Voting on a soft day (for adults only)

As I type this it’s a grey day out there. A soft rain is falling (unlike Bob Dylan’s famous Hard Rain) and things generally are getting a slow but cumulative drenching. It’s the kind of day where you might be tempted to stay indoors  and read a book or watch the telly or look through summer holiday sites about sunnier places.

But hunkering down and making another cup of tea isn’t an option today. Because today you can make history. So can I. So can anyone who has registered as a voter.  If you’re a political activist, you’ll need no prompting to get you down to the voting centre. If you’ve always voted and are a creature of habit, you’ll very likely walk the walk and make your mark. But if you’re part of the 35% who regularly can’t be bothered voting or believe no party deserves your vote, you’ll be checking the TV schedules and maybe sending a few emails to tell friends to tell them how fed up you are with all these damned elections.

If you’re one of this last group, let me offer a small number of reasons why you might want to break through the lethargy.

1. Your estimation that none of the candidates on offer deserve your vote may indeed be accurate: they may all be a shower of tossers. But if you don’t put your X beside one of these tossers, someone else will. I don’t mean that someone will pretend to be you and vote in your place. I mean  that if you don’t vote, you’re passing the choice of who gets elected into the hands of others. You’re as good as saying to these others “Do what you like with me over the next five years”.  Do you enjoy passing control to others?
2. You may feel that ‘None of the above’ applies, but almost certainly there’ll be some of the above who you think will be even more ghastly than the rest. There’s only one way you can increase the chances of Ghastly Person not being elected, and that’s to walk the walk and put your mark beside somebody else.
3. You’re a big boy or girl now. You know how to use the toilet, you have a job or had a job or would like a job. You don’t tend to  throw yourself on the floor and burst into tears when thing don’t go as you’d like them to. You know how to feed yourself, wash yourself, how to read and write and count. One of the advantages of being all growed up is that fewer people tell you what to do and what not to do – you make more decisions for yourself. You know how to talk and walk. As a big boy or girl you likewise have the privilege/duty today of helping decide who’s going to be in charge of shaping all our futures. Yes, you’re only one; but every single person who votes today could say that. Man/woman up. Walk the walk and make the mark.

I know there are constituencies where the result looks a foregone conclusion. But no constituency is a foregone conclusion: if nobody voted, no candidate would get elected. But a lot of people will vote, which means the result in that apparently foregone-conclusion constituency is in their hands. And yours.

Marginal constituencies, however, deserve particular attention: Fermanagh/South Tyrone,  North Belfast, Foyle, South Belfast, even Upper Bann – in those constituencies the race is going to be something between really close and tighter than a snake’s arse. We saw in 2010 how F/ST came down to four  votes – a carload. If you’re in one of those constituencies, you really really should be walking the walk through the soft rain today, making your mark and almost certainly making the difference.

As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest.

So put down the book, switch off the telly and walk the walk before it’s too late. You’ll be glad you did.