Abstinence is Good for You

I want to start by saying that I write this in good faith, and not because I've lost my polling card. Though I couldn't, off the top of my head, tell you where my polling card was.

There is one thing on which all politicians agree, on which all pundits agree, on which all teachers, and parents, and grown-ups, and all people concerned with the upstanding prosecution of citizenship agree. It is that we should vote. That, furthermore, those who don't vote are "apathetic". People laid down their lives to give us the suffrage, we're told, and we owe it to their memory to use it. This is just one of many bogus propositions. I'm sure some people gave their lives to scurvy or some such in the discovery of tobacco, and it doesn't mean we all have to smoke.

Tony Benn's oft-repeated line to ram home the importance of voting is always a variation on: "When people tell me they're not going to vote, I just think: 'I'm not going to bother listening to you, then.'" This isn't exactly what he means. As an upstanding and naturally courteous man, he listens to everyone who charges him with a rational point, I feel sure. What he really means is: "That's what other politicians think." And no doubt he's right. But you have to wonder how much of a threat that is, when most people didn't honestly think politicians were listening to them anyway.

To conflate abstinence with apathy is wilfully absurd. Apathetic people certainly constitute a subset of no-shows, but that does not make the two groups synonymous. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you were passionately opposed to the war against Iraq.

You will be disinclined to vote Labour or Tory. The Liberals might have struck you as criminally milk-livered in their opposition. You could vote Socialist Alliance if they were fielding a candidate, but you might not be a socialist. You could vote for the Respect party, but you doubt their intellectual rigour, ever since you saw them on the campaign bus shouting "Tony B Liar" over a loud-hailer. (Just as an aside, it is neither funny nor deliciously ironic that Blair is almost an anagram of liar, give or take the B. Please stop this.)

It follows, then, that far from apathy, it is passion that prevents you from voting, and the more passionately you feel, the more opposed you will be to bestowing on any party the legitimacy of your support.

Withholding a vote to underline the lie of choice and governmental entitlement is a perfectly rational position, though on that level a negative one.

The positive impact of refusal came out in one of Howard Dean's campaign speeches. (Granted, it would sound a whole lot more positive if he hadn't been kicked out of the race, but stay with me.) By a country mile the most radical of the Democrat candidates, he aimed to find votes, he said, not from Bush or any other existing party, but from the 50% of Americans who do not currently bother.

A sizeable band of people who don't vote may shake the credibility of an incumbent government, but it gives courage and optimism to those who challenge it.

The reason politics has become so narrow is that a few egregious propositions have become accepted orthodoxies. The principal of these is that people don't want to be heavily taxed. Ideally, they'd like not to be taxed at all. If all the major parties accept this, then they will necessarily become more and more alike, disagreeing only on peripheral social matters according to taste, class and whim - fox-hunting, gay marriage, abortion. They may get very heated, these issues, but they will only ever be a side-dish to the business of how you want to see society ordered. The main meal is money.

If we all continue to vote for the major parties, as similar as they are, there is no reason for a leftwing candidate to go back to that first principle and refute it. The unspoken falsehood at the heart of New Labour - that, come on chaps, we're grown ups, let's admit that everyone's out for himself - will not be dented, either, by casting a radical vote for a marginal, far-left party. A challenge to the low-tax orthodoxy ultimately has to come from within the mainstream. Really, it has to come from within the Labour party.

In other words, we need a Howard Dean of our very own, which means creating the conditions that emboldened him. There's no reason for anyone to be forced into registering a protest vote with a very small party whose views they only half buy. You make a much larger and more powerful statement of your disaffection with triangulated politics by staying at home.

All you have to do then is sit tight and wait for someone to come along who will recognise this silent constituency and maximise it. In the meantime, don't let anyone call you apathetic. You're not apathetic. You're a refusenik.