And still they come … another mySociety project, aiming to kick some life into the carcass of democracy in the UK. Give up guys, it’s dead, that’s what I say.
No seriously. Notapathetic.com is a laudable effort, allowing those of us who really really don’t think voting is worth bothering with to differentiate ourselves from those who merely don’t understand the question, can’t be bothered or (surprisingly many) didn’t realise that there was an election on. You can record your reason for not voting for posterity. Don’t be put off by the fact that a lot of the putative reasons on the website look a bit pathetic; there is going to be some proper analysis of the reasons (I’ve apparently signed up to hand-classify a hundred, so make yours interesting), so the unsystematic ones will tend to cancel out. So if you’re intentionally not voting (even if live in Birmingham or Blackburn and thus suspect that you will end up voting Labour by post anyway), pop along to notapathetic and tell the world why.
I had sort of promised to put this link up last week, but well, you know.
{ 22 comments }
ASteele 04.18.05 at 5:24 pm
Hey I thought earlier you said you are going to vote Tory, to give a bing FU to Blair, did you change your mind?
Daniel 04.18.05 at 5:27 pm
I no longer have a bloody mind. I might do absolutely anything on the day; on the other hand my dad is going to be visiting to celebrate his birthday so I might just get drunk instead. I’ve sent a fax to Frank Dobson’s office asking if he would suffer material financial hardship if he lost – I wouldn’t want that to happen ‘cos Dobbo is a good old lad – but he never replied; I suspect I sent it too late and Parliament had broken up. I dunno. Apparently, I’m in a top 5 seat for the Greens and I like loonies so I might vote for them. uuurggh.
Tom T. 04.18.05 at 8:09 pm
Pardon an ignorant question from the US, but what sort of voter turnout is typical in the UK for a Parliamentary election? Is it as low as it is for presidential elections over here?
Gregg 04.18.05 at 10:14 pm
Turnout at General Elections between 1945 and 1997 averaged 78% (fluctuating between 72% and a peak of 84% in 1950). It fell sharply to 59% in 2001, and many pundits expect it to drop to 50% in this election. Turnout has traditionally been much lower in local, and latterly regional and European elections, though those showed some increases last year.
bad Jim 04.19.05 at 2:36 am
Notwithstanding any principled arguments, I’m at a loss to understand why anyone in a safe district would not choose LibDem, the only credible antiwar protest vote, a possibly noticeable cri de coeur. I comment as an American liberal Democrat, not a Japanese [corporatist] Liberal Democrat, and, as usual, belabor the point.
Poodles should be barbecued.
des von bladet 04.19.05 at 3:26 am
Bad Jim: Sadly the Lib-Dems are the political equivalent of a walking “Kick me!” sign. The Tories have been indulging an extravagantly bizarre and prolonged form of ritual suicide as a political force since 1997, and the Lib-Dems have not only not taken up the slack, they’ve made barely measureable inroads into the public mindshare.
It is surely hard to believe, although I admit to not trying very hard at all, that they actually want to be in power, or even to be the default opposition.
Matthew 04.19.05 at 3:43 am
Oh sure, voting is all about personal expression, and making sure you have carefully groomed your political outlook.
The resulting balance of power and the effective policies implemented are really secondary,
and I’m sure Tony will parse that website at length, because he cares. He seems so concerned about the overall apathy in the UK, although it allows him to implement any policy (such as illegal wars of choice and PFIs), and will be shaken by blank votes (rant attached)…
A vast Labour majority could be soured by vast numbers of “none of the above” ballots!
reuben 04.19.05 at 4:00 am
The higher the Tory’s percentage, the more anti-immigrant bile we’ll hear from them (and Labour, as it plays to the right wing papers) for the next five years. There are idiots out there who are utterly convinced that asylum seekers are over-running and ruining the UK, that immigration is the UK’s biggest problem, that the UK takes in the world’s highest percentage of immigrants and asylum seekers, that asylum seekers get bigger benefits than Brits, etc. If you don’t vote for someone besides the Tories, you’re not cancelling those people out, and you’re encouraging Howard and his cronies to take up this mantle and run with it even further. And frankly, the rhetoric is already disgusting enough.
