Why Voters Don't Vote

I noticed that much was said during the mid-term election campaign in TV and radio news items as well as in blogs about low voter turn out. This problem has also come to the fore in the UK in recent years at election after election there has been an ever-lowering percentage of those eligible to vote actually going and voting. This is especially marked in local council elections. There has been hot debate over this issue and a number of both causes and solutions have been advanced.

One solution put forward by many is to make it mandatory to vote. This would be a complete travesty in a democracy. The whole point of democracy is that you have the right to vote or not as you please.

The political parties think that they only have to get the right collection of policies together and the people will come out in their droves again to vote. They have been bending over backwards in their efforts to appeal to the voters. They struggle to appeal to the young, schoolgate mum, pensioners, Essexman, just about anyone who might listen and give them a vote.

The whole trouble is that they are looking in the wrong place for the problem. People still discuss politics in pubs up and down the UK, so it is not politics they are bored with. In local elections independent candidates and one issue candidates do well. I rather think it is that people are fed up with the politicians and the party political system as it now stands.

Like the US, the UK has the first past the post electoral system in that the party with the most seats in The House of Commons controls the Government. It is a good system in that it makes for certainty but it can mean that a party which had a minority of votes actually cast controls the Government. It also encourages the party political system where two big political parties are government parties and the others make up the numbers.

I think that certainly British voters are fed-up with politicians who vote in Parliament slavishly to the party line and not in-line with the interests of their area or of the country and the electors who put them into parliamentin the first place. M.Ps should remember that the oath they swear on entering parliament is of loyalty to The Queen, in other words the country and its people and not to the Leader of their party or the party itself.