I've contracted Political Apathy and it's THEIR fault

I've always been interested in politics.  I remember in 1997, when I would have been fourteen, waking up on a geography field trip in Dovedale on the morning of the General Election result.  I tried in vain to find out whether Blair had won, or if Major had somehow defied the odds.  No-one knew - teacher or pupil – or, even less, cared.  It took until lunchtime to discover the horrendous news on a radio liberated for ten minutes from playing pop music.

It shocked me at the time that so many supposedly intelligent grammar school pupils and teachers could care so little about a matter of national importance.  It continued to shock me over the years as I met people who didn't know who the leader of the opposition was, didn't bother voting, didn't watch the news or read papers, and generally just went about their days in blissful ignorance.  "How the hell can you live like this?" I thought.

Until this week.  Then, it finally caught up with me.  I got fed up with politics.  Unfortunately, however, it didn't stop me being a geek, so I looked at the figures.

Between 1945 and 1992, the voter turnout in general elections oscillated happily between 83.6% and 72.6%. Indeed, even in the 1997 election, the turnout was 71.3%.

But then, something shocking happens.  In 2001, it suddenly plummets to 59.4%, and in 2005, 61.4%.  What happened?

Well, we got Tony Blair and a disingenuous Labour government, who even tried to claim that the historically low 2001 turnout "reflected the voters' satisfaction with the [...] Labour government".  What rot!

In the past, the two major parties were diametrically opposed: Labour was more to the left and supported mainly by the working classes, and the Conservatives - to the right of their current position - with the majority of their support coming from the middle classes.

Under the guise of ‘New’ Labour, the traditionally working-class party started to gain increasing support from the so-called ‘middle-Englanders’ through Blair's manoeuvres towards the centre ground.  He got rid of Clause IV, and the party declared itself perfectly happy with people becoming "filthy rich" and went all-out for the centre-right vote, all of which was pivotal to their winning the 1997 election.

Voters thought they had seen the worst excesses of parliamentary sleaze under the previous Major premiership, what with Neil Hamilton's "cash for questions" scandal, David Mellor's undermining of the "Back to Basics" campaign with his extra-marital shenanigans, Jonathan Aitken and his "sword of truth", and so on.  Indeed, John Prescott was regularly to be heard bawling, "Tory sleaze!" from a sedentary position on the opposition benches in an irony that would only reach its full, juicy ripeness some ten years later. 

Little were the voters to know how much worse was to come.

After 1997, extra-marital affairs that were previously a resigning issue would became de rigueur. Peter Mandelson would be sacked and re-instated three times; Blair would show his readiness to leap into action on behalf of very rich men ranging from Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, to the Indian billionaires the Hinduja brothers and steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal;  and so on, and so on, and so on.  A pattern of degradation in the morals of our most important public servants emerged.  Something had gone horribly wrong with the British political system, culminating in the expenses scandal, implicating most MPs, and defenestrating supposedly the very symbol of parliament, the ineffectual Speaker Michael Martin, in the process.

Anti-war protest, February 2003

Concurrently, the public were not being listened to. The Countryside Alliance march elicited no change in the government's policy.  Worse, the march against the Iraq war in February 2003, attended by an estimated million people, did not dissuade Blair from his determination to invade without any adequate plans for the aftermath.

No, instead the government legislated in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 to make it a criminal offence to protest within the vicinity of parliament without authorisation.  They later promised to repeal this unpopular measure but it was inexplicably dropped during the pre-election “wash-up” period.

Add to this the sexed-up dossiers containing passages plagiarised from PhD students, lies to parliament, and the questionable role of the un-elected Alastair Campbell.  Hell, even the Chilcot Inqury, set up in 2009, still hasn't yet reported.  The Hutton Inquiry into the dodgy circumstances of Dr David Kelly's death is still contested by leading doctors, and the post-mortem report and pictures of the body have been brazenly classified for 70 years, apparently to spare Kelly's wife and daughters from further media reports.  I'm sure they'd rather have the truth.

In 2005, Labour even argued in Court that their manifesto promises should not be legally binding [Wheeler R (on the application of) v Office of the Prime Minister & Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs [2008] EWHC 1409].  The wise and impartial judge ruled that this was indeed so.  No matter that if a business acted in the same manner, it would find the directors charged with many offences.  In other words, they can promise you the moon on a stick, but they can, instead, place a wet cow pat in a brown paper bag on your doorstep, set fire to it, ring your doorbell and run off.

And yet despite all this, and more, Blair still managed to win three general elections.  Desperate Conservative politicians, marooned on the opposition benches for years began to feel that Blair's way was the only way.  And so they elected Cameron.

The iconic and meaningful Conservative torch of freedom was duly extinguished, to be replaced by a scribble of a tree.  A bloody tree!  Cameron ran off to Norway to hug a huskie and warn us all of the dangers of global warming, and stuck a little electricity-generating windmill on his house, bless.

Thus began the shift of all parties to the supposed political Nirvana of the "centre ground".

The problem is that once you're in the centre, you don't actually stand for anything any more.  There is no differentiation between the parties.  We're stuck with the EU; we're stuck with the Human Rights Act; we're stuck with the Quangos; we're stuck with the bloated public sector; and we're stuck with a bunch of career politicians whose only desire is to be elected, rather than to change the country (with a mentionable handful of exceptions).

So, politicians, you can stuff your rhetoric, your newspaper columns, your speeches and your pleas for votes.  Until you actually stand for something worth standing up for, rather than tinkering round the edges and actually see it through; until you prove yourselves to be men and women of vision and courage, with a desire to see this country flourish on the world stage; until you stop playing silly politics with ticket upgrades, alleged insults to police officers and whether it’s acceptable to say “calm down, dear”; until you prove yourselves to be grown ups, then these ears will remain wilfully deaf.


Simon