And I know that Labour has a lot to answer for on this issue, but I’m fairly certain that they’re just playing to the crowd. As long as this is a hot button issue, then Labour will talk tough on it. But if the country gets a bit of perspective, Labour will dampen down their rhetoric, and hopefully treat asylum and immigration as real policy issues to be analysed and addressed in an intelligent, fact-based fashion, rather than as political footballs.
abb1 04.19.05 at 4:54 am
The saying goes: don’t Vote – it only encourages them.
And that’s all there is to it.
Micheal Mouse 04.19.05 at 5:17 am
I was going to post a long explanation for my reasons for not voting on NotApathetic, but I just couldn’t be bothered and I didn’t think it’d make any difference.
dsquared 04.19.05 at 5:30 am
The higher the Tory’s percentage, the more anti-immigrant bile we’ll hear from them (and Labour, as it plays to the right wing papers) for the next five years
This is “always keep a hold of Nurse” reasoning; the trouble is, there will always be the possibility of “something worse”, so you can quite easily find yourself in Hell, one tiny step at a time.
Rhetoric is annoying, but it doesn’t kill anyone; deporting them back to places like Zimbabwe does, and as far as I can see both parties are more or less the same as one another on that score.
For me, it’s the lies; if Blair gets back in with a thumping majority, we will have established the precedent that these days it’s OK to take the country into a war on the basis of a prospectus that would have you banned as a company director if you’d tried to raise money with it on the London Stock Exchange. I would risk quite a lot in terms of policy outcomes to establish the point that it isn’t. The Tories don’t have much of a chance near me so it doesn’t really arise for me personally but I absolutely would not rule it out.
Conchis 04.19.05 at 5:57 am
“The higher the Tory’s percentage, the more anti-immigrant bile we’ll hear from them (and Labour, as it plays to the right wing papers) for the next five years.”
On the other hand, Tony’s ability to play to the crowd on issues like this is partly a function of being able to ignore large chunks of his own party because of the size of his, er… majority. It obviously depends somewhat on the MPs in your individual electorate, but voting Tory could actually end up pushing Labour leftwards.
reuben 04.19.05 at 6:18 am
Rhetoric is annoying, but it doesn’t kill anyone; deporting them back to places like Zimbabwe does, and as far as I can see both parties are more or less the same as one another on that score.
I can definitely understand your reasons for sticking it to Blair, and I agree with most of them. But I wonder if your above quote doesn’t underestimate the power of rhetoric to shape national debates and, ultimately, effect policy.
If rhetoric leads the majority of the nation to believe that the UK is over-run with bloody foreigners who are here to steal benefits, then policy is very likely to be affected, and people are more likely to get sent back to Zimbabwe or some other deathtrap. Prospect magazine had an article on this in its most recent issue, I think, with a real-life example of someone who was only rescued at the appeals stage.
In the US, rhetoric has led to abortion rights being lost, creationism being taught in schools, and, as Matt Yglesias has rightly harped on about, most young adults believing that social security is sure to collapse within their lifetime. Enough people have said it enough times, so they honestly do believe it.
I’ve been in the UK for five years, and as an immigrant I’m probably a bit more sensitive to this aspect of the national debate than I am to some others. I think that without a doubt the tenor has shifted to the right in the last half decade, and opinions about immigrants and asylum seekers alike have become more vituperative. And I think that is very likely to affect national policy, if only by encouraging the ruling party to play to the crowd by being overly strict on immigration and asylum. That is, Tory success on the immigration issue will encourage a cynical Labour party to move further to the right – thus we get two parties spouting largely the same crap. And when that happens, real people suffer.
By the way, I’m definitely not saying that people should hold their noses and vote Labour. I just think that people tend to underestimate the negative impacts of not voting at all.
reuben 04.19.05 at 6:31 am
voting Tory could actually end up pushing Labour leftwards
That’s may be a fair point on some issues, I think, but at least on the specific one of immigration and asylum, I think the (woefully misinformed) national concensus is far enough to the right at the moment that Labour won’t move back to the left until they see that it’s politically expedient.
