Election 2015: don’t be fooled – this election matters to your money

published 29 April 2015

150429-election — Don't make the mistake of thinking your vote doesn't count

It's easy to be cynical about politics. And it gets a lot easier during election campaigns.

Every new day brings a new headline promise. Rent controls! No tax hikes before 2020! Fine the banks to pay apprentices!

But don't make the mistake of thinking "they're all the same", or that your vote doesn't count.

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Each outcome could have a very different effect on your finances.

It's just a shame that it's impossible to tell at this point which it'll be

The polls are so close that every individual seat could matter

We might get a Conservative-led government. We might get a Labour-led government. Or maybe the outcome will be so indecisive that we'll end up with another election later this year.

Each of those possible combinations takes us down a different path. And it could boil down to a matter of individual seats.

And what makes it even trickier is that while it's pretty clear that either the Tories or Labour will be in the driving seat, the particular mix of politicians who are backing them will make a big difference to policy-making and stability.

For example, a Tory/Lib Dem combo might sound like more of the same, but not if it's reliant on support from Ukip, say. And a Labour majority is very different to a Labour minority dependent on the co-operation of an awkward-squad SNP which in truth, is no more a natural ally of the Labour party than of the Tories.

And then there's the threat of another messy election later in the day. That's a whole other ballgame.

Some people argue that political gridlock is a good thing. They're usually thinking of the US, where two parties locked in mutual loathing regularly end up with sufficient support that they can scupper each other's plans.

However, that sort of gridlock comes with certainty it's going to last until the next election or until the two sides make some sort of peace. It's a stable sort of gridlock.

Britain's different. For a start, we're not used to that sort of uncertainty. For another, power is rather more centralised in Britain than in the US. Finally, it would be a short-lived sort of gridlock more an extended repeat election campaign.

We've already seen the parties make increasingly desperate and more radical promises the closer we get to polling day. Imagine how much more noisy and confusing they'd become in the run-up to a re-run.

I'm not interested in telling you who to vote for you'll ignore me, and rightly so. What I am trying to say is that there are pretty clear differences between the various outcomes. And each will have a very different effect on your finances. But there's no way of knowing who'll win.

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.