General Election 2015

"Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in."

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."

"I wonder who would lead us if none of us would vote?"

I write this on the eve of the General Election 2015 in the UK. The polls all indicate that this will be the closest election since 1974 and a hung parliament looks inevitable.

In this climate we are all being urged to vote and to use our vote wisely. For many in marginal seats voting "wisely" will mean voting tactically to seek to ensure that a particular party does not win. On the other hand the Green Party insists we should vote for whom we believe in and not tactically. But what if we don't believe in any party? What if we feel that the whole system of parliamentary democracy is fundamentally flawed? What if government is incapable of solving the major systemic problems we face today?

Two significant opinion pieces in the Guardian newspaper have been published today. The first, by Owen Jones, concerns the rise of English nationalism and convincingly argues that another hung parliament should lead to electoral reform. Owen goes on to plead for a federal Britain with anew populism uniting English, Scots and Welsh against the "rapacious elite." Owen's piece reads like a manifesto for anarchy and, yet, in a video contained in the online version of the paper on the same day, he passionately urges us to vote. The second, by George Monbiot, rightly suggests that the Tories, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and even the SNP have generally reached a consensus about which issues are worthy of debate. In particular, all are committed to the concept of economic growth regardless of the effects this has on the planet. Monbiot calls for new ways of building political grass-roots communities transforming politics from the ground up. Now that sounds like anarchism!