Apathy and Activism

I wasn’t glued to the TV or the internet at 9pm on Sunday night, waiting for the news of the European Elections to start trickling through. In fact I waiting for that exact news – but I was standing at the edge of a hall in Pity Me, Durham, with a green rosette on my chest and hand in hand with J, the Lib Dem contingent behind us and the BNPs in front of us. Seated at the tables in a horseshoe were dozens of exhausted council workers and in the middle were 116,213 votes exactly, each one sorted, checked, counted, checked, and finally tied in a bundle of 100 to be placed on the appropriate pile. Our job as party representatives had been to scrutinise the counting process, flagging up any votes that had been placed incorrectly through malpractice or, as was much more likely to be the case given the sheer numbers involved, through human error.

Durham did not have any council seats up for election, due to the restructuring into a unitary authority that happened one year (two years?) ago. Our three European seats went to Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem, once each. The Labour count was much higher than I expected – it’ll have certainly been higher than the national average, I assume – but even that was down on normal when you consider that much of the North East of England has never even considered voting for anyone else.

I have nothing to add on the subject of the BNP, UKIP, and the increasingly far-right tendencies of the Tories to what has already been said over at Jenny’s blog. The hard fact is that every seat that the far right have gained, both in Britain and across Europe, is as a result of people voting for them, and not enough people voting in order to counteract the effect.

But this leads me on to Jenny’s question. What’s done is done, but what the hell can we do about all this now?

I suppose on a grass roots level it’s about motivating interest in politics, and trying to get informed debate going so that people know what they’re voting for (and why they’re voting for).

The next level up from that is getting involved in either activism or actual politics. I am not a member of the Green Party – J and I were there on invitation to help out a party member who we know from Quaker Meeting – but discussing the statistics and tactics, and feeling part of the whole electoral process has at least temporarily fired up my enthusiasm for getting involved properly. The system is undoubtedly flawed, yes. I had a pang of sympathy for the 400-odd ballot papers that were discounted for having ‘FUCK YOU ALL’ or ‘NOT FIT FOR GOVERNMENT’ scrawled across them – but the fact is that this is the system in which we presently have to work. Are we going to stand aside in protest at a system and let those manipulative people who have no such qualms take it over while we sit around debating the respective merits of various democracies, and wondering why things are getting really shit?

[And here I intend(ed) to go into a political discussion of a rather more philopsophical bent. It may yet happen. Stay tuned. But time slips on, and if I don't publish at least this first entry soon then it will be lost to the nether regions of my 'Draft' pile forever! It's been sat there a good few days already.]