It's that time of year again folks - voting time. Hearing about these elections, however unimportant they may seem, set my brain ticking, and harking back to around this time last year, as the UK approached the biggy - the General Election, which led to the Marmite Coalition, that one you love or hate. It wasn't the the parties I started pondering though, or the government that was made. It was the real 'Kingmakers' (to quote what Nick Clegg loved saying he wasn't last year); the public, each individual voter that has the power to make or break a candidate. And specifically, it related to their perceived apathy towards politics.
Political apathy is often thrown accusatorily as young people; young people don't care about their country, they'd rather listen to rap music and mug grannies. The kind of stuff we're getting to used to being told about ourselves. Only last year in particular, and in the previous election for MEPs, this accusation of apathy spread out from young people and was applied to the wider population. Controversially, head neo-Black Shirt Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, was elected as an MEP, yet his party had actually received less votes in that particular election than they had in the previous European Parliament elections. And so the public was blamed; if more people hadn't been so uncaring and bothered to go and vote, Nick Griffin would probably not have got in. And it's true, and I was and am among the ranks of those who wish more people had voted, if only to stop the BNP; not because Griffin will really be able to achieve anything in his position, but because it gives them credibility as a serious political party, rather than just the National Front in suits.
However, I now dispute that the lack of voters then and in last year's General Election was due to vote apathy. I didn't realise it at the time, but it's come to me more recently, as my mood has shifted. I admit, I am a paid-up member of the Labour party (albeit only because I could join for £1), but my loyalty towards them is beginning to dwindle. Only it isn't being replaced by a growing affection for any other party. The truth is, none of the mainstream parties (or any of the others, really) appeal to me; none seem to have policies in line with my views and beliefs, and on a much more basic scale, none seem very nice. Politics seems to be full of sniping, back-stabbing and vitriol thinly veiled behind sentiments of "the right honourable gentleman". The House of Commons on Prime Minister's questions day may look like a bunch of school children waving paper at each other, but there is an undeniable dark undercurrent, that's often not actually that far under the surface.
And so the disullusionment set in, with Labour, with all parties, with politics in general. I began to wonder what the point was, thinking that no matter what I did or how I voted, nothing would be different, nothing would change. If a snap election was called tomorrow, I honestly wouldn't know who to vote for. And if you don't really want to vote for anyone, what do you do? You don't vote at all.
It isn't the nicest concept to consider; democracy is certainly not something to be taken for granted, not when people have died - and continue to die, around the world - in the struggle to gain the right to vote for their leaders. But it is undeniable, and a hard thing to overcome. Last year, my mother, who had been a staunch Labour voter all her life and who comes from a very socialist family, voted Lib Dem. A strange choice, considering the Lib Dem candidate had barely even bothered to campaign in our constituency. Perhaps it was one of those protest votes, a lot of people were doing. It certainly wasn't out of any desire to for the Lib Dems to get power; when I asked her why she'd crossed that particular box, she simply replied "I don't want any of them." The conclusion to draw from that seems to be that she knew the Lib Dems stood no chance of winning here, so she voted for them simply to be able to exercise her right to.
Political parties, the media and all sorts are running campaigns trying to get people more interested in politics, to care. However, I believe that people do care, and it's because they care that they feel stuck in such a quandry and even unable to vote. Political parties need to stop trying to score cheap points of each other and get back to what's important; instead of thinking the way to win votes is to point out the flaws in the opposition, they need to win people round to their own fine points. People will listen, people want to be involved, but not until politics and the people involved in it change.
