The Importance of Voting. |

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a friend. This friend is intelligent, driven in their professional life, is a partner in a small business and in all respects is what you would consider a valuable member of society. I can’t remember quite how the conversation came up, but I mentioned the recent success of the Green Party massively increasing their membership and how that might translate in to votes. My friend’s response was ‘I don’t vote. I’m not in the right tax bracket to vote’.

This was an unexpected reply. The idea that voting only matters if you’re well off or rich firstly implies that working class people can’t change their lot in life because their vote doesn’t count as much as someone with a lot of money and secondly, that voting only affects us financially. Both parts of this idea arise because for the last 47 years, the only party that has been in power is the Thatcherite Neo-liberal Party. Sometimes in a blue tie, sometimes in a red tie. This Thatcherite Party has continually acted to protect capital and frame the health of the Nation in purely fiscal terms as this allows them to justify the privatisation of our national industries, to decimate public services and to promote landlordism so that they can funnel wealth upwards to the ultra-rich. Thatcher famously said two things:

‘There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.’

And when asked what her greatest achievement was, she reportedly replied ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’

These two quotes show two things; that starting with Thatcher, the idea of the state having any real impact on peoples lives was to be shunned; that people should be self-reliant and that it’s up to people taking pity on others to help those in need… spoiler alert; that didn’t go too well. We now have billionaires in the same country where nurses are going to food banks. It also shows that the policy stance of New Labour was taken directly from Thatcher. It’s an admission from the former PM that there is no distinction between Conservatives and New Labour.

I think for anybody with a modicum of functional intellect, it is blatantly obvious that Neo-liberalism has failed. All of the capital in the country is concentrated at the top. An example of this can be demonstrated with the recent publicity around multi-billionaire Jim Radcliffe; He has approximately £17 billion. He moved overseas to avoid paying tax on that to the tune of £4 billion. In terms of GDP, £4 billion doesn’t sound that much but let me reframe this for you. Total local authority spending for the UK in 2024-2025 was £135 billion across 317 local authorities, averaging out to £425 million per authority. Of course, you have places like London, where their actual budget is multi-billions of pounds and then you have tiny authorities with budgets of tens of millions of pounds. Taking the mean of £425 million though, just the tax that Radcliffe should have paid would cover the entire annual budgets of almost 10 local authorities. If you take the smaller authorities, it could have paid for multiple tens of annual budgets. If he had to pay tax at the same rate as none-millionaires and billionaires, he would have owed double the amount of tax. Tax isn’t the only issue here though. It’s the rest of his money; the other £13 billion. All of that money has been taken out of circulation from our economy. The personal wealth of a single man has removed 12.5% of the total annual budget for all local authorities in the UK from the economy. We currently have 171 billionaires in this country. All of the nation’s wealth is sitting in their bank accounts. Meanwhile, the cost of the average house outside of London costs between a third and a half a million pounds but the first time buyers, mostly young people, are on wages from £22k to the low thirty thousands. The current generation of first time buyers have been entirely removed from being able to buy a house because we have consistently voted to protect capital and we have voted for that because all other options were realistically removed. We have only had the illusion of choice.

The point that I’m working towards here is that for 47 years, the British people have been consistently told and shown that our votes do not matter; it doesn’t matter who gets elected, nothing will change for you other than you will get poorer despite working harder and longer and the only people that can realistically effect policy are those with enough money to buy politicians. My friend was correct about the historical context of voting in our lifetimes. We are now at a stage where voter turnout is incredibly small comparatively but, importantly, for the first time in my lifetime, there appears to be a cultural shift. People are finally demanding real change and in response to this, two political parties have put their heads above the parapets to offer something new.

