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.
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