The political, moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the current Conservative party

 

The UK is currently suffering a level of strike action not seen for decades. There is a simple reason for most of that - it is government policy. Take the continuing strikes in the rail industry. According to the Financial Times two weeks ago: “Employers had planned to offer a 10 per cent pay rise over two years to the RMT union, but were blocked by the government, which controls the industry’s finances, according to three people familiar with the matter” by adding tough new conditions at the last minute.

Or take the unprecedented strike by many nurses. Nurses have seen a large cut in their pay relative to those in the private sector since 2010. The government’s current pay offer will see that continue. Quite simply, nurses are being forced to strike because the government insists on reducing their standard of living compared to private sector workers as well as making their working conditions more intolerable. Now if for every nursing vacancy there were hundreds of applications then you could make a case for lower pay, but the opposite is true, partly because many nurses are leaving the NHS. It is a similar picture across the public sector.

Of course the government tries to assert that none of this is true. Instead they like to pretend that they are on the side of poor suffering Joe Public, and also like to claim that somehow it is the Labour opposition’s fault that we are seeing all these strikes. Given the level of misinformation we have in this country many (although for nurses certainly not a majority) will believe them. The reality is that the government thinks these strikes will work to their political advantage in returning some core Conservative support they have lost in recent months. In other words, they are making these strikes happen, despite the inconvenience this will cause and the damage it will do to the country, because they believe it’s to their party's political advantage.

Governing in a way that harms the country but boosts your flagging popularity is a good measure of political and moral bankruptcy.

But strikes are not an isolated example in an otherwise sea of policies the government is enacting to benefit the country. Take one of the most pressing issues of the moment, which is the crisis in the NHS. UK citizens are dying who would otherwise have lived because ambulance waiting times have sky-rocketed, A&E departments are overloaded and delays for many basic operations are at record levels. A key reason for this is a lack of beds and infrastructure, made acute by the number of patients being treated in hospitals with Covid, together with an inability to pass on patients to social care

Neither is an excuse for the government to do nothing! On the contrary, dealing with both is what any government is there to do. But where is the government action to create more NHS beds, and the staff that goes with them, following the emergence of Covid? What are the government’s plans to deal with the crisis in social care? Once again, by refusing to pay NHS staff more, and failing to provide the resources to attract more people into social care, the government is actively making things worse.

The new Prime Minister made a big speech announcing a new policy last week. But it wasn’t about the NHS or social care, or the growing poverty caused by the cost of living crisis. Instead it was about people crossing the Channel in small boats, mostly to claim asylum in the UK. Shortly afterwards some died trying to make that crossing in icy waters. Yet, as Lewis Goodall points out in this excellent summary, Sunak’s speech did not contain the one policy that could solve the problem of small boat crossings at a stroke, which is for the government to provide a means for asylum seekers from wherever they come to claim asylum safely.

Once again, the problem of Channel crossings is a problem of the government’s own making. By failing to provide any safe route for asylum seekers from all but a few countries to claim asylum in the UK, they create the demand for small boat crossings and the smuggler gangs that facilitate this. Why don’t they want to provide a safe route for asylum seekers? Because they want less asylum seekers in the UK compared to most other comparable countries. While some countries that have the same goal erect high barbed wire fences on their borders, we have the English Channel.

Those in the Conservative party, if they were being honest, would say they were just doing what their supporters want. Those in the Labour party who do not point out the truth about Channel crossings would say the same about the voters they need to attract to win the next election. There is some logic for such claims, because the UK’s FPTP voting system and our right wing press bias policy towards the interests of those who just want less people claiming asylum in the UK. But if this is the politicians’ excuse, why lie about it, and call those making the Channel Crossing ‘illegal migrants’? It means politicians are going beyond what they need to do to represent these voters. They are not only helping to put people’s lives at risk just for party political gain, but they are distorting or concealing the truth from those they represent. [1]

Take the biggest crisis facing the world today, climate change. What does the current government do? Opens a new coal mine. A government that lets people die just to win votes, or puts the future of humanity at risk for a bit more money today, is a good indication of political and moral bankruptcy.

