Parties, Whips and Chains.

Challenging the stereotype of the non voter

Imagine being pestered your entire adult life to take part in a shit game.  

A game in which you’re ushered into a room with randoms and asked to make a selection.

A game that feels *a bit wrong* but you go along with it anyway, because of social pressure and misplaced optimism.

A game in which hardly anyone seems to land what they want, and the winners are usually sleazy, wadded old fellas.

No, I’m not talking about the car keys one.

I give you the British politics and more specifically, voting.

A game that remains popular, possibly, because it successfully blends many elements of our best loved family favourites - there’s Monopoly money, a large helping of Charades and plenty of Snakes and (career) Ladders.

I was always a floating voter. 

Now, as a non-voter, I am to the establishment, a floating turd - a crap reality that won’t go away. 

Why?

Because I don’t fit their convenient stereotype of lazy, uneducated chav who refuses to tear her velour loungewear clad arse away from Netflix to the polling station.

And this is a major problem for them. 

Just as Convid outed the mainstream media portrait of the ‘antivaxer’ as an elaborate fake, it turns out non-voters are not all the Love Island-watching, benefit scrounging, selfish morons that mainstream media would have you believe.

So why are more and more intelligent adults becoming so disillusioned with politics and making a conscious choice not to vote?

The political situation during my own 48 years has been farcical. 

The Tory-Labour tug of war that’s lasted decades, has been like being in a car with two warring parents. 

“We’re going to Blackpool” 

says dad and we drive towards Blackpool. 

Oh! I’m quite looking forward to Blackpool, I think. Not reeaallly my bag but y’know, I’ll ‘ave it, the others seem to be into it…..

But before you even have chance to glimpse the windmill, let alone the tower, mum grabs the wheel. 

“Who wants to go to Skegness?” 

She yells with enthusiasm.

“Me! Me! Me!” chorus the whiny kids in the back.

They get their way, and we drive the opposite direction for a while, until the same happens again and dad takes back the wheel…..  

And there we stay, forever on a bastard motorway, never reaching either destination.  

A highway to Hull.

Mum berates dad and dad slags off mum. They both scold you for having encouraged the other; whilst simultaneously trying to woo you with the promise of a Mr Whippy.

At least that’s the surface model.

The left blame the right and the right blame the left. 

Well, you know who I blame?

You dickheads who keep getting in the car.

It’s gone on for years and have we ever reached even a mediocre destination, let alone the talked of utopias?

No.

It wasn’t always this way for me. 

Raised by a staunch Thatcherite mother, my first vote was for *gulp*, Tony Blair. 

‘Cause

“Things can only get better”, right?

Hmm…..

Who could forget the campaign?

There was ‘Our Tone’ with his Britpop bezzies - remember Cool Britannia? Cherie, the anti-dollybird on his arm. Maybe things could get better……

I remember the day he was elected. Lecturers at my University wept. Actually sobbed. After over a decade of Tory rule, there was an appetite for a new era of equality and opportunity. Blair wanted more people to go into Higher Education, vowed to end fox hunting and produced a timely sprog to secure his family man credentials.  My generation fell for it. 

There was a Care-Blair for everyone - family Tony, churchy Tony, music fan Tony, animal lover Tony….. This of course, became his undoing as we all found out the bloke had more faces than Big Ben. 

Iraq finally unveiled his real self as that of a warmongering, lying monster.

Generation X became Generation “Who the fuck next?”

My later voting years were spent drifting between Independents, Green, Lib Dem and Labour candidates. I’d particularly liked Corbyn with his earthy, unflashy demeanour.  

But Shitshow was the real fork in the road for me and many others.

It had never been clearer to me that there was no left and right anymore. 

Had there ever really been?

People I was bonding with on social media were from all political backgrounds. They were benefit claimants, entrepreneurs, professionals….. 

I’d always considered myself to be a bit of a leftie, but as conversations progressed, it was plain that a new paradigm in which to define ourselves had arisen. 

It was time to reframe our beliefs from a whole new standpoint.

You were now Authoritarian or Libertarian. 

It was as simple as that.

No-one in mainstream politics was speaking up on behalf of people like us who questioned the Covid narrative.

