It was, in all honesty, quite a boring election. There were no big ideas, strong personalities, or fiery clashes, and long before it was even called, the pollsters had spoken – Labour would win a crushing majority. Within weeks of hitting the campaign trail, the leader of the incumbent Tory party was begging the electorate not to let his opponent humiliate him too much. Meanwhile, said opponent was saying just enough to appear like a man with, well, not so much a plan as a vibe (“change”), but not so much that he’d have to spell out the inevitable (that little will change). The closest we got to the thrills of Prescott’s fisticuffs or picturing Theresa May naughtily cut through wheat fields was watching a fat man fall off his paddleboard. Amidst all this monotony, however, there was some light relief to be found in the redoubtable Peter Hitchens’ political gyrations. 

Hitchens, in-spite of his decades’ long career as one of the Conservative Party’s least forgiving right-wing critics, has spent the last month or so apparently urging his readers to vote for the party whose destruction he once described as “desirable”, and reproaching those preferring to vote for smaller right-wing alternatives like the Workers Party or Reform UK as acting out of an unreasonable “emotional spasm”. On its face, this might seem wilfully contrarian but, as the well-known meme goes, “[t]here comes a stage in a man’s life when he puts aside childish beliefs and comes to realise that Peter Hitchens was right all along ”, so it is worth attending to the great man’s arguments in some detail before explaining why (if!) they are wrong. 

We should begin by clarifying something that Hitchens has expended a great deal of energy emphasising that he was not asking people to vote for the Tories but against Labour. He explained this in some detail during his appearance at UnHerd’s “Alternative Election Hustings”:  

There’s then to other question which I have to take up which is the question of if I hate the Tory party so much, why don’t I wish to see it crash and burn on this occasion, having campaigned since 2003, as I have, for its destruction, having poured over its head so many gallons of slime and hatred, why is it that I don’t now want you all to rush off and vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK? 

It’s because I’m not a child. It’s because I understand, as everybody in this country ought to understand and millions of people currently don’t, that a vote is not an emotional spasm, nor is it a sacrament, it’s not even a civic duty. It’s a measurable, simple act with a measurable result. If people vote for Reform in large numbers, their votes will aid the victory of a Labour party led by a man who is, as I say, the most left-wing person to put himself forward to enter Downing Street in the history of this country… [Emphases ours]

Hitchens’ argument here can be boiled down to two key claims: (1) that voting is a means to an end, not an end in-itself; and (2) that the most pressing end facing British voters during this election cycle was preventing the accession of a party whose incumbency will, he argued, prove more devastating than Tony Blair’s. From this, he suggested, it followed that the only reasonable option for every British citizen was to vote for the Labour party’s biggest competition in their own constituency, which, in many cases, would have meant voting Tory. Even if it meant denying a hateful party its rightful oblivion, to do otherwise — such as voting reform — was to act unreasonably and to chase a vapid symbolism or an election-day catharsis that could not hope to survive the next morning’s cold, red-tinted light:

…if those currently toying with taking some sort of “revenge” on the Tories would only think about what they are doing, they might realise what they are going to bring on themselves.

Trying to punish the Tories by helping the election of a Starmer government will, I confidently predict, be useless. It is like bashing yourself over the head with a lump hammer to frighten your enemies. Ejected politicians often rather enjoy their post-power years. But you won’t enjoy Starmerism.

The problem, as we see it, lies with (2), which can be read as comprising two sub-claims. While we can grant, even just for arguments’ sake, that Labour’s time in office will be terrible for the UK, we cannot accept Hitchens’ conclusion that preventing this outcome was the only reasonable end that voters could adopt, for the simple reason that a Labour victory has seemed quasi-inevitable for a while now. According to Mark Pack’s meticulously curated database of opinion polls since 1943, the Tories have not scored ahead of Labour since late 2021 — and since January 2023 have, on average, enjoyed a whopping 19-point lead. However shrewd his prognostications about the Labour regime, Hitchens’ project of blocking their ascendancy was likely always doomed. Under such conditions, it was always reasonable to vote towards a different, more realistic end, such as that of shaping the opposition to Labour’s hegemony. As Reform UK’s representative at the UnHerd event, Matthew Goodwin, exclaimed that:

Peter wants to wake up the morning after the election feeling as though he’s done his bit in stopping the labour tide I want to wake up the morning after the election and feel as though I’ve done my bit in laying a foundation for a more credible, representative, and responsive alternative to the Labour party [and] that’s why I’m going to be voting for the Reform party.