It seems the government has given up on the business of governing, and instead its actions are determined only by what gains their party a few more votes. You might be cynical and say it is ever thus, but I think this is wrong. Whatever you might have thought about her vision, Margaret Thatcher did have ideas about how to make the UK a better place. Some of that might have been destructive, like reducing union power, but it was also constructive, like helping to create the Single Market for EU trade. There were of course some policies designed just to win votes, like selling council houses for example, but there was also a clear set of new ideas about how to improve the economy and individual opportunity.

The same is true for the Labour government of 1997-2010. Gordon Brown could list the many ways it had made lives better through specific policies in a conference speech. It too had a vision. If we call the vision of Thatcher neoliberalism, we could call Labour’s vision neoliberalism with a human face. Yet it is hard to imagine Rishi Sunak giving a similar speech about the achievements of Conservative led government since 2010. Austerity left the UK permanently poorer, put UK public services in a dire state, and yet UK taxes are at a record high. Brexit has bought further economic misery but hasn’t brought any benefits worth listing in a conference speech, with even immigration at record highs.

To describe all three governments as embodying neoliberalism misses these key differences, and therefore misses the political and moral bankruptcy of the current government. Yes, it still spouts neoliberal platitudes, but they have increasingly become clichés designed not to try and make the country better off with more opportunities for its citizens, but instead used as a mask for funneling money to friends, donors or potential future employers. So the UK’s private water companies are protected at the expense of sewage in our rivers and on our beaches. Energy companies are allowed to keep their record profits if they invest in producing more climate warming oil. Private companies with the right political connections are paid over the odds with public money to provide unusable PPE, then paid with public money to store it and then other private companies are paid with public money to dispose of it. I have described all this as a transition from neoliberalism to a form of plutocracy elsewhere.

Once we see austerity as the huge mistake it undoubtedly was, we can see that the bankruptcy of the current government did not start after a referendum in 2016, but from its very start in 2010. Wanting less public services and taxes without changing what the public sector does turned out to be as foolish as it sounds. With this, and nonsense like Britannia Unchained, Conservative ministers took the platitudes of neoliberalism [2] and thought that together they made a coherent and realistic vision, yet they remain in denial that this pursuit has done nothing but harm to the UK economy.

All this represents an intellectual as well as a political and moral failure. A failure to see that growth under Labour before the financial crisis matched that under Thatcher, and also more than matched growth in other G7 countries, yet with better public services and without the advantages of growing North Sea Oil revenues. A failure to recognise that increasing taxes to bring NHS spending up to European levels was popular. A failure to learn from the fact that the Global Financial Crisis reflected a lack rather than an excess of government regulation. All these showed at the very least the limitations and dangers of unbridled neoliberalism, yet these lessons were ignored

This intellectual failure didn’t end once the Conservatives were in power. After unjustly blaming, with the invaluable help of their press, immigrants for many of society's problems in opposition, Cameron set up immigration targets he either couldn’t hit or wasn’t willing to hit, yet his party used immigrants as a scapegoat for the effects of austerity. This played into the hands of populist Brexiters, who only had to link immigration to free-movement to make their case. After Brexit it seemed that the exclusive motivation of Conservative MPs became power for power’s sake, exemplified by the election of Boris Johnson. His own moral bankruptcy does not need retelling, although it is worth noting that public money is still being used to defend his lies over Covid partying.

When a government refuses to use our money to pay nurses a decent wage or relieve severe rationing in the health service, but instead spends it on defending the obvious lies of a disgraced former party leader, that is a pretty clear sign of political and moral bankruptcy.

