The Last Voter in England?

Thursday 15 November, and Election fever grips the Land. Three cheerful tellers sit behind a table in our village hall like the wise old monkeys they probably are, as the People Decide. The girls and boys in political rosettes have stayed away, I notice. Or maybe the Three Wise Ones are political, but hiding it in the interests of Police Impartiality.

The UK Police and Crime Commissioner race is on, and so’s the Kettle.

This is British democracy at its glorious best and awful worst.

I'm a congenital Voter, Me.

Like them or hate them, you can't complain about them if you didn't bother to elect them, say I.

There's enough mitteleuropean blood in my veins from my parents’ generation to appreciate a country where you can vote.

The more of this sort of thing we do, the more we may get a taste for it and build a more participative intelligent democracy. That’s my fantasy, anyway.

So why are some 80% of the voters likely to sit this one out?

Well, for a start, nobody really knows what the hell it’s supposed to be about. In the bad old days you elected a council, and they put people on a governance authority for your local police. It was a bit of British great and good stitch up, but by and large it worked. Jolly PC49’s gave kiddies the time of day, the beer stayed warm, England lost the Test Match, and old maids cycled safely to early communion through autumn mists.

Many suspect this whole thing ain’t broke, and this is just £75m going on another lame stunt by our leaders to convince us they believe in democracy and so should we. They could be right, but...

For seconds, there's little to argue about from a strictly party political point of view, until someone is crazy enough to start a political party dedicated to sacking police officers, penny pinching myopia, mind-numbind levels of bureaucracy, letting fraudsters get away with it, and rewarding Thieves with knighthoods.

No party believes in that prospectus. But they all implement it anyway. So where’s the choice? And why have a Party political beauty contest about it?

Finally, few of the candidates are known across the area they will represent. High deposits and the lack of a mailshot are said to have stacked the odds against independents before they got out of the starting gate. So perhaps this is a referendum on whether you want to vote for party candidates or independents. For all we know some of both are completely crazy, but what do we know? They are all going to reduce bureaucracy, put more officers on the beat, catch crooks, save money and generally make us feel good. They’ll get us Police who are Judge Dredd, George Dixon and Inspector Morse rolled into one.

So what’s not to like? Vote early, vote often, as they used to say in northern Ireland. I managed the first, and felt pretty damn smug about it for at least ten minutes. Next step in my democracy rollout — a directly elected General Synod.