More election dissatisfaction

Readers may recall that I was rather annoyed back in 2024, when I ended up being unable to vote in that year’s General Election due to an ill-timed trip abroad. My inability to apply for a postal ballot in a timely fashion hasn’t been a problem for today’s local elections, as I’m safely at home and able to make it down to the polling station in person, but I still may end up abstaining, since not one of the candidates in my constituency is particularly inspiring.

I always used to vote for the Communists, represented in my district by a veteran comrade who looked like a contemporary of Joe Stalin himself, but the Party hasn’t put up a candidate since he passed away about a decade ago, so more recently I’ve been backing the Greens. They have evidently chosen to focus their electoral efforts elsewhere this year though, so I’ve been left politically homeless.

The seat I live in is not a marginal, so I guess my vote is not going to make much difference anyhow, but I still feel that I would be failing in my civic duty if I didn’t participate at all, so I’ll probably write in my own name for President or something.

Looking at the bigger picture, it seems certain that both Labour and the Conservatives are going to suffer some serious damage as an electorate thoroughly disenchanted with mainstream politics fractures unpredictably. Whether that will benefit broadly progressive parties like the Greens, and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, or reactionary currents represented by Reform, remains to be seen. I’m hoping for the former, but the experience of the last few years suggests we need to prepare for the worst.