It is true that the Covid pandemic would severely test any government. But the current government, including the current Prime Minister, failed that test repeatedly. Long term planning for a pandemic in the form of stockpiles of equipment was allowed to become useless under austerity. Once the pandemic started, an initial hope that the pandemic could just be ignored led to little contingency planning, yet that hope was scuppered once data arrived. Over the summer of 2020 Sunak championed spending public money that helped create a second wave of infection, and pushed Johnson to listen to a tiny minority of experts who were against lockdowns. Johnson himself, under the influence of some newspaper owners, began to distrust the centuries old methods of dealing with pandemics, so scientific advice was frequently ignored and lockdowns delayed. Tens of thousands died unnecessarily as a result.

If there is one image that sums up the moral bankruptcy of the current Conservative party for me, it is the massed ranks of Conservative MPs in the summer of 2021 sitting on the crowded government benches with hardly a face mask to be seen, even though the government’s own advice at the time was to wear masks in crowded indoor places. It was just like partying in No.10, except it involved nearly all Conservative MPs in an unashamedly public way. Here were our elected representatives putting their own personal convenience, vanity or warped ideology above the interests of those around them, and by implication above the interests of those they represented. The Conservatives have been labelled the nasty party with much justification, but since 2010 they have become a party whose only aim seems to be to look after themselves.

[1] At the end of the day it’s a policy that makes a minority suffer, and a few die, so that some voters can feel happier. The primary responsibility for those policies lies with the politicians that enact them.

[2] For example 'government should get out of the way', reward the 'wealth creators', or 'regulations hold back business'.

The implications of a tipping point in public support for Brexit

 

Labour’s current policy on Brexit is designed to help them win power. There is nothing the government and their press would like more than to suggest Starmer intends to undo Brexit, and so the policy of “making [hard] Brexit work” is tailored to remove any credibility from such a claim. However the moment Labour wins power other considerations come into play.

In power Labour becomes responsible for the health of the economy, and Brexit has undoubtedly brought severe damage to the economy and average incomes. Starmer knows this, which is perhaps why he added “at this stage” when saying joining the Single Market would not help growth. In power he will not be able to avoid two clear truths. The first is that, Northern Ireland Protocol apart, the economic effects of being more cooperative with Europe within the context of Johnson’s hard Brexit are small. The second is that the gains from joining the EU’s customs union and, even more so, their single market are certainly not small, just as the costs of leaving both have not been small.

The dangers of alienating those voters who still identify with Brexit will remain, or more generally worrying those voters who fear that changing the Brexit deal in a fundamental way would paralyse the government just as the Brexit referendum did. However the size of the first group will diminish over time, in part because of simple demographics. The size of the second group will also diminish if Labour manages to handle negotiations with the EU over more minor matters with little fuss.

In addition, as Stephen Bush notes, “a Labour government would free up vast swaths of civic society and lobbying organisations, many of which think that Brexit is a disaster but feel they have to pussyfoot around the topic to remain on Downing Street’s Christmas card list”. I noted two weeks ago that we had passed a turning point, where the costs of Brexit had become so evident that the broadcast media felt compelled to start talking about them. With the focus on a Labour rather than Conservative government, there will be fewer voices defending Johnson’s Brexit deal and many more pointing out its problems.

Indeed, it seems likely that one of the last groups to change their mind on Brexit will be the Conservative party. This, combined with this trend in public opinion away from either believing in Brexit or fearing its modification, means that at some point support for Johnson’s Brexit deal (or something even harder) will become an electoral liability for the Conservatives. As it becomes clearer that Brexit has reduced living standards and held the economy back, an attachment to the policy will be associated with a party that wants to keep the country poorer.

There is therefore a tipping point in public opinion, when suggesting Johnson’s hard Brexit deal needs to be thrown in the dustbin of history no longer becomes a political liability but a political necessity for Labour. Some may think we have already reached that tipping point, but two key factors suggest otherwise. The first is that FPTP helps Brexit supporters, and works against those who want to change Brexit, because the latter are concentrated in cities. The second is that Brexit regret does not necessarily imply a wish to change Johnson’s Brexit deal, because the prospect of reopening the Brexit question reminds many of the three years after the referendum.

