Now brace yourselves, hold onto your seats, its election time once again here in Hertsmere. I know it's exciting but please relax and only continue reading once you have calmed yourself down. I use tea and bourbons, you may use other props. I want to give you my assurance that I’ll try not to use this Blog as an unofficial form of election publicity, but it’s going to be business as usual for me and I won't be shying away from the contentious issues facing my home town. The people who know me well, know I have a difficulty hiding my frustration at a world gone mad and a Tory Council gone native. If that upsets or offends you at this time of year, I suggest you may want to avoid reading this blog until May 2nd, if I still have one then.

So apparently we’re in a period of Purdah. A time when we’re not allowed to speak about anything contentious, or vaguely interesting. This does put paid to my bile filled rant about the new collection of social misfits and gel headed sociopathic sycophants in the new series of the Apprentice, but it did get me to wondering about the word and the idea of political censorship.

The OED defines purdah as a curtain ‘to hide women from men and strangers’; look it up if you don’t believe me. Purdah really does mean hide the women, put up a big veil and hide them from the world. However, it does seem that in a similar way words like fit, wicked, chav, rank and gay have all been hijacked to mean something entirely different, in this case Purdah has been transformed to denote that we should never talk about the issues that mean the most to the electorate in an election period, the time when we specifically ask the electorate to get involved. You have to give these people credit on making things just a little too crazy to understand.

So yes, it's that time in the local political calendar when election fever takes such a strong grip on Borehamwood, that over 70% of our neighbours become so underwhelmed with the opportunity of making a political difference, they decide it’s not really worth bothering with and stay at home instead.

Although I can understand why people don’t vote, I have always thought that a spoiled ballot with a rude word scrawled across it sends a better message about how people feel towards those in charge than not turning up at all. Of course I’m now worried that my election call to the people of Borehamwood is ‘come to the election and write foul language on the ballot forms’. But really I have a challenge for everyone who genuinely wants to spoil their ballot. Write anything you like but try and make the vote tellers laugh. I’ve been to many vote counts where our much maligned civic workers count ballots through the night and have to weed out the non-votes; it’s their job and it sucks. This year if you want to spoil your ballot try to do it by putting a smile on a vote teller’s face at 2am. I only wish I could offer prizes for the best one but I’m pretty sure the Electoral Commission would want a word with me on that.

Not voting has never been an option for me. Even growing up in Liverpool, I was always extremely interested in both local and national politics, in fact in those days at school we mostly only ever talked about girls, football and politics. But then that is Liverpool for you. Liverpool and Everton, two of the most partisan football teams in the country separated by a big lawn and a scrap of trees. I’m a red by the way, what colour did you expect, blue?

In my mid to late teens, wanting to vote was a close third place to my all consuming desire to pass my driving test and find a girlfriend. If there are any local 16/17 year olds out there reading this, surely there are far more interesting things for you to look at on the net and if your still reading this, FYI with the benefit of hindsight, passing my driving test and gaining the ability to take girls out without having to put 'L' plates on my car and take my Dad with me, felt infinitely more rewarding than the anticlimax of putting a cross on a ballot paper, but don’t let that stop you from trying it out for yourself, when your time comes.

Depending on your opinion of what constitutes a healthy democratic system, for me non voters are now a real problem, especially here in Hertsmere. For example, take Brookmeadow the ward I represent, where turn out last year was around 24%. That is desperately low; in fact I think it may be one of the lowest turnouts ever recorded for the area. If my memory of the count is correct, the winning candidate attracted 636 votes from voters who felt that the current ruling group was doing a good job, while 623 of my voters coupled with the Green Party’s 227 votes meant that at least 850 local voters didn’t want the winning candidate and around 4000 people who didn’t bother voting at all, felt that they couldn’t give a monkeys either way. Why was that?

Was it a serious level of voter apathy, was it some evil Mugabe-esque plan by the Tories to affect the voting result, or was there something more sinister going on, a silent majority voting with their feet and not at the ballot box? No, I’m fairly sure it was voter apathy.

It’s not all doom and gloom, as one interesting spike in the turn out numbers comes in the form of postal voters. More than 50% of those registered to vote by post, actually exercised their right to do so. So is it convenience or the lack of it that’s causing people to stay away in their thousands? For example, what sounds more appealing, dragging oneself out to a polling station at 9pm or staying in and watching your team playing in the champion’s league on the box? Maybe if people could vote by text, in the same way they did to name the Blue Peter cat, ok I will stop there, bad idea.

So what's the alternative? I'm not sure how I feel about the UK adopting a big stick approach, like the Australian format where voting is regarded as a public duty and failing to vote could result in a fine.

Whatever the reason for low voter turnout, all Politian's are now facing the task of engaging residents in the political process. Whether it's because people feel disenfranchised, or the result is already a foregone conclusion, or it won’t change anything anyway, or they mistakenly believe that a local elections are about national politics and that all parties are operating in the same ideological middle ground (which they are not), the voting figures say that so far we are not doing the greatest job of persuading you to get out and vote.

Oh dear my Mega Blog is back, if you made it down this far my apologies, I do get carried away with things now and again. Short and sweet next time, I promise.