24 days to go until the election: but does it really matter?

I found out some useful facts on voting in the general election. In my constituency - Kingston and Surbiton - we are Liberal Democrats. So although Labour is in power, my town is still very much Liberal Democrat. Issues like the council tax rate is set by local councillors who are also Liberal Democrats. The important point being that Labour knows the majority of Kingston and Surbiton voted yellow. So it is not whether you voted Labour, but whether your neighbours did as well to gain an overall majority.

I did some number crunching also. The BBC news website has a good guide to your local election called Election 2010. Only 49,750 people who could vote in Kingston and Surbiton did so in the last general election, which is quite a small number when you consider that Kingston alone has 147,000 possible voters. Just over half of these votes counted for Liberal Democrats in the last general election of 2005, whereas a third counted for Conservatives. It doesn't look likely we could ever be a Labour town.

Yet, if the majority of Kingston and Surbiton did vote Labour then we would suddenly become Labour. The Election 2010 BBC website has a list of the potential local MP candidates. There's a point in all this, and I guess what I'm saying is to use your vote.

I get the impression from talking to friends and spending a whole afternoon on the Have Your Say forum on the BBC website that people are disillusioned. A general consensus being that politicians are all the same, only out for themselves and that nothing ever changes. This may be true and if people find politics boring it's because we feel powerless in the process. But I think not bothering to vote is not the way to go.

Imagine if everyone voted in Britain. I can only see it sending shock waves through Westminster that actually people are interested in the way the country is run.