I moved house four months ago, to what turned out to be a safe-seat constituency. It’s embarrassingly safe, in fact – the Conservatives have held this seat without interruption since 1931 and, in two-thirds of the elections since then, have gained more than 50% of the vote.
Even calling it a safe seat seems like a colossal understatement. With three weeks to go, the results of the general election have already been strapped down and locked up and carved in stone. Everybody already knows who’s going to win, even the other candidates. That’s why nobody bothers to campaign here any more.
So far, I’ve only received one leaflet from our Ukip candidate, using a carpark ticket machine – as if to demonstrate his all-powerful dominion over the machines. The Green candidate knocked on my door at 2pm one Tuesday afternoon, and looked so startled to get a response that she essentially just ran away after about five seconds. And that’s it. To campaign here would be to spaff precious time and resources down the toilet.
So the instinct would be not to vote. Not to even register to vote. Because, really, what’s the point? The result is a foregone conclusion. It’d be pointless to expect change if I wanted change and, if I wanted to maintain the status quo, everyone else would maintain it for me. I may as well just spend the whole of 7 May in my pants, eating Pringles and playing Grand Theft Auto.
And yet, despite all the logic to the contrary, I’ve registered to vote. Call me an idiot, but you never know. Perhaps Ukip will slice the rightwing vote in two, leaving the nearest left-leaning candidate open to exploit the schism. Perhaps my vote can make that happen. And perhaps the 35% of people in this town who haven’t voted in a general election for 20 years will magically register to vote, and vote in May, and vote the same way that I do, and together we’ll edge out all those decades of complacency. You never know.
Monday is the last day that you can register to vote for this election. You may have already noticed this because Twitter has gone into full-blown condescension mode. Every third person who tweets anything today has inexplicably taken on the persona of a fully annoying trendy vicar, dripping in unearned sanctimony as they tell you how, like, voting’s really cool. These people are all uniformly terrible, and you’re right to hate them.
And it’s not even like you should believe them, because voting isn’t cool. Voting’s a massive bloody chore. You walk for half an hour, go into a room that smells vaguely of death, scratch a thing with a bit of paper and then walk all the way home again. Voting is rubbish. The only time that voting isn’t rubbish is when your polling station is a primary school, and you can go use one of the tiny urinals while screaming “I AM A TERRIFYING GIANT!” at your own genitals. That’s fun.
But, despite all this, you should still register to vote. You never know. I live in a constituency so safe that I may as well ball up my ballot paper, push it up my bum and spend the afternoon farting it out at pigeons. But I’ve still registered to vote, because you never know.
Statistically, if you’re reading this, you probably have a much better chance of affecting change than I do, so you should definitely register. It’s a ballache, it’s a long shot, and I hate myself for joining the trendy vicar brigade, but register to vote. You never know.