It may seem hard to imagine passing this tipping point, because before we get to that tipping point the opposite is true, hence Labour’s current commitment to making Brexit work. But the big Brexit divide cuts both ways, so that when enough voters see Brexit as a mistake that needs a fundamental correction it will become politically advantageous to argue for that correction, and a political liability to oppose this. Then the costs for the Conservatives of championing a policy mainly favoured by the elderly that incurs serious economic costs will finally come home to roost.

Labour are unlikely to reverse their current Brexit policy immediately on taking office. They should instead immediately start discussions with the EU about “making Brexit work”. It is important that such discussions start quietly and without diverting attention from more immediate concerns. It would for the same reason be an obvious political mistake to raise expectations about what such negotiations can achieve, because any economic gains that follow will be small. But the existence of a tipping point for public opinion on Brexit means not only that Labour need to be prepared to switch from making Brexit work to changing Brexit during their time in government, but also that it is in Labour’s interests to do anything it can to hasten the arrival of that tipping point.

The Conservatives ability to tag Miliband’s Labour party with economic incompetence was crucial in winning the 2015 election, and Johnson’s Brexit deal can do the same for a Labour party once it holds power. It is therefore in a Labour government’s interests, assuming we have one in 2025, to be as open and honest as possible about both the economic advantages of the alternative ways of softening a hard Brexit, and also about what is and is not possible in terms of any deals with the EU.

That raises the question as to when Labour should begin to suggest the possibility of going further, which in practice will almost certainly mean rejoining the EU’s customs union and/or single market? Should this happen during Labour’s first term, or its intended second term?

The point at which Labour changes from doing what it can with a hard Brexit to changing Brexit will depend on many things beside the tipping point in public opinion, such as the pressure from domestic events and willingness on the EU side of the table. Two other factors are worth noting here. The first is the likely lag between any agreement (which itself will take time) and the economic benefits that would follow. If one of key reasons for a Labour government to change Brexit would be to benefit the economy and therefore household incomes and public services, the sooner this happens the better.

This suggests moving as quickly as is feasible to join the EU’s customs union. While the economic benefits are probably less than being part of the single market, it would remove some of the paperwork that small businesses in particular find is a barrier to exporting to the EU. It would also provide a good excuse to revise or end the few genuinely new trade deals obtained by Liz Truss, which seem lopsided to the detriment of some UK sectors. There may also be some gains to be made through alignment of standards, cooperation in research etc.

In assessing the likelihood of the UK joining the single market we need to consider a second factor influencing timing, and that is the behaviour of the Conservative party in opposition. If the Labour government benefits from the economic recovery that follows from the current recession, then - as with the last Labour government - the Conservatives will have to focus on social rather than economic issues. Just as with the last Labour government, immigration is likely to be their most effective issue.

Attitudes to immigration have been changing over the last decade, but it remains the most potent social issue among potential Conservative voters. Furthermore, how important those voters feel that immigration is compared to other issues depends a great deal on how much coverage it is given in the Conservative press. That in turn will depend on whether the Conservatives are in power or not. [1] Newspaper stories about immigration or asylum seekers are therefore likely to begin to increase under a Labour government, and public concern will rise along with it.

It is therefore immigration, rather than attitudes to Brexit per se, that is likely to be the main barrier to Labour trying to negotiate membership of the Single Market, because of course that membership requires free movement of labour within that market. The best way Labour have to moderate this Conservative weapon is to move to some form of PR for general elections, for reasons noted above. There may be other means of making free movement politically acceptable, as Peter Kellner suggests here.

None of these arguments guarantees that Labour will or will not try to negotiate to join the Single Market, but they do suggest that negotiations to join the Single Market will be one of the last stages in the long road back from Brexit.