On the one hand, we have Reform UK, a highly conservative party in multiple ways; first, the party is filled with ex-Tories, many of whom are directly responsible for the current state of the country and, despite saying they are offering change, are using the same rhetoric as before and offering broadly the same policies but with added cruelty, but they are also conservative in terms of their values; they want to protect capital at the expense of ordinary people. Look at recent comments from former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman when she said ‘Working class people in this country have had it too good for far too long’. Or the comments from Richard Tice saying that ‘We need to lower the minimum wage for young people’ or when he said that Reform would increase people’s energy bills. Or what about when Zia Yusuf tried to tell us that poverty in this country was only in small pockets of the population despite the actual figures being 21% of people in the UK being in poverty. That is 1 in 5 people. For every five people you see in the street, one of them is in genuine poverty, having to make decisions between heating and eating, having to decide if they can afford to buy a replacement pair of shoes.

On the other hand, we have the Green Party of England and Wales; a social democratic movement that is offering genuine change; a return to wealth taxes for the ultra-rich, a root and branch reform of policing, proportional representation, an actual workable immigration policy, an evidence based approach to health, housing, criminality and reducing inequality. They are offering a platform of uplifting the social state; more social housing (not to be confused with private affordable housing), a welfare system that actually looks after people, a reform of the taxation system and a reform of the education system to reintroduce essential subjects like the arts and humanities that have been missing from state education for too long.

Given that both of these parties have only a tiny amount of representation in Parliament, why is this now an important crossroads; simply because the the Conservative Party no longer exist is a meaningful way any more and the Labour Party have performed so poorly that they are unlikely to be elected again any time soon. As a result, both Reform and the Greens are surging in the poles. In recent by-elections and local council elections, Labour have more or less collapsed, with a few exceptions, and it has been predominantly a competition between the Greens and Reform. It is likely that one of these two parties will form the next government.

Here is why it is more important than ever to get out and vote; both of these parties are offering the polar opposite to each other so it does matter which party wins now. And it isn’t just about winning; voter turn out has been consistently declining, meaning parties are winning majorities on smaller and smaller voter turn outs so even majority governments are not representative of the vast majority of the populace. In addition to this, a party with a small majority will struggle to enact their policies, meaning wishy washy small scale change and compromise. If a party wins a super majority, they can enact their manifesto in full. Please, get out and vote. Please encourage your friends to get out and vote. For the first time in their lives, it does actually matter and can result in real political change that will have profound effects on all of our lives.

I want to quickly cover some of the policies from both parties that highlight the differences and why it matters who gets in:

Reforms UK’s immigration policy is offering to repeal the Human Rights Act, leave the European convention on Human Rights, diss-apply the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN convention against torture and the convention against human trafficking. It aims to remove the Hardial Singh constraints which stop people being indefinitely imprisoned without trial under the guise of deportation. The policy wants enact broad ranging warrants and to establish the UK equivalent of the barbaric I.C.E agency in the US; effectively creating gangs of state sponsored thugs to go and kidnap people from their homes in the middle of the night. It explicitly outlines plans to create concentration camps where people can be sent, directly from the street without trial or investigation and it aims to spend a fortune on chartering multiple civil aviation flights per day to deport people.

Their policing policy aims to massively increase the demonstrably unsuccessful and discriminatory stop and search strategy and to give custodial sentences for the vast majority of crimes. It aims to deport prisoners who have come from other countries, even if they have been living here for decades and it aims to bring back transportation for UK citizens, a punishment that was so barbaric that it was ended in 1857.

Their Save the Pubs policy aims to cut 5 pence of your pint of beer by putting 450,000 children back in to poverty when a 5^th of the nation are already in poverty.

Their crypto legislation aims to make crypto currency, specifically Bitcoin, a nationally backed currency that would be illegal to refuse and is not controlled by the central banks. This would allow for money laundering, bribery and corruption by state officials on a scale that has never before been seen on the face of the entire planet.

None of this is hyperbole; it is all explicitly stated in their policies. Whilst all of their policies are either barbaric or legalise state corruption, they are also largely unworkable. Their immigration and policing policies for example, rely on other countries agreeing to this nonsense. Think about that; just withdrawing from the UN conventions on human rights, trafficking and torture would immediately kill the policies as the UN consists of 193 active participant countries and 2 countries that are observers of the statutes. That covers all of the 195 countries in the world. The policy is entirely unworkable and is just a piece of racist propaganda to shift the blame from billionaires to the poorest in society.

