NOT VOTING

My friend and occasional blogger “Hoppy” got annoyed enough last week to take to his keyboard and write a very well argued piece about why everyone really ought to take the time and make the effort to vote in any and all of the democratic elections which we are lucky enough to be allowed to have in this allegedly “free” country we live in. If you get a moment, click on this link (http://thehoppyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/death-of-democracy.html) and have a look, because he makes a lot of very good points, none of which I could either add to or argue with, even though the nature of “democracy” has taken a bit of a battering lately with what some of our more self-serving MPs did with their expenses, and with the amount of integrity that seems to have been thrown away by the prospect of having even the merest sniff of a chance of power…

However, with all that in mind, I have to hold up my hand and confess that, in the end, I didn’t actually end up voting in the PCC Elections, which means that, whatever happens, I suppose that I can’t really complain at the outcome, and this is coming from me who has been terribly and tediously “vocal” about the reasons people “ought to” vote on numerous previous occasions.

Not that anyone really takes my opinions on anything all that seriously, but at least I used to try, even if it always seemed as if I was only talking to myself…

It’s amazing what it is that can persuade us back to the keyboard in order to get a few thoughts off our collective chests, although, like with many other things, I’m sure that the rumours of the “death” of democracy have been greatly exaggerated, even if it’s struggling a little at the moment.

Mind you, because of that confession above, perhaps I don’t have much right to explain myself, but, because we do live in a democratic nation (no thanks to me…) I am able to explain myself anyway, and explain the reasons why, for the first time in my adult life, I didn't actually take part in an election I was eligible to vote in.

My bad.

Ironically, and despite the fact that I did actually turn up to vote on that occasion, the only other election that I failed to vote in was the 1997 Labour landslide. I’d moved house that year and, for some reason, I managed to slip off the Electoral Register that year without even noticing, so that my name simply wasn’t on the list, much to my own personal despair. I stayed up half the night to see the results coming in that night, too, but I couldn’t claim any personal involvement in the first genuine sea-change in hue of the government I was living under in my entire adult life that far.

I did, of course, have my reasons, this time around, as I’m sure, many others felt they did too, although I’m starting to feel a bit bad about it now. Granted, I’d already left for work when the polling stations opened on that icy November morning, and, because of the way the day was organised, it was well after eight-thirty at night before I was heading homewards having done my evening run to the railway station, but it was still open at that time, and it wouldn’t have been all that difficult to park up and pop in for a couple of minutes, and even though I had managed to do some  “last-minute” research that day, neither of us felt that we knew enough about it to be able to make a calm and rational decision instead of taking a rather more random “what the hell” approach…

Perhaps the main problem was that when the polling cards turned up, this was the very first I’d heard about the elections themselves, despite them being a cornerstone of a manifesto that I was never likely to have paid all that much attention to. Those polling cards were also the very last paperwork we received about it as well, so we kind of kept on forgetting that it was actually happening. When I finally was reminded, it was simply because someone mentioned it on the radio as I was driving to work that day, and the five candidates I was able to track down on the internet at lunchtime seemed to be a very dismal bunch, none of whom inspired any confidence really.

Three were very “party political” and the other two were “independents” one of whom didn’t actually seem as if he thought the whole thing was a very good idea, and the other of whom looked as if he was trying rather too hard to appeal to the “yoof” vote in his open-necked plaid shirt. The three “officially backed” candidates all explained in their brief paragraphs that they were either the sort of “businessman” I would cross several streets to avoid engaging with, someone from UKIP (’nuff said…), or someone who seemed far more interested in telling the electorate how many children and grandchildren he had than in telling us what he had in mind.

The “granddad” won in the end, so maybe that kind of campaigning is the most effective if you’re looking for the “family” vote…?

Perhaps I ought really to have been paying more attention, not least because households like mine, which live in the crispy bits at the very edges of the cornflake that is the catchment area of our constabulary, at the edges of the rim, are seldom approached for our opinions about anything very much. More often than not we find that we are ineligible for support from certain official bodies which are just a couple of miles away but in another authority’s area, and instead get referred to “our” version of the same thing which might be based somewhere half a county away or sometimes as far away as Greater Birmingham. This happens with things like bus services, ambulance services, hospital trusts and more esoteric things like Arts grants, but is equally problematical if you ring up and need the assistance of a constable with some urgency.

