ON ELECTION DAY

Bright and Early

Actually, not bright, but overcast. When I came out of church from saying Morning Prayer I found the Labour parliamentary candidate, Karen Buck, standing there accosting parents bringing their children to school. She told me that she'd already spoken to three people who had needed reminding that the General Election was today! The exercise was precisely to remind people to vote; here on the Warwick Estate it is presumed that no persuasion will be necessary to get them to vote Labour. Karen and I agreed that it had felt a very strange sort of campaign, the strangest either of us could remember. I was pleased to see her there, though I'm not sure that it was the best choice from her point of view, as we're only a small school. People generally say, though, that what candidates do on polling day is basically just displacement activity. There is a real point for all parties in getting the vote out in areas like this, because those who feel themselves marginalised are less likely to vote, as they will already feel despair at their lack of influence over anything in their lives. The frustrating thing, of course, is that they are the people for whom political change is most likely to make a difference. If you are comfortable and successful, most things the politicians might do will only be a minor annoyance but if you're struggling to make ends meet then small changes, one way or another, make a huge impact.


Vote Early, Vote Often

That's what we used to say in the political association of which I was secretary at University; it's an old joke from Ulster politics, where "personation" was rife. Personation is the offence of pretending to be someone else in order to use their vote, which remains difficult to police. In most countries you have to present your identity card in order to vote, but, since we don't have them here, there is no accepted method of checking who someone is. I know we have this collective folk memory of Nazis demanding "papers" from innocent civilians, and rejoice that we are not like that, but isn't there actually quite a good argument for the usefulness of identity cards? The civil liberties argument that it enables the government to store information about you doesn't impress me, I'm afraid, because they can do all that already, and basically I'm inclined to trust the state not to misuse such information (I'm much more concerned about my bank, frankly). It remains not difficult for personation to take place, though the system is not as leaky as it used to be. If you knew someone's number on the electoral register and went to the polling station early you would be undetectable (unless you were silly enough to turn up at the same polling station multiple times). There were Ulster constituencies where the dead were particularly keen voters (and I don't know whether that has been remedied, though it could have been). Now the big loophole is postal votes, with people turning up to vote in person and finding that they've already voted by post because the safeguards for the issue of postal votes have not been tremendously demanding, and have been carelessly applied by some local authorities.   


Not An Election At All

The Church of England is the only section of the worldwide Anglican Church where bishops are not elected in one way or another, which is an ironic hangover from the medieval contests between popes and monarchs. Nowadays it is all much less secretive than it used to be, and a virtue is made of consultation with the diocese, and so it was that I found myself at Church House on Monday, being consulted about the appointment of the next Bishop of London. We, the clergy of the Two Cities Area (over whom the Bishop of London exercises personal oversight), were invited to come along to be consulted by the Archbishop's Secretary for Appointments, and the Prime Minister's Appointments Secretary. At this session there were just four of us, but it would be fair to say that we represented a broad spectrum, as the others were a conservative Evangelical, a liberal Evangelical and a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic. It was fascinating to meet these shadowy bureaucrats and to make a contribution to the process. Clearly, our discussions were confidential, but I think I can say that all four of us were horrified that the Secretaries claimed to be unaware of the "London Plan" (which is the legally constituted scheme for keeping traditionalists on board while affirming everybody's ministry): if I am genuinely the first person to have brought that to their attention, I think I've made a significant contribution to the process.    


Two Years Ago

The last general election (twenty-five months ago) was the first in which I voted late in the day: I have always voted early. Down in Cornwall and sometimes in Reading  I used to unlock the church hall for the poll clerks, and witness the unsealing of the ballot box, so that really was voting early. Today I went at 9.45am, but in 2015 I voted just before 10pm, when it was dark, which felt very strange. It was, though, a strange day, as it was the day when Helen was told that she had inoperable cancer. We had walked over to St Mary's to the clinic in the morning, and after telling us they had sent us to A & E in order to get Helen admitted that day, so it took until after 9pm for her to be admitted to a ward. When she was settled I hared back to the Warwick Community Centre to vote and then collected all the things that Helen needed from home and cycled back to St Mary's with them. It's the sort of day that you remember with awful clarity.