Get disconnected

Over on The Telegraph comment section, Philip Johnston (or it could be Philip Johston - The Telegraph doesn't seem to be sure of his name) wonders if the decline in voter turnout might have something to do with the reluctance of politicians to get out and mingle.

Mr Johnston (or Johston) refers to his son who is eligible to vote for the first time, but may not bother to do so. When asked why not his son told him that he felt .....

..... none of the political parties actually listened to the electorate, but rather conducted a debate among themselves and with the media that excluded the rest of the population.

Mr Johnston's son strikes me as being a very astute young man - because he is exactly right. As Johnston goes on to note himself, politicians are very quick to jump on any technological bandwagon that comes along from television to Twittter - but the more they do so the less they connect with the people. When they do appear in public - as Mr Johnston notes as well - it is carefully stage managed to avoid any embarrassment. So "public" meetings are nothing of the sort, but actually stuffed full of party activists and sympathetic journalists.

The trouble with politicians today is that they are so keen to prove just how hip and trendy they are and so desperate to demonstrate how much they love technology that they've forgotten some of the basic fundamentals of human interaction - trust. And they forget that trust is built by real person to person contact and not through electronic media.

However, even though I think Johnston ha hit the nail on the head with regards to the lack of trust and belief in politicians, there is something else which is missing. The other observation that Mr. Johnston's son makes is this ......

Why bother voting if you feel it cannot make a difference?

This is perhaps the most fundamental point of all. People have stopped voting because, regardless of who they vote for, they get the same government. They get the same government because all the main political parties are all the same. The media and political activists love to make a big fuss over the "differences" between Labour and Tories - but those differences are nothing more than minor discrepancies over how to implement a policy - not about the actual policy itself.

The question is, are those parties all the same because they don't bother getting out and meeting real people anymore or are they not getting out and meeting people because they have nothing to say that is different?

Who knows. What I am pretty sure of, though, is that politicians need to disconnect themselves from their cosy little Westminster world and do more to connect with people face to face and not through a wire.