This might be because with us being so close to the boundaries, several of the surrounding authorities would rather consider us to be “somebody else’s problem” it would seem, which kind of really means that I ought to have paid more attention. After all, if none of us could be bothered about what happens to us, why on Earth should they…?

I did, however, enjoy taking part in this little exchange which took place on FizzBok on the day of the vote:-

CN: One of my PCC candidates says he will ‘ensure that the anti-social neighbour and the local yob know the police will stop them from terrorising our communities.’ I hope these two people have been suitably warned.

MAWH: I finally remembered this was happening and, because we’ve had absolutely no information at all about our local election, went and looked up who our five actually are, and what a dismal bunch they turned out to be. One of them seemed to be most interested in telling the world how many grandchildren he has (which I’m sure will be the most important aspect of the job), but he had one of those faces which ought never to be photographed smiling, so he’s off the list. As are the other four, apparently...

CN: Sounds like you have a pretty similar selection to us. I also couldn’t bring myself to vote for the one with the moustache who is going to improve safety on the ‘busses’.

MAWH: There's one who looks a bit like Michael Emerson on “Person of Interest” who looks like the least worst option, but I would still worry about his secret super computer and what he might do with it...

CN: That could indeed be a worry. I hope he will use his super computer to tackle the local yob.

MAWH: To be fair, if there’s only the one, and he (or she) is THAT well known, it shouldn’t take a super computer to track them down... You see...? It’s saving us all money already...!

CN: Another little gem: ‘For the first time ever, one person will be responsible for policing and crime.’

MAWH: You mean... they’re putting the yob in charge...?

CN: It seems so. I think his name was Lex Luthor.

MAWH: or Professor James Moriarty...?

“X” MARKS THE SPOT

I had a strange experience on voting day last week. I don’t mean something particularly constitutionally or legally unusual or anything of that sort. There were no electoral shenanigans that I was aware of, nor undue pressures being put upon me by lurking strangers in shiny suits or anything like that. I was  just the experience itself that led to me having to have a little bit of a leap of imagination and left me having to rethink a few of my thoughts on the electoral system of which I am usually such a proud and (literally) stout defender of.

I recent years, due to other commitments and the vagaries of the public transport network timings, the beloved and I have been known to be standing outside our polling station as it opened up in the morning, rather giving the officials, I fear, the idea that maybe they were in for something of a busy old day. This time, however, our Thursday was not going to be nearly so busy and so we decided that we would risk the huge queues and do our voting duties on our way home from work. So, in the late evening, under the gathering clouds, we pulled up outside in our car on our way back from the station and prepared to wait in line amongst the hordes of voters.

We were still the only ones there. I asked the official if they’d had a busy day and they said not really as there were only two hundred or so actual voters listed for that particular polling station. Given the massive queues we witnessed on the news during the last general election I had to conclude that this was either way below the average number for an individual polling station, or that turning up five minutes before they are due to close is a terribly bad idea.

Anyway, the pleasantries over, and our identities confirmed, we were handed our voting slips and headed off to those strange wooden temporary structures that we have to vote in and the democratic process was about to be duly executed when something strange happened. I looked at the tiny bit of paper I’d been given and there were only three names upon it. Now, you might think that there’s nothing unusual in that given that we have three main political parties in this great nation of ours, but the strange thing was that the three names were not the ones you would usually expect to find there. Granted two of them were, but, given the fact that both of those parties were currently in power nationally and pursuing policies that I was not entirely in favour of, and that the third was a party usually considered to be one of the “fringe” parties at best, I did start to wonder quite what had happened to the main opposition in my area to make them think that it wasn’t even worth showing up.

