Apathy in the UK

Justin Cash

Name:Justin Cash
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Joined: Dec 2011
Occupation: studying PPE at Durham University
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Think 2011 was a year in which the UK population proved it was politically savvy and proactive? Think again.

Photo by Alberto Garcia

That the title of this piece is a pun on the title of a certain well-known Sex Pistols song is no accident. As much as this year was defined by the anarchy of protest, it was also defined by an apparent indifference towards the political process. Reflecting on 2011, it seems that we just didn’t care too much about how our country was run.

Take the referendum on the Alternative Vote in May as a case in point. In some parts of the UK, the turnout sunk as low as 28%, and overall turnout was only a shade above 40%. This lackluster engagement with voting reform is hardly surprising; taking the time to understand the technicalities of each system is a tedious affair. But the public had the chance to fundamentally change the way our democratic system operates, for better or worse, and they missed it.

In July, the replacement of the defunct Downing Street online petition website was announced. Now, on a new site, any e-petition on that reaches 100,000 signatures will be considered for debate in the House of Commons. Only 6 petitions, however, have reached this magic number, and one of them is the relatively trivial call for the government to release all documents relating to the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster. In total, there are only 8 petitions that have achieved even half of the signatures required for a Commons debate.

Moving forward to April, and the country was in jubilant mood thanks to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Yet very few members of the public were proactive in bringing to attention any obviously relevant political debate regarding the monarchy. Similarly, in August, despite extensive coverage of events in the Arab Spring, very few were moved to protest at the British government’s decision to intervene in Libya, despite this being an obviously contentious move.

Part of the problem lies with our reliance on online media. Why go out and actively engage with society and politics when all the updates you could ever need can be streamlined in a Twitter feed? We mainline political information in a level of brevity that leaves us disinterested in relevant detail. We train ourselves to think short term, appeasing our relentlessly waning attention spans. At the time of writing, half a million more people follow Wayne Rooney on Twitter than the Prime Minister. This is a strong indictment of an apathetic nation that remains uninterested in its own governance, and lacks of concern for its political future.

The obvious exception to this trend was the Occupy movement, showing that there is at least one issue that the British population cared a significant amount about in 2011, and that was social inequality. Such vociferous protest, continuing into 2012, should at least encourage the general public to stand up for something and take notice of the political course of their country. The decisions our government makes affect us all and won’t be properly debated if we are so apathetic. If we don’t act, we only have ourselves to blame.