I am not, in the ordinary run of things, a man given to civic exhortation. Lecture another adult on what to do with their Thursday and you tend to end up wearing their coffee, quite rightly.
But indulge me, just this once, because tomorrow is local election day across great swathes of England, and somebody has to say something about the great British shrug that has come to define our relationship with the ballot box at the parish-and-pothole level.
In the last round of council elections, turnout in some wards crept south of thirty per cent. Thirty per cent. Sit with that for a moment. Seven in ten adults, in possession of a franchise their grandparents fought a war to defend, opted instead to put the kettle on, watch a man on YouTube fitting a gearbox, or sit there in a state of low-grade irritation about Westminster as though the council had nothing whatever to do with their lives.
As though the council did not run their bins, set their parking charges, decide whether the vape shop next door could open at seven in the morning, and quietly determine, through the dark art of the local plan, whether a four-storey block of flats will rise next year on the patch of brownfield where their children currently kick a football.
I run businesses for a living, and I can tell you, as readers of this magazine will already know in their bones, that the people who shape your operating costs are not, in the main, the slick young SpAds and ambitious junior ministers preening on the Today programme.
They are councillors. People with names like Peter, Paul and Jane, even I used to be one for over a decade. People with dreadful lanyards and, mostly, excellent intentions. They set business rates relief schemes. They grant, or refuse, your A-board, your awning, your application for a pavement licence so the punters can drink rosé in the rain.
They decide whether your high street will boast a half-decent bus service or a bewildered taxi rank flanked by three Costas and a Greggs. They sign off road closures that can cost a small retailer a fortnight’s takings in a single botched resurfacing job. They run procurement budgets through which billions are quietly dispensed every year, and from which, incidentally, your own firm could perfectly well be eating, were you ever to bother with the tendering portal.
In short, if you run a business, the council is your landlord, your regulator, your customer and your traffic warden, all rolled into one slightly damp Edwardian building with a malfunctioning lift. Ignore it at your peril.
Now. I am not going to tell you who to vote for. I have my views, strong ones, in fact, ones I will not bore you with here because, frankly, they are not the point, and you have yours. That is the splendid, frustrating, occasionally infuriating glory of the thing. You may be a lifelong Conservative who has finally had enough. You may be Labour through and through, a Lib Dem with a clipboard, a Green who cycles, a Reform man who shouts, or one of those magnificent independents who slipped in last time on a single-issue ticket about the duck pond.
I do not care. I genuinely, profoundly, do not care. What I care about is that you put on a coat tomorrow, walk to the church hall, the primary school or the slightly dispiriting community centre, take the stubby pencil they have thoughtfully provided, and put a cross in a box.
Because here is the awkward truth: democracy is a muscle. Use it badly, use it crossly, use it with a heavy sigh and a glass of red waiting at home, but use it. Leave it in the drawer for too long and it withers, and once it has withered the people who do turn up, and they always turn up, get to decide everything for the rest of us. That is not a left-wing observation or a right-wing one. It is simply how arithmetic works in a polling station.
I am told there is a fashionable line these days, much retweeted by sixth-formers and weary executives alike, that “voting changes nothing”. To which the only sensible reply is: marvellous, then you will not object to my vote counting double. Of course it changes things. Ask any small business owner who has watched a sympathetic council slash parking charges, or an unsympathetic one slap on a workplace levy. Ask the publican facing a three a.m. licence refusal. Ask the parent whose new primary school exists because three hundred neighbours bothered to turn out one wet Thursday in May.
So. Tomorrow. Coat on, pencil up, cross in. I am not telling you who to vote for. I am telling you to vote. There is, I promise, a meaningful difference.
Richard Alvin
Richard Alvin is a serial entrepreneur, a former advisor to the UK Government about small business and an Honorary Teaching Fellow on Business at Lancaster University.
A winner of the London Chamber of Commerce Business Person of the year and Freeman of the City of London for his services to business and charity. Richard is also Group MD of Capital Business Media and SME business research company Trends Research, regarded as one of the UK’s leading experts in the SME sector and an active angel investor and advisor to new start companies.
Richard is also the host of Save Our Business the U.S. based business advice television show.
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