Now, Goodwin’s faith in the Reform party could be misplaced, and he could be wrong to think of Reform as a “springboard” to a new kind of right-wing politics, but his overarching response to Hitchens is nonetheless sound —  given the likelihood of a crushing Labour victory, it was always as (perhaps even more…) reasonable to vote with the aim of shaping the opposition as to do so in the hopes of blocking a Labour victory. On these terms, votes for Reform, the Greens, Lib Dems, or even George Galloway’s Workers Party were not wasted or unreasonable but simple acts with measurable results in shaping the membership of the opposition’s benches and, hopefully, our country’s political future.

Throughout this debate, Hitchens’ response to this line of argument has been to reject what we might call “psephological determinism” — that is, he rejected the suggestion that, in making our decisions about how to vote, we treat polls as predictive devices that give us an idea of what is to come. Instead, he said, seeming to channel Pierre Bourdieu, we should think of polls as primarily performative devices, aimed at manipulating the public’s voting behaviour, and try to resist their malefic influence. He explained, echoing a renowned argument of his:

The polls mean nothing if we defy them. Why let your mind, will, and hand be influenced by a (quite possibly inaccurate) survey of what other people will do? 

Be a human, not a flock animal. No doubt many of my readers think the Tories are useless, but they cannot believe this as strongly as I do. Even so, this week’s poll is not a referendum on the Tories. It is an election which will choose the next government.

Embrace your autonomy, said Hitchens, and do not let your actions be determined by the polling industrial complex’s charts and graphs. 

The problem with this response was that — as he has previously acknowledged — polls are simultaneously predictive and performative, and that he was effectively asking us voters to blind ourselves to the first of these. On the one hand, he is right and polls are used to spin a shared understanding about what is likely to come, and to thereby manipulate our behaviours. On the other, polls do often tell us something about the future. Using Mark Pack’s aforementioned opinion poll data, the political scientist Paul Whiteley has investigated the correlation between vote intention polling and election outcomes over the period of 1945-2019, producing the following: 

This shows the correlation between the predictions made by pollsters one, three, six, twelve, and twenty-four months before election day and the election’s actual outcome. The closer a bar is to one, the more accurate the polls put out at that time, for that party have been on average (hitting one would mean 100% accuracy). From this, we can see that pollsters have, on average, been generally accurate in predicting both Labour and Tory outcomes in the month leading up election day — when, this time around, they were giving the former a twenty-point lead. It was therefore quite reasonable to expect a crushing Labour victory, and to integrate this expectation into your electoral decision-making. 

Of course, had things been different, had it been a summer-long campaign (it wasn’t), appealing mostly to tactical or undecided voters (it didn’t), or had Hitchens enjoyed a platform large enough to sway enough of our voting intentions (he doesn’t), then maybe it would have been reasonable to behave as he demanded and to treat the opinion polls as wholly uncertain, or even to ignore them entirely. Unfortunately, that was not our world and we had good reasons to pay attention to what they were predicting. 

While Hitchens is right to remind us that in paying attention to polling we risk succumbing to its performative allure and behaving like “flock animals”, he is also wrong to say that it was unreasonable or evidence of an “emotional spasm” to do so. With polls having been so consistent, categorical, and broadly reliable, it was perfectly reasonable to abandon the end of blocking a Labour party majority and to orient one’s efforts around something else, such as shaping the opposition or expressing countable support for politicians outside of the uniparty.