Imagine I went into a cake shop. On the counter in front of me were four cakes, all of which looking like they'd seen better days.
There was a blue cake that looked very fancy but would cost me a fortune and ruin my job prospects.
There was a red cake that looked slightly better than the blue cake until I remembered that, the last time I ate it, it got the country involved in a costly and highly illegal war.
There was a yellow cake that was telling me it would taste amazing but it had said that before and turned out to be a lying bastard.
And there was a purple cake that refused to be eaten by foreigners.
In short, my cake options were limited. Add to that the fact I wasn't really very hungry in the first place and, well, there's a good chance I would leave that shop without making a purchase. You'd all understand that, right? No-one would be disappointed in me if I did not buy a cake when all the cakes on offer were a little bit shit.
Why then do people struggle to understand the reasons why others didn't vote?
We were presented with a wide selection of parties, but mainly four, all of whom were giving us far more reasons to ignore them than they were to put an x next to their names. The Tories are cocking things up now, Labour had cocked things up in the past, the Lib Dems stand no chance for as long as the current generation is alive and UKIP are, well, UKIP. Where was the motivation for anyone to go out and pick one of them to represent us in Europe? I must have missed it.
Those who insist that voting is essential claim that people like me are the reason we now have some gay bashing, black hating, beer swilling plumbs taking over power. But those plumbs spent a long time appealing greatly to like-minded people. They put in time to making their presence felt and the media lapped it up. Did any of the other parties speak to us in such a passionate way? Nah. They didn't do much at all, really.
Sure, if the 66% of Brits who didn't vote had done, maybe things would have worked out differently. But the fact that such a large proportion of people frankly couldn't give a shit suggests more than just apathy on our behalf; it suggests that more needs to be done to encourage us to care.
If those cakes had been luring me in with promises, hopes, exciting visions for the future and a nice bit of decoration on top, maybe I might have been convinced to buy one. Alas, the only cake putting in the effort was the one no-one was happy to see do well. Is it our fault for not voting? No. You can't simply choose a product because it's the lesser of the evils available. That's all we would have been doing if we'd turned up, which is a pretty rubbish way of selling something.