However this should not stop Labour being honest about the economic costs of leaving the EU’s single market, and therefore the benefits of joining. Chris Grey suggests an interesting additional idea, which is that Labour suggests that it would be unwise (or the EU might be unwilling) to consider the UK being part of the Single Market until there is cross-party agreement that this should happen. This would have the political benefit, for Labour, of emphasising the economic costs of the Conservative’s continuing attachment to a hard Brexit.

To summarise, the existence and proximity of a tipping point on public opinion about Brexit means it is important for any Labour government from 2025 to be open and honest about Brexit’s economic costs and what can and cannot be achieved in negotiations. It also means that it is quite possible to see Labour moving beyond ‘making Brexit work’ once they have power, although rejoining the Single Market remains the most difficult move in political terms.

Once the tipping point is passed, believing in a hard Brexit will become a serious political disadvantage for the Conservatives. Yet what is difficult to imagine is how they will escape from what will become a serious drag on their popularity. Johnson and others have made Brexit part of the Conservative party’s DNA. The conditions that make me confident in saying that no Conservative government will change a hard Brexit for at least a decade also make it difficult imagining them renouncing the policy in opposition. Perhaps it will take many years in opposition for MPs, but also crucially party members and the owners of the right wing press, to realise what a liability Brexit support is for them.

[1] The exception was during the Cameron government, but I don’t think it would be overly cynical to say that this had a great deal to do with Brexit, which the press favoured and Cameron did not. The data supports this, with the number of articles mentioning immigration rising rapidly from 2013 until 2016.

Why Voting under FPTP should always be tactical

 

Ever since I can remember, I have advocated tactical voting. This post tries to make that argument in the context of different motivations for voting. As this is not my area of expertise please let me know of anything I have missed.  

Why do people vote? Do we vote in an instrumental way to (help) achieve some outcome, or do we vote in an expressive way to say (often just to ourselves) something about our own views. From my own experience in talking to people, many do vote in an expressive way. Even where the effective choice in a First Past The Post (FPTP) seat is between just two parties (X and Y), and where the voter happily acknowledges that on all counts X is a better choice than Y on all issues they care about (X>Y), you will often hear people say that they still couldn’t vote for X because of their policy on one particular issue. It doesn’t seem to matter that Y has the same policy as X, they nevertheless choose either not to vote at all, or vote for another party that doesn’t have that particular policy, rather than vote for X, even though X>Y and only X or Y can win

This attitude makes little sense (but see below) if voting is instrumental, but does make sense if voting is expressive. There was an even more extreme case of this in the last UK General Election, where some people suggested to me that they couldn’t vote for Labour because Labour was not formally in favour of continuing EU membership, or they didn’t trust Corbyn on Brexit. They would vote LibDem or some other party instead, even if they were in a marginal Lab/Con constituency. It was more extreme because it was almost inevitable that Brexit would happen if Johnson won, while it was far from inevitable that it would happen if Johnson didn’t win, even if, as I suggested here, Labour got an overall majority. In this case people were voting in a way that, from an instrumental point of view, would make them worse off.

Expressive voting is one reason why it makes sense for the opposition parties under FPTP to not field candidates in seats they have no chance of winning in the next election. Even if the parties cooperate informally, there is nothing stopping expressive voters voting for the party closest to their own views even when that party has no chance of winning. I’ve seen it argued that such actions by political parties are bad because it ‘reduces voters choice’, but in reality it only reduces the choice of expressive voters. Unsurprisingly, as most party members are likely to be instrumental in their attitudes, most Labour members (e.g see this poll) would favour not putting up candidates in seats where doing so might split the anti-Tory vote. From an instrumental point of view, this majority is entirely correct.

