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| Apathy Wins by a Landslide |
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By Sajjad Khan
Editor: New Civilisation
sajjad.khan@newcivilisation.com | |
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“If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it” (Ken Livingstone 1987 title of book)
At the heart of western democracy is the concept of consent, indeed this is what gives any government its legitimacy or a parliament its right to legislate. This consent is vital, as states by their nature do things that individuals cannot. States can levy taxes, they enact laws which everyone must obey and, as Max Weber pointed out, they are also the monopoly provider of legitimate violence in society.
If consent is absent, for whatever reason, a representative government by its nature ceases to be legitimate in the eyes of its citizens. Consent, as we are often told, is what distinguishes democratic states from those nations that are termed dictatorships. This is not to say that democracies are perfect, even their most ardent supporters do not claim this, but within western political systems there lies embedded within its Lockean roots a system that operates within the context of underlying consent. As John Locke said
“Man being… by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”
However, recent voter turnouts in elections on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to challenge this notion of electoral consent. In November 2000 when the whole world was enthralled about hanging chads, black voter exclusion and supreme court judgements in the context of a tight contest between Al Gore and George W Bush, very few people failed to mention another significant story of that US election. This was the numbers of people who actually refused to provide consent. There was copious analysis on the popular vote in 2000, concluding that Gore had beaten Bush by about half a million votes (50.5m vs. 50m)—despite the latter’s win in the electoral college. What was subject to less scrutiny was the fact that just as many people (100m) didn’t actually vote for either of the two main candidates. In a country that prides itself on its democratic Lockean traditions this should be given some consideration.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the situation does not fare any better. At the last general election in the UK, we witnessed a voter turnout of just over 59% with 18 million people deciding to stay at home, the worst electoral turnout since 1918. Thus more people watched the recent England vs. France Euro 2004 football match than voted at the last general election. It is, therefore, all the more remarkable to see Tony Blair on the one hand enjoying huge parliamentary majorities, yet on the other receiving consent to govern from only one in four of the British people. Yet despite this significant lack of a popular mandate, New Labour has changed some of the fundamentals of the British constitution, given independence to the Bank of England for the setting of monetary policy, signed the Nice treaty, and launched a pre-emptive war on Iraq.
However lack of voter turnout has not simply been restricted to the general election, in local elections interest is even lower. Despite the volume of campaigning and media focus in the recent bye elections, the successful Liberal Democrat MP in Leicester South obtained less than one in seven of the electorate’s consent. William Whitelaw once famously accused Harold Wilson, the former Labour prime minister, of: “going up and down the land stirring up apathy”. After the recent local and European elections and the Bye-elections in Leicester and Birmingham, the charge could easily be levelled at a whole host of politicians from across the political spectrum. Worryingly for politicians, lack of electoral participation seems to be strongest among the young; at the last general election, 61% of 18-24 year olds did not bother to vote. In 1997 this percentage was only 43%, showing an astonishing increase of 18% in four years.
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