Standing Against Davis is Political Suicide
ppbarrett Mon Jun 16, 2008 at 11:07:55 AM GMT 
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We should not stand a candidate against David Davis as doing so will not be to the benefit of the party nor the electorate.
But what will happened if we stand?
First off, we will lose. No question about it. The electorate will not treat this as a referendum on the 42-day detention legislation, this will be, as in all elections where a parliamentary representative is elected, about wider issues, on which, in this Tory-Liberal seat, we have not only no history of winning, we have no history of coming close.
How will our defeat be portrayed? This Tory seat is being elevated by the press as the battleground for 42-days, and by standing in it, we only further add to its credibility as a real contest, and further contribute to the depth of our defeat. The fact this is just a semi-rural seat in Yorkshire will be ignored, everyone will forget Labour polled only 13% of the vote 3 years ago – it will be made out that we were crushed by the electorate on the basis of our unpopular authoritarian agenda.
What will a defeat mean? We lose even more credibility as a governing party. We look (more) unpopular, we look (even more) like losers and we further slip away from the possibility of our ‘historic’ fourth term. Moreover, we hand credibility to our opponents and we hand credibility to the egocentric, attention-seeking antics of David Davis. Where he once could have been dismissed as wasting everyone’s time, we are now flirting with the possibility of making him a martyr for the libertarian cause. In party political terms, standing in the by-election will only keep this issue at the fore, when it would otherwise disappear into obscurity. The longer this issue remains the focus of the media, the more we stand out to lose from it – we become increasingly branded as the ‘authoritarian party’ (and conversely, the Tories benefit from being branded as the ‘libertarian party’) and we allow a contentious issue to dominate the political agenda, preventing us from moving on - ideally to something more progressive.
Whether we stand or do not stand, we will lose on both counts, but more heavily if we chose the former. The merits of standing do not really surpass the clichés of representation, a fact which will be quickly lost in the media coverage of the by-election. Can you honestly see the men and women of H & H saying ‘I usually vote Tory or Liberal, but good on Labour for standing like they stood in 2005, I may even lend them my vote’? We gain no credibility from standing, we gain no kudos for doing what we do anyway, we only strengthen our opponents and further compound our decline.
If we do not stand, we may well go back on our principles of seeking universal representation, but is this not an exceptional circumstance? We will obviously return in 2010 in as unassailable position as we left it in 2008 – we lose nothing. And what to accusations of cowardice and treating the electorate with contempt? Yes, there is a possibility that we could be labelled as cowards, but by whom? David Davis? I could not care less what he thinks, and I do not really think much of the electorate do either. As for treating them with contempt, that is a risk, but I would endorse the view that we stand to lose much more from standing and lending credibility to our opponents than we do from being viewed as treating the electorate with contempt. By not standing, but moving-on, by pushing forward with the legislative agenda, not only do we make Davis look like a fool, but the more likely it is that news will move on, and people will forget, lest care, that we never stood.
Standing is political suicide – we lend credibility to our opponents, we turn a capital-punishment advocate into a libertarian hero, we turn a semi-rural Tory seat into the nation’s focus group on 42-days and we further contribute to our degeneration into a defeated party.
