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The abstentionist elephant in the room
There is feverish speculation about how many people will vote for each party in Thursday’s UK election. But it seems nobody wants to ask the other big question: how many will bother voting for anybody? Whatever the voter turnout finally turns out to be, the virtual silence on the problem of abstentionism beforehand is another sign of the yawning gap between the new political class and the electorate.

Partly it suggests that the political and media elites are now so out-of-touch with normal people that they seriously believe the rest of us are as hysterically over-excited as they are about those boring televised leaders’ debates, and that turnout must soar as a consequence. In this, as in much else, they are in denial about the real state of parliamentary democracy.

More importantly, however, the near-silence about turnout suggests that the elites are now so alienated from and contemptuously fearful of the masses, that maybe they are not all that keen on encouraging everybody to vote anymore....

...This leads us to the third and most important potential factor in the lack of discussion about turnout this time around: the possibility that the parties do not mind too much if millions of voters don’t vote in the election.

The election campaign has been conducted for the most part within the sterile bubble of the media, discussing safe questions. But the smiley mask slipped in Gordon Brown’s Bigotgate blunder, revealing the fear and loathing which New Labour feels for large sections of the electorate. And if anything the Tories and Lib Dems are worse, with deep-seated prejudices about the working class.

At a time when the isolated elites have no notion what we are thinking and their experts have no clue who many people might vote for given a choice, why should they want to encourage millions of unreliable proles to decide their fate? The ruling class of a society such as Britain have always had an ambiguous attitude towards mass democracy, anxious about the consequences of unleashing it yet needing public endorsement to bolster their own authority....