Matt McGrattan 04.19.05 at 8:30 am
“For me, it’s the lies; if Blair gets back in with a thumping majority, we will have established the precedent that these days it’s OK to take the country into a war on the basis of a prospectus that would have you banned as a company director if you’d tried to raise money with it on the London Stock Exchange. I would risk quite a lot in terms of policy outcomes to establish the point that it isn’t.”
I think this is fundamentally right. The Blair government has lied to a degree that it’s important not only that this particular government not be rewarded for their behaviour but also that a message be sent to politicians in general that this is not acceptable.
Furthermore, this government has led a concerted assault on civil liberties which has more than outweighted the genuine achievments, and there are several, that they’ve produced.
I couldn’t in all good conscience vote for them and the threat of a Tory victory doesn’t really fill me with fear.
In fact, if I were being utterly cynical about it, a Tory victory, which is incredibly unlikely, might be the one thing that’d reinvigorate the political left in this country. The mainstream centre-left has utterly failed to oppose authoritarian and reactionary measures that would have had them screaming in rage if they’d been enacted by a Tory government simply because they’ve been the product of a Labour administration.
Simstim 04.19.05 at 9:12 am
Indeed Matt, part of the horror engendered by the SoWhoDoYouVoteFor quiz seems to be that the LibDems, of all people, are to the left of Labour on most policy issues. Labourites just can’t seem to get their head round the fact that their party’s been taken over by a bunch of careerist authoritarians.
Donald Johnson 04.19.05 at 10:19 am
Some of you guys sound like Naderites. I mean that as a compliment, but wish to add the effects of the Nader campaign (in 2000; 2004 he didn’t matter) weren’t exactly positive. Though on the other hand maybe it has reinvigorated the left–people are starting to realize the conservative Democrats and their willingness to bend ov–I mean be bipartisan has been a big part of why the country keeps drifting right. But the price for reinvigorating the left has been too high.
Simstim 04.19.05 at 10:46 am
The UK electoral system, whilst still broken, offers us a bit more room for manoveure than the electoral college system. For example, I live in the most marginal Labour seat with a LibDem as main challenger. Thus, in voting LibDem I avoid getting the Tories in, give Labour a bloodied nose and vote in favour of a party with more leftwing politics than Labour. Oh, and the LibDems are pro-PR which is the one political development I most definitely want to see in this country (so I can start voting Green with some effect). Others, alas, are not so lucky, either being in solidly-safe seats or a Lab-Tory marginal.
Jayanne 04.19.05 at 2:29 pm
>>>>
The UK electoral system, whilst still broken, offers us a bit more room for manoveure than the electoral college system
>>>>>
I think it’s more that we aren’t electing a Head of State in semi-plebiscitary manner (even though Blair probably thinks we are).
>>>>
For example, I live in the most marginal Labour seat with a LibDem as main challenger
>>>>
I live in a very marginal Labour seat with Lib Dem second, I’m doing the same as you, and ignoring George Monbiot’s call for me to vote for, e.g. Plaid Cymru. (Does he know anything at all about Wales and Scotland?!)
I’ve had it with this “don’t risk letting the Tories in” moral and emotional blackmail; how bad does it have to get before people stop saying that? (Don’t answer.)
NB: today it’s been reported that Michael Howard’s anti-immigrant kick isn’t helping him anyway — presumably because New Labour’s already so right-wing on it.
Uncle Kvetch 04.19.05 at 3:07 pm
And I know that Labour has a lot to answer for on this issue, but I’m fairly certain that they’re just playing to the crowd.
Why don’t Labour and the Democratic Party in the US simply merge and be done with it? The rationalizations for total capitulation in both parties have become completely indistinguishable.
Matthew 04.20.05 at 3:24 am
For me, it’s the lies; if Blair gets back in with a thumping majority, we will have established the precedent that these days it’s OK to take the country into a war on [lies].
Yes but being one of the people caring about this, and not voting, you’re doing your bit to help Lab get a vast majority, and a giant Blairite smile, no?
dsquared 04.20.05 at 4:01 am
Well yeah. It’s up in the air. I might still protest-vote. I really don’t know.
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