Instrumental voting is very different from expressive voting. If voting is instrumental, it makes sense for your vote to have some purpose beyond self statement, which usually means voting for party X even if you don’t agree with everything X stands for, simply because the realistic choice is between X and Y and you prefer X to Y. In most cases (but see below) instrumental voters will vote tactically, because that is the most effective way of using their vote.

However instrumental voting is subject to a problem that is often called the ‘paradox of voting’. The problem is the chances that your vote influences the outcome are negligible. To use the language of economics which is quite descriptive, the voter is ‘small’ relative to the electorate in a constituency, so their own vote is hardly ever critical in deciding the result. The ‘paradox of voting’ could also be called the insignificance of the individual voter argument, where insignificance means very small indeed. Note that this paradox only applies to instrumental voting, and not expressive voting.

I remember one General Election trying to persuade someone to vote LibDem in a LibDem/Con marginal. They objected that it was a waste of their time because their vote would be insignificant, but they did it just to please me. The LibDem candidate ended up winning by 10 votes. I triumphantly said to the person I had persuaded to vote, look your vote did matter, to only be told that if they hadn’t voted the LibDem candidate would still have won by 9 votes, so it was they who had been proved right.

Instrumental voting can be rescued from this insignificance paradox by talking about the payoff from your side winning. If the benefit to you of the party you vote for winning is sufficiently large, this can offset in expected benefit terms the very low possibility of your vote being decisive. However that is not the route I want to go down. Instead I have a more fundamental problem with the paradox of voting.

The insignificance of the individual voter argument casts voting in individualistic, expected utility terms. I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Voting is instead a social activity. We can see that quite simply from the fact that large numbers of people do vote in an instrumental way, despite their individual insignificance, so either they are being irrational or there is something else going on. As economists like to think that most people are not irrational I think we can conclude that something else is going on.

You can see why there is a social norm that we should try and vote from imagining a contest between two parties, one of which had rational policies and the other had irrational policies. Rational people prefer the rational party and vice versa. As most people are rational, the rational party should win, but if all rational people decided it was irrational to vote because of the paradox of voting, the irrational party would win, and the rational people would be worse off. Whilst the insignificance of the individual voter argument works for the individual alone, it does not generalise to society. [1] It may not make sense voting as an individual, but as part of society (or as a member of a class) it certainly does. There is evidence that most people do see it as a social duty to vote.

Seen in this light, as I think it should, expressive voting becomes a rather selfish act when voting is done secretly. You vote to make yourself feel better about yourself, rather than for the good of society as a whole. It also follows that we should vote for the party that would make society (or a group of that society like a class) as a whole better, rather than voting for the party that would make ourselves individually better off. This is because the latter is voting based on the outcome for one individual, where the paradox of voting still applies.

If we should vote instrumentally to make society (in our personal view) better, then it almost follows automatically that tactical voting under FPTP is the only sensible way to vote. By the same logic, you will often, under FPTP, end up voting for the lesser evil, because even if there is a party you could vote for that is better than the lesser evil, voting for it will be a wasted vote because that party cannot win. If you don’t like voting for the lesser evil that probably means either you prefer expressive voting or you don’t like FPTP systems..

Why do I say that it almost follows automatically? There are two common arguments against voting tactically, which in particular (and I would say pretty exceptional) circumstances are valid. The first arises from voting being a repeated activity (a repeated game). This brings in the possibility that voting one way today may influence our choice in the next election. Suppose X>Y, but X is still pretty awful, and if X lost this time it might be replaced by Z, where Z>X>Y and Z was a lot better than X. In those circumstances the best social choice might be to allow X to lose, because it would allow Z to emerge next time (see here).

This is a way you can try and rationalise why some of those on the right of the Labour party, for example, might have worked to enable Corbyn to lose in 2019, because they believed that would allow a much better Labour party to emerge from the ashes of his defeat that wouldn’t have emerged if Labour had won.

