However much you check yourself against groupthink, we all swim in the same ocean and meet the same fish. Between the sight of a triumphant Nigel Farage parading around Clacton, the drip, drip effect of vox pops saying all politicians are the same and the spectre of far-right victories in Europe, I missed one minor detail: I’m really excited about the election. All this work, furiously managing my own expectations, worrying about the future, muttering about Labour and its timidity, and I haven’t extinguished the delight. Whichever way you cut it, we seem on the brink of getting rid of the Tory government. The sound of them on the radio, audible defeat cutting through the habituated pomposity; some day soon, we won’t have to wake up to that.
Polls can’t decide how large Labour’s majority will be, and people talk airily about “supermajorities”, when the phrase has no meaning in British politics. You either have a majority and are golden or you are Theresa May, and are not. Yet as sceptical as I am about almost all predictions, I am picturing a Labour win, and there is a non-negligible chance that the Lib Dems become the party of opposition.
God knows I won’t be voting for Ed Davey, however fun it is to watch him fall off things, and no, I’m not wild about the fact that – by any conventional measure – the Lib Dems now stand to the left of Labour. There are problems coming down the track related to, if I can borrow the phrase, the mess the Conservatives have created. The bolder promises of Labour’s manifesto, certainly the ones that cost anything, will need a lot of luck. But we will have a governing party, for the first time in years, that sides explicitly with workers over capital; that pledges to end zero-hours contracts and eradicate precariousness.
The opposition, meanwhile – in my dream-but-not-impossible scenario – explicitly sides with carers and just will not tolerate that harsh and hostile Tory drumbeat, where disabled people are slackers who could perfectly well work if only someone found the right incentive. Whatever Labour and the Lib Dems promise, however much of it they meet, whatever they don’t say that you wish they would, pause for a second to imagine a world in which we are not singing from a Conservative hymn sheet; a world in which there are barely enough of their MPs to even make a serviceable choir.
Separate to party and policy, it has always been hard to get excited in a first-past-the-post system, where you feel at best like a tiny fragment of a victorious side that could have done it with or without you, at worst like a powerless husk. When I interview people about their voting history, they often say: “I have to vote tactically, because …” with the same tone: a tangible, though not seismic, dejectedness at having been part of getting or keeping a party out, but not really getting their guy in. But tactical voting is very 1997; 2024 is all about the vote swap. Basically, if your heart is with a party that doesn’t have a hope, you can swap your vote for someone’s in a place where it does. You can create a miniature parallel world where proportional representation has already been brought in, and your vote matters.
The rightwing commentariat was in a stew at the weekend, mostly about younger voters: how dare they think politics should be able to make their lives better? So entitled, way too woke; why can’t they just submit to getting economically drop-kicked from every direction, and like it? I cannot wait until that is impossible; until you simply cannot be a serious person and write off an entire demographic because of its low vote yield.
I am not without concern about what comes next. I lack the deep conviction that things can only get better. But I remember how it felt last time, sloughing off a Conservative government after 18 years. It felt great.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
