Does not voting achieve anything?

Cycling on my journey to work through north east London I was struck by a number of posters carrying the message: “STAY MUSLIM. DON’T VOTE”.

These messages have come, of course, shortly before the London elections and they are in protest to the actions of Britain’s two main parties in Afghanistan and Iraq. The subtext of the message is that by voting the Muslim community is legitimising the process of democracy that has committed atrocities against Muslim people.

Non-voting has a long history and is steeped in anarchist and communist tradition. Both of these ideologies advocate an absence of government and strands of thought within these movements contended that there was no point in voting in a pseudo-democratic process for a better government if you did not believe in executive government arrangements. This led to the well known slogan, “If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it”.

Going back to the posters, I wondered how other people would react when they saw them. I discussed this with one of my Politics classes and they suggested that people might think that if certain people don’t like it here then they don’t have to live here. A simplistic solution until you consider that many Muslims were born here. But this reaction would not be unusual since I do remember stories when I was a student of communists campaigning for voters to spoil ballot papers at election time being told that if they didn’t like it, they should move to Russia.

Divisions about the way we should be governed continue to permeate British society, but there are obvious differences between radical ideas in the shape of revolutionary socialism and Islamic fundamentalism, not least the kinds of pictures we have seen this week of one the 7/7 suicide bombers telling his young child that the action he was about to carry out was for her long term benefit.

Racial tension can quickly boil over into violence and posters like the ones I saw this morning do little to promote multi-cultural harmony.

A further problem is, is that if voters do stay away from the polls on Thursday, they may end up with the candidate least able to deal with the challenges of racial integration in the UK.

Non-voting by anarchist/communist groups has done little to alter the political framework over the last 50 years, so what will following a similar path achieve for Muslim groups?