The problems with this argument come from both the many ifs involved and from the present sacrifice made (party Y gets to rule badly for 5 years). The many ifs include whether defeat for X does lead to Z, and whether Z would have happened even if X had won, and that Z will win against Y in 5 years time. (The problems are intensified if during that 5 years party Y changes the rules of the game to make a future victory for Z less likely.) The argument has some similarities to accelerationism, which argues that the best way to achieve a 'good society' in the future is to intensify rather than try to ameliorate the current bad features of society. In my view it’s an argument that is not always wrong, but most of the time it is. On the particular example of the Labour right and Corbyn, I think the cost of a hard Brexit should pretty well dominate any perceived advantages that the Labour right might have imagined getting their party back might involve.

A second argument against tactical voting goes like this. If voters make their vote for party X conditional on X adopting some policy, then voters have some power over policy. If instead they always vote for X, they have no power. However, for this power to have any credible influence on party X, individuals have to be prepared not to vote for X if X doesn’t adopt their policy. It then becomes an argument like the one above but related to individual policies rather than party leadership or complete parties. (Because people didn’t vote for X because of some policy, X does badly and is forced to adopt the policy in the next election.)

The main problem with this argument is credibility: on most issues most voters for X will not be prepared to carry out the threat of not voting for X if they don’t get their way. For that reason most of the time those that do make this threat will be ignored. Equally there are very few issues where enough people can make common cause to pose a sufficient threat to X. But just occasionally the argument might work if the issue is central enough, voters feel strongly enough and they have a means to demonstrate the threat. The run up to the 2019 election provides one possible example, where the policy was Labour’s position on a second referendum. Voters who would normally vote for Labour voted against them in local and EU elections, and threatened to not vote for them in general election polls, and this did change Labour’s policy on a second referendum, for better or worse.

Putting these two exceptions against tactical voting aside, I want to end by saying something about responsibility. If voting is a social norm or duty, then with that goes the idea of responsibility for outcomes. (I’m indebted to @spinninghugo for thinking about this, although he has no responsibility for my current views!) If we go back to my example of people who voted LibDem (say) in a Lab/Con marginal because they didn’t trust Corbyn on Brexit, in what sense if any are they responsible for what Johnson’s government subsequently did?

The first and obvious point is that they share that responsibility with everyone who didn’t vote tactically against the Conservatives in 2019, and those who voted for the Conservatives have a greater responsibility. However pointing this out does not avoid the issue of responsibility. To see why, imagine someone was murdered by 100 people, each of whom struck once with a dagger. You would certainly say that each of the 100 was responsible for the death of the victim, and the fact that ‘he would have died anyway even if I hadn’t been one of the 100’ doesn’t absolve anyone of their responsibility for the murder. Suppose you were not one of the 100, but had the opportunity of trying to prevent the murder, but had chosen not to. You too would have some responsibility for allowing the murder to happen. It remains the case that anyone who didn’t vote tactically against the Conservatives in 2019 remains in some small way partly responsible for things the Conservative government did that Labour would not have done.

In contrast, as tactical voting is the choice of the lesser evil, it is not the case that the voter is responsible (among millions) for everything the winning party does. Instead they are just responsible for what the winning party does differently from the only credible alternative party (X-Y in implemented policy space, if that helps).

What the only credible alternative party would have done is a counterfactual, so it allows people to try and avoid responsibility by making claims about that counterfactual. It is why, for example, those who supported the Conservatives in 2019 like to make the unlikely claim that a Corbyn led government would have been even worse than a Johnson et al government, because otherwise they would bear some responsibility for the mess we are currently in. The fact that people make such incredible claims shows that the idea that voting is a choice we should be responsible for has some force. 

[1] To drill down a little more, the paradox of voting assumes that your action of not voting is peculiar to you, and will not be followed by anyone else. If instead you assume that other people will make the same calculation as you do, then you would want to vote to avoid the irrational party always winning. More generally social norms that voting is part of being a good citizen can be seen as a social response to the paradox of voting.

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