Because of moving around an awful lot in my life, I have rarely voted.  Now that I’m in Edinburgh I am settled enough to have voted in the last couple of elections and, now that I’ve done it, I find myself asking what the hell the point is.

That reflex response “Well if you don’t vote, you can’t complain” has always struck me as a load of old bollocks.  In fact, never mind that, it is a load of old bollocks.  When I first decided to cast my own vote, no matter how hopeless the party for whom I was voting, my reasoning was this: I didn’t want the slippery fuckers to be able to get away with it so easily.  I knew I was wasting my vote in most ways, but I just wanted to head off that criticism, that smug “Well if you didn’t vote…”

Ultimately though, voting is bordering on pointless.  Labour have moved so far to the right that the Tories are now fighting them on green issues and civil liberties – in other words, they have almost had to move to the left of Labour in order to differentiate themselves.  It’s ridiculous.  How the fuck does choosing between those two sets of snivelling lickspittles constitute any sort of meaningful choice?  How does the election of Cameron or Brown make even the tiniest difference to our day-to-day lives?  Tony Blair was essentially a Tory prime minister.  And given it makes no difference whatsoever, why are we voting?

A vote is supposed to be a choice, a statement of belief and principle, your chance to make a declaration of political allegiance and attempt to influence the way in which the country is governed.  Does anyone seriously believe that the current system, which is effectively two-party, offers us a choice in how the country is run?  Does it bollocks.  The influence of lobbyists, and hence wealth, in politics is so colossal that unless you promise to govern in a particular way, to play the game obediently, then the chances of your name even appearing on the ballot paper are basically nil.  As Tony Blair so brazenly demonstrated in the buildup to the war in Iraq, they are absolutely not accountable to us; not in the slightest.

So when we vote, what are we doing, legitimising the status quo?  It certainly feels that way.  We are basically giving the impression that we genuinely believe that choosing one special interest sock-puppet over another represents a meaingful choice for us and one which we are willing to take seriously.  Surely voter turnouts dropping to record-low levels makes more of a political statement than dutifully making an appearance and marking your box like a good little boy.  How, after all, can they claim legitimate mandate to govern when a mere twenty percent of the populace endorsed them?  They will claim it anyway of course, and blame us, but it feels like a stronger, more meaningful statement than simply choosing one bunch of toadies over another identical bunch of toadies who happen to wear differently-coloured ties.

The problem, really, is the alternative.  If you refuse to vote, which I think it a perfectly reasonable decision and one with which I am seriously toying at the moment, then how do you remain politically active?  I guess you join activist groups, participate in message boards and sites that debate political issues, and generally cherry-pick your participation in terms of single issues rather than sign up to any one morally bankrupt political party or another.  It’s politics by aggregate rather than partisan allegiance, which seems dead in the water at the moment.  Here anyway.  Look at The States and partisan tribalism has more or less engulfed the political process, and why?  I guess because they genuinely feel that picking Obama or McCain or, until recently, Clinton over the others will produce genuinely difficult outcomes for the country.

Over here, does anyone seriously believe Cameron, Blair, Brown or any of these twits are significantly different from one another?  The great success of the Scottish National Party this year has been their mediocre inoffensiveness, allowing them to play the nationalist card, which in much of Scotland translates as borderline racism, and thus mobilise the bovine masses without seriously threatening to do anything meaningful which might upset anyone.  Or, more significantly, make them give a shit one way or another.

So what are we left with?  I am increasingly finding myself in a situation where I can barely justify voting.  I would rather a pathetically low turnout, as political statements go, to pottering along voting for this or that identikit besuited mannequin and continuing to give the impression that they are actually doing their jobs.  They are not.  We are not being listened to.  Our votes are fucking meaningless.  And what can we do, spoil the ballot?  Maybe.  Not vote?  I don’t know.  I wouldn’t be happy with that at all, it just doesn’t feel right, and of course it is impossible to differentiate between the indifferent non-voter and the pointed non-voter.  So it may be difficult to make a statement that way, but it is very close to being the only real statement we can make as an electorate.  Is this too disillusioned for a Friday?  Sorry.  Have some gin and forget I ever said this.

Fela Kuti – Government Chicken Boy
Billy Bragg – NPWA
Radiohead – Electioneering

Not that I mean to make things even more pompous and portentous around here than they already are, but I just read an article about Evangelical Christians in America causing family schisms by switching their vote to the Democrats and found myself bubbling away with inane chatter once more. Sorry.

Articles like this show up human rationalism and thought for the sham that it is, if you ask me. We humans are so proud of our brains, of the power of thought, analysis and all this other shit, but ultimately even on subjects as important as political decision-making we are basically tribal.

I have never entirely understood how Evangelical Christians can almost invariably end up as Republicans, apart from the unavoidable conclusion that for a great many of them terms like ‘the love of Jesus Christ’ seems to rather oddly translate as ‘vicious, petty, small-minded bigotry’. I have my doubts as to whether that was quite what a bearded Jewish hippy would have had in mind, to be honest.

