Giving without expectation is the purest form of generosity. To gift something that you own, perhaps something very precious, without any stipulation about what you want in return is a morally admirable act.
Except when it’s your vote.
Because people fought to get you that vote. People died to get you that vote. People fought wars, gave up livelihoods, camped out in the cold and the rain and the snow so that you could have a say in who governs this country.
And how do we honour those people? Apparently, quite a lot of us do it by gaily tossing our vote towards a bunch of right-wing, xenophobic, ill-informed, corporate-focused tosspots who happen to be good at getting on the telly, and trilling as we do so, “Oh, I’m very disillusioned! It’s a protest vote, you see!”
Well, here is some shocking news. Protest votes have exactly the same effect as any other type of vote. They do not somehow get filed in a special box marked “Votes that people only cast because they’re cross”. If you vote for someone whose party believes women shouldn’t get any maternity pay, gay people shouldn’t have equal rights or that climate change doesn’t exist, then those people get into office and start implementing their policies. And it’s a bit late then to bleat that you were so terribly busy, you never had time to check what they actually wanted to do, and anyway, didn’t they understand, it was only a protest vote.
Tough. Too late. Democracy is a serious business. If you vote for bigoted buffoons, you get a country run by bigoted buffoons – and what’s worse, you drive all the other parties in the same direction. Bigoted buffoonery becomes the accepted order of things, because that’s what people voted for.
An awful lot of folk seem to believe that voting doesn’t change anything. I regularly hear people – often people I respect – trot out that old line, “If voting changed anything, they’d ban it” and it makes me furious.
Voting does change things. If you vote for a party that thinks poor people don’t deserve any benefits, then families will become homeless and children will go hungry. That is how politics works. And I don’t think those desperate children will care whether or not you’re looking on in horror, shamefacedly whispering, “It was only a protest vote…”
