Politicians must take the blame for voter apathy

'To deal with electoral disillusionment by forcing electors to vote risks having the opposite effect'

Quite recently the Britain in Europe campaign did some polling to establish who, among well-known personalities, would be likeliest to sway public opinion in a putative referendum on the euro. The three names which came out top, way above politicians of any party, were Des Lynam, Sir Trevor McDonald and Richard Branson.

Quite recently the Britain in Europe campaign did some polling to establish who, among well-known personalities, would be likeliest to sway public opinion in a putative referendum on the euro. The three names which came out top, way above politicians of any party, were Des Lynam, Sir Trevor McDonald and Richard Branson.

This doesn't, of course, tell you what would happen if such a campaign was actually happening. But it is a snapshot which illustrates, better perhaps than any number of dry statistics about voter turnout, the perilous level of credibility enjoyed by party politics. In the US, the contest to elect a President on Tuesday is likely to be decided by who wins the highest share of the votes of perhaps only 50 per cent of Americans. In Britain's European elections the Conservatives' victory was real; but it was based on lower aggregate share of the national vote than in any election in this century.

The principal fear that stalks the Government is that their core supporters will stay at home. Simultaneously, it is possible to see in the willingness of the fuel protesters to take to the streets or motorways further evidence - which some spuriously use to justify the protests - of a disillusionment with conventional politics.

Against this unpromising background come all sort of ideas for more fully engaging the electorate in the mainstream political process. Yesterday the psephologist Michael Thresher did little more than confirm on the BBC's Today programme what was already apparent from the experiments carried out in the last local elections - namely that the one sure way of increasing voter turnout - in some cases by as much as 50 per cent - is to insist that all votes are cast by post, as they are in New Zealand's local elections.

Much more than early and - in afew cases - delayed voting, supermarket polling stations, optional postal voting, and any of the other experimental devices for increasing turnout, all-postal ballots produce real results - surprisingly so given the dislike many people have for filling out official pieces of paper. This rediscovery in turn prompts the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union to renew its call, as it did yesterday, for compulsory voting, a system already in place in Australia, Austria, Latin America, Turkey and Greece.

In a Fabian pamphlet earlier this year, Tom Watson and Mark Tami of the AEEU made some interesting points in favour of compulsory voting, including the contention that single or limited-issue pressure groups are likely to be less proportionally influential the closer voter turnout is to 100 per cent. They also argued that it might reduce the funds needed to mobilise the party's natural supporters and so increase the tendency to argue about the policies and issues which differentiated the parties. Finally they point to the undoubted, if rather banal, truth that compulsory voting can be relied upon to produce the highest turnouts.

Much less persuasive, however, is the pamphlet's argument that unrest at the compulsion will be minimal. "Some retired colonel from Hampshire would be bound to make a stand against what he saw as the intrusion of the state," they blithely acknowledge, "and no doubt the BBC would film him wearing all his medals whilst he ripped up his polling card." They then go on to say this can all be dealt with by small fines for non-participation. (In Australia the fine is currently around £18).

Apart from the possible - and unappealing - inference that compulsory voting might automatically help Labour, since the poorest electors would be the most reluctant to risk fines, there is a more telling objection. To deal with electoral apathy by forcing electors to vote, risks having exactly the opposite effect. If ever there was a right time to introduce compulsory voting, this isn't it.

It may, moreover, be no coincidence that the AEEU is militantly opposed to proportional representation, a much less draconian means by which the voter can arguably be more engaged. If you happen to live in the - roughly - 500 parliamentary seats where under the first-past-the-post system the result can safely be predicted before an election campaign even gets under way, your sense of electoral potency is bound to be somewhat circumscribed.

In the end, however, all this reliance on changing the mechanics of voting - including electoral systems - misses the point that voter disengagement is rooted in a much profounder malaise. Some of the factors are no doubt global and spring from a belief that governments no longer have the influence they once did. But politicians themselves cannot escape the blame. Cynicism is a powerful weapon in the hands of oppositions, and the Conservatives use it day after day, slipping into the mantle of One Nation one day and ruthlessly exploiting fears about asylum the next.

But governments - including this one - are hardly blameless. If you double-count spending figures, if you over-present, above all if you regard the parliamentary system (in the Blair adminstration's case explicitly) as only one, rather than the primary one, of many forms of modern democracy, you do a disservice to what elections are all about. You also incidentally become too reliant on a press which can bite you as energetically as it once drooled over you.

As it happens, all is not lost. In the US, trivia - the Gore kiss and all - has increasingly threatened to elbow out the issues, and who is to say that may not itself be a factor in an expected low turnout? Here, turnout, at least in England and Wales, where there is no lawmaking Parliament to rival Westminster, turnout may actually be significantly higher than in 1997. First the differences between the parties - not only on Europe but also on tax and spending - will be much wider than they were then. Secondly, and more conditionally, past experience suggests that turnout will increase in direct relation to how close the polls suggest the election will be.

This doesn't mean the nuts and bolts don't matter. Local government - historically the base and forcing ground for national politics - badly needs reviving by giving it greater freedom and power, as Peter Mandelson, the sometime prince of presentation, went some way to acknowledging in his Herbert Morrison lecture last night. Primaries would go a long way to taking candidate selection out of the hands of Labour control freaks and Conservative sectarians. Postal-voting is clearly worth looking at. But in the end there are no easy answers; the task of building and spreading trust and interest lies with the politicians themselves, and the kind of discourse they opt for.

Increasingly British politicians have looked across the Atlantic for their campaigning models, Blair to Clinton, and Hague to Bush and the Ontario right. The razzmatazz, the clever but empty slogans, the emphasis on style and personality have all been part of that. But if the turnout across the US on Tuesday is as poor as some fear, it will be a warning that - among other things - treating political campaigning as a branch of showbusiness hasn't worked.

* d.macintyre@independent.co.uk