"Your Vote" (1951)

From the August 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rumours buzz round from time to time that a General Election is likely to take place in the autumn, and once more the working class will be in a similar position to that of the “Light Brigade" with politicians to the left of them, and politicians to the right of them volleying and thundering for their vote.

It is therefore quite important to review this event that crops up every five years or so, and ask the people who constitute the “Electorate" what importance they attach to their votes. The Parliamentary Candidates consider this vote is so important to obtain, that they (through the medium of the political party that they represent) will go to great expense to get it.

They will ran garden parties to woo voters, socials, free entertainments of all kinds, and on the great day, they will provide free transport from your local railway station to the polling booth, or from any where else in the locality.

The workers are told what jolly good fellows they are by the contesting Candidates, and that if the workers cast their vote for the particular parties that they represent, everything in the garden will be lovely. The workers have been up and down this garden path so often that they have worn it into a trench as deep as Cheddar Gorge, and still they listen to the howl of would-be leaders who can only lead them even deeper into the abyss because these leaders are unable to show them the way out

There are certain numbers of the electorate who have grown tired of these howling saviours who give excuses for past failings and fancy promises for the future. “They are all the same," is a common statement. “All of them are only put for their own ends," and therefore these dis-interested people consider .that it is a waste of time to go to the poll. To these people this article is directed. The vote which politicians appeal to you for at every election both national and local, is something that cost a lot in the form of victimisation, bloodshed, misery, and transportation to prisons on the other side of the world. The vote which is your passport to political recognition, was got for you by such members of the working class as the victims of the Peterloo Massacre that happened on St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, a little over a hundred years ago, the members of the Chartist Movement, and many more too numerous to mention. They dreamed the dream of Working Class emancipation through the use of this great weapon, “ The Vote."

Nobody realises the truth of the statement, “they are all alike” more than the members of the S.P.G.B., and for close on forty-seven years we have laboriously been telling this to the workers. But we do not say that going to the poll is a waste of time, for we realise that at the polling booth we are able to express opposition to the continuation of Capitalism. We can do this by writing the words “SOCIALISM S.P.G.B. ” right across the ballot form. By so doing we have withheld our vote. We have informed the Candidates that we are not interested in any of their airy-fairy promises. We are only interested in terminating the system that they wish to keep going. Those who do not agree with the S.P.G.B.’s case, but do believe that all the political parties are the same, could go to the polling booth and register disapproval of these people in some way or other. How you do it is your affair, but the vote is your weapon to wield as you like. With it you can make or break a government. We Socialists look to the future (for the future is ours), when through the use of this weapon we shall be able to see come into existence the one thing for which we are striving—The establishment of a system based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

“SOCIALISM."

J. G. Grisley