Bumbling Boris was fannying about sketching ‘roadmaps’, whilst Starmer seemed to dream the same dream but in permanent marker.

We persevered. We filled in their consultations, emailed our MP’s, signed petitions with the gusto of an 80’s kid doing a round of autograph books….all to no avail.

What about the smaller parties, the independent candidates? Were they worth a go? Was it a wasted vote?

The more I learned about the political system the more I realised it wasn’t the players that needed to change, it was the game.

The board needed to be ripped up and scrapped completely.

How could MP’s truly represent the wishes of their constituents when they had to toe the line of the party whip and were heavily penalised for not doing so?

How could we ever trust that our leaders listened to public opinion, when we saw the number of signatories on petitions wilfully ignored? 

How could we have faith in laws upholding important processes, when all it took was to call something ‘an emergency’ and protocol was kicked to the kerb?

The deeper ‘conspiracy theorists’ dug, the more we unearthed. There were more bodies buried than in Cromwell Street and UK politicians had both mud and blood on their greedy sausage fingers.

Why did mainstream parties all have links with Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the World Economic Forum? 

Why were countries such as China, notorious for human rights abuses, suddenly lauded as shining examples by our government?

Why was an MP heavily involved with a so-called ‘fact checking’ company?

Look guys, I know you’ll only go down the rabbit hole when you yourself become curiouser and curiouser, but aside from that, it’s certainly worth questioning any long-held beliefs you have internalised regarding withholding your vote.

Over decades we have been hounded into marking our crosses by guilt campaigns reminding us of what terrible, ungrateful citizens we would be if we dare not exercise this ‘privilege’.

After all, “your ancestors fought for this right”.

Excuse my eye roll.

There’s folk right now fighting over the last piece of KFC and that piece of KFC probably has more meat on it than that argument. It’s a line that as with “fighting for your country” sounds lamer by the day. 

That’s not to belittle the sacrifices our forefathers and great grandmothers made. I absolutely respect them because most of them genuinely believed our so-called ‘democracy’ was a fair system and that leaders had our interests at heart.

I don’t - and think many would turn in their graves if they could see what the civil liberties they’d defended had become.

What we’re offered by the current framework, is an illusion of control rather than true power itself.

It takes the format of a school council;

“Yes kids, of course the school can switch to recycled toilet paper! It’s great that you students want to support the planet via your arses. Power to your arse!

Oh, What’s that, Johnny? You propose making changes to the entire school curriculum because it’s steeped in woke dogma that functions to prepare a groupthink workforce to serve an elite few? I don’t fucking think so. Now sit down and remember, not everyone gets to choose their toilet roll…”

I take the piss because they do.

I’ve come to see that engaging with this corrupt pantomime of ‘having a say’ does more damage than good.

Why?

Because it reinforces its credibility.

When we vote, watch leadership debates or join in with their staged requests for input, we cement their authority simply by recognising it as such.

So….what if?

What if non-voters care more than you’ve been led to believe?

What if their decision not to vote was born of a realisation that if opting in hasn’t made a difference, maybe opting out one day could?

What if they had come to understand that their greatest power was their own, and that voting was handing over their self-sovereignty to someone else? Consenting to their own demise?

Perhaps non-voters conclude that voting is the very action that keeps us in these chains rather than frees us from them.

Why are we so scared of being ungoverned?

How bad could it be?

Much of this is depends on how we see our fellow human beings.

Are humans born good as per the Rousseau model of the innocent child, or do we see an every-man-for-himself ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation breaking out because we’re all inherently bad bastards?

Personally, I’m up for giving anarchy a whirl.

Can it really be any worse than the fates world leaders have planned for us? Of wars, eating insects, social credit and barely leaving the house?

I doubt it.

Do you really see your neighbours turning into crazed barbarians just because they can?

Maybe the current political set-up actually contributes to violence and social ills rather than helping alleviate them.

So……back to games.

Let me tell you about my favourite. 

An underrated classic I’m keen to revive.

You may want to join me because I know most of you understand exactly how the wheels turn already.

That’s right.

I invite you all to play ‘Downfall’.

Buy me a coffee here

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/julident19p