That Biblical teaching translates so directly into the policies of Conservatism, the right wing and free market fundamentalism strikes me as far from obvious. I have always tended to assume, despite my rather venomous antipathy towards devout belief, that most devoutly religious people actually do think that the teachings of their religion centre around love and kindness, compassion and generosity. Don’t they? I mean seriously? Otherwise, why not just fucking throw the whole fucking lot in the bin right now?

When you look at it that way, love and kindness, compassion and generosity are palpably absent from most of the political teachings of the politicians most such people tend to choose as their leaders. Quite how the parents in that particular article came to ask their children ‘how can you vote for abortion?’, without ever asking themselves how they can vote for a party whose attitude to its own poor seems to be to cut them entirely adrift and fuck ‘em if they can’t survive, indicates a childlike, bovine credulity that I find baffling. How exactly does ‘protecting the family’ involve attacking other people’s families? Do you honestly think that Jesus really would persecute, terrify and ridicule homosexuals? Do you really take it as a given that Jesus would hate basic socialised medicine, well-funded state schools and some form of protection for the unemployed and unemployable? I am not saying a religious person should automatically take a left-wing line these things either, but I am not convinced that trying to support the weak and the poor is exactly an anti-Christian sentiment.

This shows up on the other side as well. Most left-leaning types slaughter the Bush administration for its cheerful disregard for the US Constitution and in particular the checks and balances imposed on government therein. Those same lefties also tend also to lionise Bill Clinton, particularly after the utter debacle of the Bush years, but Clinton was just as aggressive in undermining government oversight as Bush is. He was, at heart, an authoritarian. He may have been an authoritarian whose policies we preferred and whose bungling was generally restricted to his administering of the Presidential Saucisson d’Amour, but that doesn’t excuse it in the slightest. Or at least it shouldn’t.

My mother became positively tearful with agitation when I said that I could never, ever bring myself to vote for Tony Blair, I guess because her politics are still quite firmly rooted in the partisan wars between Labour and Tory that she grew up with. I had to point out to her that voting for Blair would involve voting for so many things she didn’t believe in that it would be crazy to do so, but I doubt I entirely persuaded her.

Basically, all the article above exposes is that we vote tribally. What we believe depends almost entirely on who is telling us, irrespective of what they are actually saying, and we will not listen to arguments from ‘the other side’ even if they make sense. We all do it and it can lead to egregious mistakes.

Not one of us, I would imagine, examines our political decisions on their own merits, and free from the knee-jerk instinct to support our sort. We all tend to see only the evidence that supports our own theories and this only gets worse as we get older and increasingly surround ourselves with people with whom we agree on most matters. What does that mean? Well it means that we aren’t using our brains, doesn’t it. It’s a more gut reaction than that – it’s basically the same instinct that leads to street gangs. Human beings, in other words, are fucking idiots, despite what our species’ colossal vanity might tell us.

We really should make an effort to try and have these inner dialogues more directly between our own consciences and the actual facts at hand, rather than seeing it through the lens of these sorts of silly, falsely dichotomised tribal shouting matches.

Billy Bragg – Ideology

Well I voted last week for the first time in my life. I can’t believe it has taken me until past the age of thirty to finally do this, but there are some slightly mitigating circumstances (read: feeble excuses).

Basically, this is only the second time I have been in one place long enough to actually get on the electoral roll during an election, and the first time I was too lazy and disorganised to actually get my arse in gear to do anything about it. Most other years I have been living in shared flats where I never registered, or just moving so frequently that The Man couldn’t quite keep up with me – sort of a half-arsed modern vagrant.

Living on the boats down in London virtually no-one was registered because that meant being hit up for council tax, which we were all keen to avoid anyway, so this is the first time I’ve actually been sufficiently legit to scrawl my X on a few bits of paper and generally participate in the wonders of modern democracy.

Now, as an avowed cynic, I rather see voting as being somewhat akin to choosing which particular junkie you’d like to have come round and burgle your house, so I am not feeling overly optimistic about the whole process, but I do think it’s important not to give the scheming weasels that superior Get Out of Jail Free card that they have a habit of sniffing down their noses at us: ‘Well if you don’t participate in the democratic process, then you can’t very well expect your voice to be heard, now can you?’

Well I am participating in the democratic process, you slippery eels, and I still don’t expect my voice to be heard, because you will be so busy polishing the ringpieces of big business and helping yourselves from the tax payer funded mini-bars that I doubt you’ll find the time to give my voice even a second’s consideration.

To mark this momentous occasion I thought I’d post one of the sillier songs in my music collection. The Ukranians were formed by ex-Wedding Present guitarist Peter Solowka and one of their songs found its way onto a Cooking Vinyl compilation I picked up back in about 1995 or so. This song is mental, but huge fun, and can be found on their album Kultura. They’ve even been known to throw in the odd Smiths cover (all in Ukranian, of course) as well, so it may be worth a punt if you’re feeling particularly frisky.

The Ukranians – Polityka

[Edit: Following Stewart's contribution in the Comments below I feel compelled to point you to their site and recommend you go and listen to the Anarchy in the UK snippet in their music section. Next time there's a Contrast Podcast about cover versions, I am baggsying that one - pure genius!]