I was suddenly left in a bit of a quandary with regards to my decision of who to actually cast my vote for, and this had never actually happened to me before. I was so nonplussed that I almost went back to ask whether I’d been given a damaged voting slip and was thinking about it very seriously except I suddenly realised that I vaguely remembered seeing one of the slips pinned to the door as I had come in, and that had had only had three names on it, so I decided that this was probably how things were meant to be and cast my vote accordingly, which might just help one day to (partly) explain a slight blip in the statistics for Lesser Blogfordshire for any unlikely future historical researchers.

Another strange experience during the process of exercising my democratic rights was the rare opportunity of voting in a referendum. This is the very first time in my life that I had had the chance to do so because, despite my great age, the only previous time it had happened, I was not old enough to vote (believe it or not…).

Afterwards, as we skipped merrily back to the car, the beloved and I discussed our various experiences of this unusual day’s voting and she asked me a very pertinent question about the pertinent question of the referendum. She’d decided how she wanted to vote, of course, but in a “yes/no” situation it’s always wise to read the wording of the question just to make sure that you weren’t being tricked by a devious political mind. I’ve seen the “House of Cards” trilogy and “The Thick of It”, I know how shifty these people can be.

Unfortunately this was the moment at which I realised that I hadn’t actually read the question. Having read most of the literature I had received, I already knew how I wanted to vote, which side of the fence I had chosen to sit upon, and which box I intended to put my own particular cross in before I entered the booth. I’d thought about it, considered all my options and come to my conclusion and headed into the polling station having set my jaw and some of my chins determinedly in a way those old-fashioned heroes of the pulp stories of the early twentieth century might have been proud of. It never crossed my mind that the question might have been written with a little bit of reverse psychology and that it might have turned out to be one of those tricky little situations where “yes” might mean “no” or “no” might mean “yes”.

You know the sort of thing; “Do you, a wise and altogether clever and understanding sort of a chap, think that changing the voting system would be a terrifically bad idea?’ Answering “yes” when you might have meant “no” to that (or vice versa) might have skewed the results a tad, I feel.

Tricky stuff.

Still, it turns out that things were less complicated than that and in this case “yes” meant “yes” and “no” meant “no” and everybody seemed to understand that, it seems. Although it did give me that ‘tricky’ moment of doubt as we strolled away happy in the knowledge that our duty had been done. Other people, I suspect, found the day less satisfying, which tends to be the way with these things. For every one person who finds an election turns out as they had hoped, there’ll be another who is deeply dissatisfied with it. Mind you, I still think that, once the results were all in the following day, it must have been rather strange to find yourself living in one of those very few boroughs that voted against the trend set by the rest of the country. “How could everyone else be so out of touch with us and what we think?” the Islington chattering classes and the intellectuals of Oxbridge might very well have been asking each other around their dining tables last weekend, “How could everyone else be so wrong?” when maybe they should have been thinking that 69% of those who voted in these various conjoined countries may very well have disagreed with them for a reason. That said, there were 31% of people who voted across the country who were in favour but lived in boroughs where more people were not, so maybe I am being a tad uncharitable there.

It’s too early to tell, of course, whether these decisions will turn out to be the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ones, but when certain boroughs end up having to toss a coin to decide who runs their council, or the percentages of the margin of victory in a referendum can be 0.01%, it does rather show the lie in that pathetic old argument from people who choose not to vote because they think that it doesn’t make any difference whether they do or not. Sometimes we all need to be reminded how many sacrifices have been made through the years to give ordinary people like us the opportunity to vote and it does seem rather disrespectful not to do so. I really don’t care how anyone actually chooses to cast their vote, just so long as they actually do turn up and cast it, but then I’m old-fashioned about things like that because I have a great deal of respect for the history that has led to giving us the freedoms that we do sometimes seem to take too much for granted.

So, no matter how tricky the choice can sometimes be, especially if there seems to be no real choice at all, next time make sure you go and put that “X” in the little box of your choice, because 48% of those who had the option to vote chose not to do so last week which is a bit of a shame when you come to think about it, and if all of those people had been in the ‘alternative’ camp, which is statistically unlikely I know, then the result could have been very different indeed. These things do matter, you know…