Make your mark

Having found the scout hut down the back alley indicated on a map with West where North should have been, I cast my vote this morning. Even though this is one of the most racist seats in London, the BNP candidate chooses not to live here, the only candidate to stand from outside the constituency. Or perhaps he was forced out by sheer weight of immigrant chavs.
Of course I know that few people care about my vote. Only my sitting MP has bothered to canvas or leaflet me; he sent me a personalised letter. So why don't politicians care about my vote even though I should be a target, having voted differently to last time? Because our electoral system is a pile of pants and in no way conducive to constructive policy making. Or to put it in Greek, myopic and parochial politics lead to a hegemony based on apathy more than democracy based on ideology.
Let me explain it this way: in each election, the major parties can expect a minimum share of the vote (unless their campaign is particularly badly run). The Tories and new Labour can expect 30% of the vote each and the Lib Dems about 15%, with another 5% spread around various other parties, notably in the non-English countries. That leaves 20% potential swing voters.
Labour has a majority of 160, which is approximately a quarter of all seats. So the only swing voters who really count are 20% of the voters in a quarter of all seats, or 5% of the electorate. Of this five per cent, only about a third are required to swing a marginal seat, so if you can capture these people, you can win the election.
But who are these people? If you ask Experian, the credit-checking company, they can profile them for you. People who live in small towns in Dorset, Hampshire and the west Midlands on fair incomes in their forties with a little debt; this is the information on us they sold to the main parties. If you fit into this bracket you're far more likely to have been visited by your candidate than anyone else. You're also more likely to have been selected for a focus group which the parties rely on to formulate their policies. This means that your concerns as a middle-aged middle Englander which will be resolutely focussed on short-term local issues, will count for a lot more than if you're in a different demographic.
This blinkered approach which focusses on politicians' ambitions to get into government rather than promoting policies which would be less easy to sell but potentially more beneficial discourages turn-out and leads to the feeling of resignation that people express where it doesn't matter who gets in, it'll all be the same; or, it doesn't matter who I vote for, the same party will win.
The fact that we have a right to vote is something that we should not take for granted but should continue to exercise that right. Similarly we should not blind ourselves to the fact that our vote is somewhat diminished in such a tarnished political structure.