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The No Vote
Article printed in Church Times, January 2004.
The final of last year's American Idol (the US version of ITV's Pop Idol), drew 24 million votes, almost a quarter of the number of votes cast in the last presidential election. Our own Pop Idol has done even better, drawing in the latest final more than a third as many votes as the 2001 general election.
So while fewer and fewer people vote in elections, voting for more or less anything else has become a popular obsession.
The BBC had a million of us voting for the greatest Briton, then the biggest read and now the best sitcom. At its height, Big Brother persuaded 8.6 million to adjudicate on its least banal contestant. Channel 4 constantly broadcasts our Top 100, from musicals to world cup moments. Most magazines seem to offer us a similar franchise, and any website worth its bandwidth will ask for a show of virtual hands on the hot topic du jour. Even such subjects as DIY now demand weekly TV plebiscites.
At the same time, electoral abstention rates are soaring. In the US, the percentage of eligible voters turning out has traditionally been far lower than here. Recent presidential elections have brought out about 50% of the voting-age population, a decline from the peak of 63.0% in 1960. Meanwhile, all post-war British elections saw turnouts of between 72.0% and 84.1%, until 1997 which mobilised 71.3%. But in 2001, this figure plummetted to 59.4%.
So in voting as in most other things, Britain has gone the American way. One wonders whether it will change our vocabulary: how long can 'voters' remain interchangeable with 'electorate' when half of the electorate does not vote?
And all the signs are that this neglect of democracy will increase. Polls indicate that, while six out of ten UK 'voters' voted in 2001, among eighteen- to 25-year-olds the turnout was half that.
A nineteen-year-old interviewed in Berkeley, California in 2002 explained, "I'm not registered, because I'm not into the whole voting thing, I guess." But this distaste, as we have seen, does not seem to be widely shared - voting has become one of the West's favourite passtimes.
If the heart of idolatry is accepting an image as the reality, then perhaps Pop Idol is well named, tempting us to offer up our vote in a play suffrage before a manufactured icon instead of taking part in the real thing. Maybe the ebbing sea of faith in politics has left us with a ballot-shaped hole that we fill with a simulation.
Why is it that we increasingly delight in voting-as-entertainment, and increasingly disdain voting-as-government?
One obvious explanation - at least to those of us who enjoy a highminded disdain towards our fellow creatures - is the triviality of contemporary culture. Educational funding reform and the EU constitution are not sexy and can no longer compete for votes with The Nation's Favourite TV Villain.
But in fact the evidence is against such misanthropy. An intriguing MORI poll from 1973 found that 14% considered themselves very interested in politics, 46% fairly interested, and 40% not very or not at all interested. When the same poll was repeated in 2001, 1% fewer went for 'fairly interested', and otherwise the figures were identical. Results from 1991 and 1997 were also very similar. Consider also the attendance records broken by last year's anti-war march and the popularity of similar exercises in voting with one's feet. Electoral Commission surveys suggest that even among eighteen- to 25-year-olds involved in such political activities, one in four do not vote. It seems that we are no less interested in politics than we ever were, we just fail to see what voting has to do with it.
Does this reflect a collapse of confidence in the political establishment? Probably. But much of it could simply be due to the centripedal force of today's politics. In Britain, the 1990s rebranding of Labour and ensuing collapse of the Tories has left us with a jostle for the middle ground, politics as a campaign to persuade voters that one is the lowest common denominator. When nearly eight out of ten voted in 1974 for Wilson, Heath and Thorpe, they offered stark choices about nationalisation and tax rates. Now the decision before us seems not so much about policies as about which party will fulfill those policies more competently. It's more like deciding between two applicants for a post than between two opposing worldviews. In America, the centre of gravity is considerably further to the right, but equally well populated.
Harder to judge is the extent to which the attitude of non-voters is 'A plague on both your houses' - antipathy rather than apathy. Britain must have one of the least corrupt political systems in the world, but perception is everything. If names like Hamilton and Aitken, and more recently Mandelson, evoke an aroma of crooked turpitude pervading the whole establishment, it must in fairness be a rather faint aroma, but perhaps media coverage magnifies it in our minds. Governmental dependence on corporate backing is a more serious but less scandalous corruption.
Linked to this is the perception that politics is now all about 'spin', or 'propaganda' as it used to be known. It seems that today's politicians need to be as adept in marketing as in governing. The contradiction (or at least irony) here is that if politics is now all about making a good impression, why does it make such a bad impression?
When one also considers the stunning immaturity of our party political culture, where one's opponents can only ever do wrong, there would seem to be some benefit in MPs asking themselves what responsibility they share for the 'apathy' they bemoan.
The other side of the coin is the decay of deference for all authority figures in western society since the 1960s. When Peter Cook lampooned Macmillan in Beyond The Fringe in 1960, the show was 'demolish[ing] all that was sacred in the British way of life', according to the Daily Mail, but of course such treatment is now ubiquitous. This is healthy, but it is perhaps naive to portray politicians as self-serving clowns across the board and then profess dismay at our lack of enthusiasm for choosing between them.
The conundrum remains that if so many of us decline to vote on the grounds that they're all as bad as each other, then why would anyone vote on Big Brother? Some questions are too deep for the human mind.
