“DON’T vote, it only encourages them,” ran a bumper sticker message in the days when bumper stickers were popular.

“If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it,” ran another.

They were just bumper stickers, though, and if bumper stickers told the truth then everybody’s other car really would be a Porsche.

Some social commentators tell us we’re morally obliged to vote because countless made the ultimate sacrifice in wars against foul dictators. This argument is as flawed as the ones on the bumper stickers.

Those heroes, the ones who charged up machine gun-raked beaches, braved lethal skies and navigated fiery seas, didn’t do so just to give us the right to vote. They did it so we could choose not only who to vote for but whether to vote at all.

We think one party has the best solution to society’s ills? That’s fine, and the heroes fought so we could vote accordingly.

We think all the parties are rotten and we either don’t want to vote at all or plan to scrawl our scorn on the ballot paper? Well, that’s great too.

The men and women we remember every November 11 fought so we could do as we please on polling day without being spirited from our beds in the dead of night for “re-education”.

For what my opinion’s worth, though, I think everybody should be sure to vote in every election.

You see, that bumper sticker, the one about voting only encouraging them, was quite right in a way.

Voting really does encourage them. It encourages them to remember their responsibiliites, it encourages them to remember whose approval their position depends upon and it encourages them, above all, to remember their place in the master-servant relationship.

How many times have we been dissatified with the performance of a politician, irrespective of their party or our own political beliefs?

How many times have we felt the red mist descend as one of them smilingly told us a blatant untruth?

How many times have we listened to them doing the complete opposite to something they earnestly promised during their election campaign?

The answer for most of us is: “Times without number.”

There’s a far more important question, though: where did they get the notion that they could get away with such behaviour?

The answer to this question is a lot easier to answer precisely. It’s because we let them get away with it by not exercising our right to keep the good and boot out the bad.

General election turnouts are poor, but in local elections they tend to be poorer still, and Swindon’s are some of the poorest of all.

Each of us is entitled to stay away from the polling station, but not all of us will be morally entitled to voice an opinion about the way our communities are run afterwards.

That moral right belongs only to those who who turn up in that school hall or community centre, stand in that sawdust-scented booth, pick up the blunt little black pencil on a string and make our voice heard.