Civitas Blog

Those concerned about voter-apathy claim a high turnout is needed at the election to confer legitimacy on its outcome.

Personally, I can’t see how a government returned with a 100% electoral turnout, but only 51% of the votes cast, should thereby be thought to enjoy any greater legitimacy than one returned on a turnout of only 50% of potential voters and with only a 51% share of the votes cast.

In the latter-case, the incumbent government can fairly claim over 75% of the electorate don’t mind it being in power which is more than can be said by the incumbent government described in the case of the first electoral scenario.

In any case, the whole electoral situation in Britain is fast descending into chaos. Large-scale fraud through postal ballots is rapidly taking over from fox-hunting as our great national criminal indulgence, although one carried out by an entirely different constituency, if you will forgive my use of the term here.

Moreover, increasingly less relevant electoral boundaries are creating a chronic growing misalignment between votes cast and parties returned.

There is a second reason for unconcern about, if not pleasure in, voter-apathy. Those who don’t vote are probably less interested in and therefore less well-informed about electoral issues. That they are is, doubtless, the reason Labour is so concerned to get this group to vote, rightly believing ill-informed voters more likely to vote for them.

Regardless, however, of whichever party for which this portion of the electorate would be inclined to vote, I would prefer apathy kept them away, than the politicians and pundits were successful in persuading them to vote through flattering them into acquiring the delusion that their voting would make a positive contribution to the result.

Having said that, voter-ignorance might well prove this May a great blessing for this country -- but only inadvertently so.

Indeed, the voting this May in which voter-ignorance is liable to have a significantly benign effect on this country is the only voting that month whose outcome is likely to have any significant effect on its future course.

The voting of which I speak, therefore, is not that due to take place on the 5th of the month in this our scepter’d isles -- or should I not now, rather, describe them as septic, given current high levels of MRSA in their state-run hospitals?

The voting in May I have in mind where voter-ignorance is likely to have a benign impact on this country is, rather, that due to take place on the 28th of that month on the other side of the English Channel.

It is an astonishing fact, as reported in today’s Times, that the steadily massing ranks of voters there who have indicated they intend to vote against the adoption of the European Constitution in their referendum are ‘left-wing voters who believe that the constitution is a British-inspired plot to destroy the protective French state and its welfare system.’

French President, Jacques Chirac, seems to have a firmer grasp than they on political reality when he claims, to the contrary, that the Constitution will guarantee France will continue to exist and that Europe will not succumb to what he calls ‘ultra-liberalism’.

For the benefit of its readers, in its report, the Times explains that the term ‘ultra-liberalism’ is ‘French jargon for the Anglo-American free market system’.

For the benefit of my readers, I should, perhaps, too explain that this latter expression as used by the Times is standard Fleet-Street jargon for the ‘illiberal welfare-state social democracy’ that currently prevails in both the USA and throughout pre-accession countries of the EU, including Britain.

Still, the fact remains those who in Britain want their country to remain at least as free as it is currently should welcome the confusion in the mind of the French electorate should it lead them to deliver there an overall majority of votes against the Constitution.

There would be some justice for the British were the French referendum to result in such a perverse outcome -- perverse, that is, relative to the wishes and aspirations in voting as they did of the French electorate.

After all, was it not by a comparable error on the part of the British electorate that, in the 1974 referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Economic Community, led them to vote for Britain's staying in, being swayed by their false belief that all they were signing up their country for was nothing more than memerbship of a common market and not subjection to the autocratic monstrosity that the French and Germans had in mind for Britain, being quite willing to become immurred in it themselves?

Fitting irony would it be, indeed, were Britain to become liberated from rule by Brussels Eurocrats by leftists of the very same kind as first thought up the whole crack-pot scheme in the first place and to whom it has ever after always pandered so!