Turnout will be bad next week, but compulsory voting is not the answer

Turnout for European elections is always low. Since they were first held in 1979, turnout for them has never reached even the miserable heights of 40% in the UK. It’s a damning indication of the sheer gulf between European politics and the general British public. Next week’s election promises to be no different – and you can add apathetic stay-at-homes to the myriad of reasons the UKIP share will be so high.

“Labour do better on bigger turnouts.” So is the received wisdom passed on from local Labour Party organisers up and down the country every election time, although possibly more with the aim of enthusing activists to knock on more doors during Get Out The Vote operations than because of any actual correlation to fact. All of the Thatcher and Major victories, for instance, had a higher turnout than Blair’s win in 1997, and the New Labour years oversaw further drops still.

Looking forward to next year and what we’ve got is a Government that has disappointed and an opposition people are unconvinced by. It’s a recipe for low turnout. Even the likelihood of it going down to the wire is unlikely to get people to the polling stations unless they start to feel enthused  one way or the other.

With the number of young people turning out to vote in 2015 expected to be even lower than the paltry 44% of the last election, this decline in participation in the democratic process shows no signs of abating. Indeed, should Labour extend the franchise to 16 year olds after the next election, it is likely to get much worse.

When Ed Miliband was meeting voters in a pub this weekend, the subject of voter apathy came up, as can happen when people meet Ed Miliband. What pleased me though, when someone mentioned the Australian system, is that he replied: “I’m not in favour of compulsory voting.”

Compulsory voting is one of the ideas that crops up (or “gets floated” might be a choicer description) every now and then as a way to deal with an increasingly disenfranchised electorate, and it’s worth making a point of dismissing it every time it does, because it’s so exceedingly dumb.

You can’t legislate a problem away. You can’t ban homelessness or poverty. You have to deal with the underlying causes and the consequences separately.

Compulsory voting is just about the most out of touch, Westminster bubble, arrogant load of rubbish it is possible for a policy to be. It shifts blame from politicians to the people, criminalising them for politicians’ failure to connect. To force people to vote does not increase the legitimacy of those in power. It would not fundamentally change the way voters and politicians interact – it would serve only paper over the cracks and let those who support it bask in the glow of a heady improvement in turnout.

At a time when people are increasingly disillusioned, when vote shares for the traditional mainstream parties is so low, and support for a party like UKIP continues to go up, who on Earth would think forcing disengaged voters into polling stations would make them feel more represented by the political system? With people forced to register their dissatisfaction in the voting booth, they’ll resort to protest parties. Currently, sights such as Greens trying to impose crippling council tax rises in Brighton are rare. We should hope to keep things that way.

Wanting to engage more people in politics is a noble aim. But don’t patronise those who choose not to play a part. Try and convince them why voting matters, rather than treating it as argument already won.

Turnout will be awful next week. It should force us to consider how we, both as Party and as a wider community, can make people believe in politics again. Ed Miliband knows that making voting mandatory won’t help, and we shouldn’t let anyone claim it does.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one way to deal with people who propose it: ban them from voting.