Their other policies will simply disenfranchise the working class both financially and by removing your rights whilst continuing to funnel wealth upwards.

In contrast, the Green Party immigration policy, which many who support the billionaire class constantly decry as a policy of open borders, is actually fully workable policy of controlled migration and will financially benefit the UK. Currently, when a European member state refuses an asylum claim for whatever reason, the claimant is banned from applying in any other member state, leaving them no real options other than returning to the country that they are fleeing, or coming to a European country that is not a member state; the UK. As we are no longer a part of the Dublin protocols, when they come here from Europe, we can not return them. The Green Party policy aims to hold the other 192 UN signatories to account on their commitments to refugees and asylum, therefore spreading the responsibility of asylum across all of those nations and opening up safe and legal routes for asylum claimants, thereby massively cutting the number of small boat crossings. Further, it allows for any asylum claimants that subsequently do come to the UK to start working and paying tax almost immediately. This will not just increase the tax intake, but their wages will be spent in our economy, keeping that money here. The policy aims to allow people on the correct visas to come here, with their families and work, allowing them to settle and contribute to a healthy society but, simultaneously, it would stop people without appropriate visas from using the NHS, thereby massively cutting health tourism.

Their policy on policing would reform the police services, making them accountable to the communities they serve and focusing on crime reduction, domestic violence, applying prison sentences where appropriate but using a rehabilitation and public health approach to cutting re-offending where that would be more appropriate.

They aim to build significantly more social housing, train council workers to be plumbers, electricians and builders to start to rebuild public sector jobs and investment. They have a policy to reduce and begin to repair the damage to the environment which is one of the biggest threats currently facing us. They have a policy that protects and rebuilds our NHS. They have multiple policies on tackling inequality and poverty as well as reforms to education.

One of these parties is offering a politics of brutality, increased capitalism and never ending divisive finger pointing at the least fortunate in society. One of these parties is offering genuine societal change and promising to correct and enforce the social contract. I think it is obvious who we want in power, but to achieve that, we must get out and vote. If we do not vote, the reality is that the party that is offering the status-quo with added cruelty will win by default.

In summation, we are at a crossroads where voter turnout has never been lower but what is being offered has never been more important, at least not in my lifetime. We need to decide who we want to be as a nation moving forwards in to the future. We are being offered on one hand, cruelty, poverty, discrimination, brutality and small minded isolationism and on the other hand, we are being offered a social revolution that would reset the social contract, enrich all of our lives and once again lift our international reputation to its former glory as a bastion of honesty, integrity, fairness and justice that the rest of the world could look to as an inspiration.

Let’s make Britain Great again. Vote Green!

References.

Margaret Thatcher interview transcript: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689

Thatcher on Blair and New Labour: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/margaret-thatcher-s-legacy-spilt-milk-new-labour-and-the-big-bang-she-changed-everything-8564541.html

https://theconversation.com/thatcher-blair-and-a-brief-history-of-class-in-british-politics-podcast-240738

Braverman on the working class: https://dorseteye.com/had-it-too-good-braverman-and-reform-uks-war-on-britains-working-class/

Tice on the minimum wage: https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/02/19/trade-unions-calls-out-reform-minimum-wage-plan/

Tice on energy: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/farages-first-big-mistake-reform-uk-slammed-over-plan-to-scrap-net-zero_uk_67adb973e4b01887f71cf4ba

Yusuf on poverty: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/exclusive-greens-slam-reform-frauds-over-poverty-claims_uk_6991a14ae4b03fabab9f6c4a

Actual poverty statistics: https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2025-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk

Local authority spending 2024-2025: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2024-to-2025-first-release/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2024-to-2025-first-release

Reform Policies: https://www.reformparty.uk/policies#policies-parallax