Jayne Dowle: Your vote is vital in these troubled times

In many parts of the world, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China, the right to vote is not automatic. In South Africa, black people could not vote until 1994. And in our own country, it’s not yet a century since all men and women were allowed to enter the polling station on equal terms.

It is often forgotten that until the Representation of the People Act was passed in 1918, only 58 per cent of the adult male population in the country could vote in public elections. The right to vote was subject to a number of conditions, chief of which was whether an individual owned property. If you were a mill-hand or miner living in a rented house, for instance, you had no electoral rights.

Until this landmark year, women could not vote at all. In the name of suffrage, they starved themselves in prison, suffered countless acts of police brutality and even took their own lives. There was no Human Rights Act to protect them then, no lawyers willing to take the government to court in their name.

Indeed, it took until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 for all men and women over the age of 21, regardless of social standing and property ownership, to be given the same rights.

This means that there are people alive today who may remember their mother being unable to have her say. If you’re so sick of the empty rhetoric and pointless arguing, remember this too. We shouldn’t take our democratic right to vote for granted.

I’ve heard plenty of people comment that it doesn’t make any difference whether you vote or not, or indeed, who you might vote for. I’d say that this is nonsense. If you don’t vote, you can’t rightfully complain about anything a government subsequently does.

And if you don’t vote, it’s arguable that your interests will not be furthered when it eventually comes to making policy and passing legislation. Those who don’t vote in large numbers – such as younger people – are at the mercy of brutal policies such as tuition fees imposed upon them. Those who do turn out to the polling station in droves, pensioners in particular, find themselves shielded by politicians keen to seek their support.

I agree that neither Theresa May for the Conservatives nor Jeremy Corbyn for Labour are what you might regard as an ideal candidate to lead us through these dark and dangerous times. However, it is fallacious to not vote because we don’t like the leader. Politics is about more than who is in charge of a party on a given day.

It was complicated and overwhelming enough for voters to deal with the issues surrounding the Brexit fallout. Now we have had three terror attacks on our shores in the space of weeks to comprehend too. No political leader can possibly present us with a guarantee that such an atrocity will not happen again.

The scale of the extremism challenge is currently so huge, that no Prime Minister coming into the job tomorrow could honestly say they have it under control. How can they? Security sources say that there are at least 23,000 individuals in the UK being monitored for suspicious extremist motives against innocent people. Around 3,000 of these are judged to pose the serious threat of committing an act of terrorism.

However we shouldn’t just sigh at the terrible state of the world and stay at home today. And neither should we allow ourselves to be tied into knots over what this leader or that would, or would not do, in any putative situation.

Instead we should vote for the local candidate who most fits our own beliefs and values. Who knows? In years to come, that individual might become the greatest Prime Minister the country has ever known. If we don’t support the political process from the bottom up, it will eventually fall in on itself. Do we really want democracy to become the crumbling edifice our detractors seek?

This General Election, called on a whim and executed under the most difficult and bewildering of surrounding events, promises to be one of the most historic yet. Please don’t ignore it. When your children and grandchildren ask you what you did in June 2017, you want to be able to tell them that you placed a vote for them because you could.