Democracy: The May 4th Movement

Every vote cast is an investment, every vote won is a victory

In the last local elections just under 36% of potential voters went to the polls. The other 64% evidently could not find a convincing answer to the question ‘Why bother?’ Town halls, after all, don’t do much more than collect the bins, and even that they don’t do particularly well.

Three reasons, then, to vote.

First, your vote is not a ‘consumer item’. Almost all political commentary encourages you to believe that in voting you are making a consumer choice. Your vote will bring satisfaction or not, depending on whether ‘your party’ wins or loses. If this is how you view it, you are probably more at home in William Hill than in the voting booth. When the votes are counted, you can at least tear up your betting slip, your vote ‘wasted’.

But voting is not a consumer moment, it’s an investment, a cost made as a necessary down-payment on preferred future outcomes. Your vote cannot be wasted because one way or another, it changes the future. Democracy is always to some extent costly to the voter, so acknowledge that and . . . invest.

Second, it’s becoming painfully clear that local governments are making choices which go far beyond doing the bins. The planning committees alone are making choices which will ramify on to flooding and water quality. The transport committee may quite possibly be planning to make car ownership more costly and your travel choices more restrictive. The council will make choices which will affect how many homeless are on the streets, how much fly-tipping goes on, whether graffiti-litter gets cleaned or celebrated, what priorities the local police are holding to, what’s happening in your schools.

Third, if the electorate doesn’t make choices on these matters, unaccountable others will and do.

Tony Benn suggested you should ask the following five questions of those with executive power:

1. What power have you got?

2. Where did you get it from?

3. In whose interests do you use it?

4. To whom are you accountable?

5. How do we get rid of you?

(The great fault-line running through Tony Benn’s political career was that although he got these questions absolutely right, he despaired that ‘representative democracy’ could provide the answers. In that political gap in the line, he met the thuggish non-democratic revolutionary types.)

If your local authority occupies its offices on a 36% vote, is there any surprise that unelected and unelectable special interest groups get to control the answers to at least 3) and 4), often by persuading those in power than they can have an outsize influence on 2) and 5). The correct answers to Tony Benn’s five questions are this:

1. Limited by voters

2. Voters

3. Voters

4. Voters

5. Voting

So to all the SDP candidates, organizers, door-knockers, leafleteers, support staff, contributors . . . thank you. On May 4 some of you, I hope, will hold the faith of the local electorate in your hands. Treasure it, and serve it. Probably more of you will return home to a life unchanged except for the knowledge of the effort you put in. But do not mistake that for failure: you have already changed the future. You have invested, and others have invested with you.