On the day of the General Election it seems apt to once again cite Douglas Adams, who wrote (apart perhaps from Crossman's Plato Today) what is for me the definining comment on modern "democracy":
"Ford Prefect, of course, had an
explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop
frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say
other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage
which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed
this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the
robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very
slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It
honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote,
so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in
more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
By which I mean to say...if you
really believe that Labour will do the things you want
done for the country, vote Labour. If you think Clegg really represents
your interests, by all means vote for Clegg. But for god's sake don't
vote for Cameron just to keep Clegg out or to punish Brown. Don't lend your - incredibly valuable - legitimacy to this process unless one of the
candidates is really promising to do things you want them to do and is
not merely in your view the least bad of a dreadful bunch. Yes, you'll be pestered by people
who think you're "wasting your vote". It's no waste to exercise the
right to abstain. The very premise of a representative democracy is
that collective action works. If we don't want any of them as mayor
collective abstention is the right choice.
You'll be pestered by people who raise the spectre of the BNP getting in - a legitimate fear, and one that has prompted me, with a heavy heart, to cast a vote (at random) for one or another non-BNP candidates in past elections, but really doesn't arise today when they have no chance whatsoever of being elected. (The irony of those crazy baldheads of the BNP becoming the primary motivation for good people to participate in the democratic process strikes me as alternately delicious and horrifying. I sometimes wonder how long it will be before I come across an expose claiming that the three main parties have begun funding them just to keep voter turnout up.)
But I've read the manifestos. Like
every political manifesto I've read in my life they boil down to the
following message: "all of the other candidates plan to seize a portion
of your income and squander it on some bullshit you don't want or need.
In my infinite wisdom I plan to seize a portion of your income and
squander it on this completely different bullshit you don't want or need instead." Somehow this position always fails to convince me.
If the only votes cast in the UK today are from people who really believe that their candidate will represent their genuine interests rather than a childish desire to punish the Labour party for having been in government or an equally childish desire to keep the other lot out, they'll get about five votes each. Here's hoping that today's the day we return a vote for none of the above and the lot of them are left standing bewildered in empty halls across the country tonight. Then maybe tomorrow we can start the business of working out how to get a government that will actually do the things we want it to.
(This is a very slightly edited version of a post I wrote about the 2008 London Mayoral election.)
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