Rejection, not apathy

In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee considers the results of the latest Hansard Society Audit of Political Engagement [PDF] - which found that UK citizens were overwhelmingly disengaged from politics to the extent that only 53% of them plan to vote - and asks the obvious question: how has this happened, and why don't people vote anymore. She also gets the answer right: because it doesn't matter. With no real difference between the major parties, and a political system which denies real choice, they no longer have anything worth voting for:

When people shut the door on canvassers saying, "You're all the same", they're not wrong in these strange political times. Give them clear choices and they'll come out and choose, otherwise they will sit at home and sulk, rightly sensing politics is a Westminster stitch-up with the parties fighting over the same shrinking piece of all-things-to-all-people centre ground.

Those most likely to vote are the old - 78% of the over-65s. Is that because they are dutiful citizens? No, it is because they have deeper affiliations stretching back to the days when parties did stand for identifiably distinct values. Above all, parties stood for different class and economic interests. Them-and-us was spelled out loud and clear: whose side are you on, who stands up for people like us?

There is no united British civic interest, except in matters of national security. There is as clear a difference in economic interest now as ever there was: indeed it is getting stronger. Twenty years ago, FTSE chief executives earned 17 times the pay of their workers, now they earn 75 times more. But no party has anything to say about that, none daring not to be the party of the rich. Yet great economic divides are there: the median earners on £22,000 and below are 50% of the voters - but that's a bit less than MPs get as expenses for running their second homes. So much gold dust is kicked in the nation's eyes by scores of TV programmes selling property beyond most people's imagining, or celebrity handbags costing thousands, that the delusion that most people are affluent has entered Labour's lexicon and even its soul. Labour needs a coalition of interests - but not to deny those interests.

Disgruntlement with politics may not express itself as a question of class, but it is the job of politicians to articulate people's strong if inchoate feelings, to crystallise ideas and describe society as it is. If they pretend that Britain is one great homogenous affluent bloc, with a few dysfunctional poor people to be sorted out, they sell a warped picture of the way we live now - and, instinctively, voters know it.

Looking through the Hansard Society's report bears this out. Those least likely to vote - at only 34% - are the poor, who aren't really represented by any party at the moment, and the young, who have witnessed with their own eyes how little difference it makes (having seen a government elected to end Thatcherism merrily continue it as if nothing had happened - and then engage in an illegal war of aggression overwhelmingly rejected by its own voters). As a result, fewer people every year believe that their involvement can make a difference - and the number of people who actively disagree with this is growing. It's not apathy the British political system is facing - it's rejection.

Faced with this, the proposed shift to preferential voting seems inadequete. Yes, it's an improvement, but not enough of one, and designed clearly to give a veneer of democracy to the current cosy oligarchy. What people want is real choice,and they're not going to get it with a system which squashes out minority voices and prevents new parties from rising. To get that, they need proper European-style proportional representation.