I am not, in the usual sense, a person given to public discipline. Teach another adult what to do on their Thursday and you usually end up wearing their coffee, properly.
But let me indulge, just for once, because tomorrow is local election day in many parts of England, and someone has to say something about the great British backsliding that is about to define our relationship with the ballot box at parish and pit level.
In the last round of councilor elections, voting in other wards went south by thirty percent. Thirty percent. Stay with that for a while. Seven out of ten adults, who own the franchise their grandparents fought to protect, would rather put the kettle on, watch a man on YouTube install a gearbox, or sit there raging about Westminster as if the council had nothing to do with their lives.
As if the council didn't run their bins, set their parking fees, decide if the nearest vape shop can open at seven o'clock in the morning, and quietly decide, in the dark arts of local planning, if a four-story building will go up next year on the piece of brownfield where their kids are currently kicking a ball.
I run businesses for a living, and I can tell you, as readers of this magazine will already know in their bones, that the people who shape your operating costs are, for the most part, not the smart young SpAds and the ambitious young ministers preparing today's agenda.
They are councillors. People with names like Peter, Paul and Jane, even I have been one for over ten years. People with bad intentions and, mostly, very good intentions. They put in place plans to help business prices. They offer, or refuse, your A-board, your awning, your application for a pavement license so punters can drink rosé in the rain.
They decide whether your high street will boast a substandard bus service or a confused taxi rank flanked by three Costas and Greggs. They signed off on road closures that could cost a small retailer two weeks worth of resurfacing work. They manage procurement budgets where billions are quietly siphoned off every year, and your company would probably be eating well, if you didn't bother with a tender portal.
In short, if you own a business, the council is your landlord, your regulator, your customer and your traffic warden, all rolled into one damp Edwardian building with a non-functioning lift. Ignore it at your peril.
Now. I will not tell you who you voted for. I have strong opinions, in fact, I won't bother about them here because, frankly, that's not the point, and you have yours. That's glorious, frustrating, occasionally infuriating glory. You may be a conservative all your life who has had enough. You could be a full Labour, a Lib Dem with a clipboard, a walking Green, a screaming Reform man, or one of those nice independents who got in last time on a one-issue ticket about the duck pond.
I don't care. I honestly, seriously, don't care. All I care about is that tomorrow you put on a coat, go to the church hall, the elementary school or the depressing community center, take the hard pencil they thoughtfully provided, and put the cross in the box.
Because here is the strange truth: democracy is a muscle. Abuse it, abuse it, abuse it with heavy sighs and a glass of red waiting at home, but abuse it. Leave it on the shelf for a long time and it wilts, and when it wilts people come, and they just show up, they get to decide everything on all of us. That is not a left-wing or right-wing view. How the statistics work at the polling station.
I'm told there's a trendy line these days, rewritten by sixth graders and jaded administrators alike, that “voting doesn't change anything”. The only reasonable answer is: it's amazing, then you won't object to my vote being counted twice. Yes, things change. Ask any small business owner who has watched a sympathetic council crack down on parking charges, or an unsympathetic council slap on the workplace tax. Ask the publican who is dealing with a three o'clock in the morning license refusal. Ask a parent whose new primary school is in place because three hundred neighbors are bothering to leave on a wet Thursday in May.
So. Tomorrow. Dress up, pick up the pencil, come on in. I'm not telling you who you voted for. I tell you to vote. I promise, there is a noticeable difference.
