I wrote this piece for the Queen Edith’s Community Forum as part of their local election coverage.
In the early 2000s the Electoral Commission published a video titled I don’t do politics. It was in part in response to the very low turnout at the 2001 General Election – one that the recent general election managed to achieve an even-worse turnout of under 60%.
Democracy, like charity, starts at home – and also does not end there. ‘Think global, act local’ has long been the catchphrase of environmentalist movements. Democracy is a far wider and deeper concept than that of elections. Furthermore, Cambridge’s local history shows that elections in themselves can be extremely undemocratic – as the old Liberal Party found out in 1859. An extremely restricted franchise (mainly property-owning men) and a system where your voting record was made public meant that voters’ personal and business interests could be – and were threatened if they did not vote for certain candidates. (See Lost Cambridge here). The Ballot Act 1872 put an end to such widespread abuses.
Recent advances in communications technology has over the course of a generation made it much easier for electorates to find out who their candidates are and put their questions to them. The website https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/ enables anyone to find out who the candidates are with just their postcode. Not only that, candidates and parties can upload weblinks, social media pages, and videos for candidates to access. Yet in my own experience as an independent candidate in 2023, only a couple of people proactively got in touch with me – even though over 260 voted for me.
In an era where global politics is changing significantly and where we are told that democracy faces a new range of threats like none before, are we moving to an age where we have to ask what we can do to strengthen democracy rather than asking what underpaid (no – really!), under-resourced, and underpowered local politicians can do for us?
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The Cambridge Town Owl 