his entourage to visit the polling station. He was horrified to see one of his most radical supporters wearing what looked like an off-colour set of traffic lights. “You’ll take those off at once” he exclaimed. In doing so he underestimated the robust quality of his own activists because, when I returned to the polling station, the MP had left and Pat, with the smile of a man who has enjoyed telling someone else where to get off, unpinned my rosette from his lapel and handed it back.
That is why, as I see the bland polling stations today, with the voting being carried out with all the decorum that a serious decision requires, I will feel a tinge of regret. No doubt the order and seriousness is a credit to the British public, but for a jolly voting day give me a general election any time.
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