General Election 2024 - Why I Won't Vote

When both a rock and a hard place look better than the candidates on offer.

So a sodden Rishi Sunak has called a general election, and if rumours are to be believed it’s because he didn’t want to lose his position as leader of the Conservative party. A job he ended up in through back stabbing and where he was soundly beaten by Liz Truss.

A wet man

Britain has a weird system, which you can go and read about elsewhere. In reality though there are two big parties in England, with the Liberal Democrats running a distant third. In Scotland there’s also the SNP who have been happily imploding for the last year and their platform of Trudeau like attacks on free speech along with “Socialism and Independence, but England pays for it all!” seems to have finally run out of steam. Maybe electing a leader who seemed to hate Scottish people wasn’t smart after all.

I very much doubt I will choose to vote at all.

The choices are awful. In reality all of the major parties are defined by a few things. They’re all socially liberal, pro-immigration from the global South, pro big-business and appear to hate English people. They are also named after things which they are not - Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats are none of those things. Plus there’s the huge talent gap which seems common all across the European political class.

I don’t agree with the argument that if you don’t vote, you can’t complain. Aside from it being a kind of Baby-Boomer lore, it’s illogical and silly. What about those who turn 18 after the election? Or those who are ill? Or suddenly away? We don’t live in a culture where voting is compulsory, and low attendances have little impact on the creatures elected anyway. Spoiling ballots makes no real difference, and having watched an electoral count first hand I have no faith that a spoiled ballot would be noticed, or correctly counted. There’s also the historical argument that voting is a hard won freedom. In Britain this holds less water than in many countries, but the average person puts no value on any freedom beyond consumer choice now so this argument has become rather moot.

Democracy is a system designed for homogenous societies deciding over small differences. It’s ideal for picking out if there should be a 15% or 20% sales tax, and things along those lines. It’s also intended for socieites where voters have skin in the game - not where the politicians can all flee the country without losing much or where robbing Peter to pay Paul is seen as a moral choice on Paul’s part. Democracy turns into a horrible system where a fifth of the electorate will vote along ethnic lines, where all major parties strive to be as similar as possible and when the wishes of the voting public are wholly ignored. Democracy relies on expecting more bodies to make a better choice than fewer bodies or trying to attach a moral superiority to one side simply because it’s bigger.

I don’t agree with the sentiment, but it amuses me.

As someone who’s on the right of politics, there’s little worth voting for. The Conservative party apes their American cousins, being conservative in name only and wholly beholden to big business, globalism and Atlanticist international politics. They have conserved nothing, despite being in control of Britain for the bulk of the last 40 years. Below them, there’s UKIP a party founded to drag them to the right on the EU. Something they did successfully, and quite why they still exist is more of a question of money than politics. There’s also the Reform party, who seem mostly interested in being on TV shows nobody watches and using racial slurs on twitter. Both parties appear more like the guy in the pub who, in his cups, declares he knows how to fix the country.

There are elements of the left which I’d be keen on voting for - cuts to the cost of living, more progressive taxation, breaking up monopolies or re-nationalising things which were nationalised in a kind of demented and foolish manner (trains). In reality though, a vote for the left now is a vote for left wing social indoctrination accelerating, life continuing to get more expensive for ordinary people and the permanent welfare class expanding. The average Briton, whose views tend to be on the right socially and on the left politically finds all the major parties to be the exact opposite of that.

You may also have some views on big issues. Ukraine for example - you won’t find a party saying we should steer well clear of that. Or Palestine, a problem we would do well to remain aloof from. Or tackling inflation through the proven logic of printing less money. Or cutting living costs (like VAT, fuel duties, and other non-progressive taxes or by trying to force landlords off the market) rather than jacking the minimum wage up and up until the shelf stacker and junior doctor are on the same hourly rate (2030 by my prediction). None of these things are issues you can really vote upon.

In Britain here we have a system which no longer suits the country, with parties who are all photocopies of each other - albeit on different coloured paper. Nobody wants to put issues to the population, or help them out, and the whole election is simply making the voters feel involved before treating them and their views with utter contempt for another half-decade.

There’s a big dot on a downward graph saying “you are here”. Enjoy it, it’s not getting better. The bottom is a long way off.

I’d say that voting encourages our political masters, but they don’t really care. If they win a majority off the back of a few hundred individual votes (possible in the British system) they’ll rule in exactly the same manner as if they win by a clear 5 million.

Let’s all ignore the circus. We know they hate us, that they don’t care what they do to us and that they’d replace us all with roombas with sufficiently advanced programming at the drop of the proverbial hat.