In the damp annals of British political theatre, where provincial potentates once promised to devolve power like so many municipal Santa Clauses, we now witness the sequel that no one particularly queued for. Greater Manchester, that throbbing conurbation of rain-lashed ambition and intermittent footballing despair, has just staged a mayoral by-election with a turnout of around 25%. One can picture the ghosts of civic reformers past—those earnest chaps who dreamed of regional barons wielding budgets over housing, transport, and policing—gazing down in mild bewilderment. Twenty-five per cent. It is not so much a democratic exercise as a polite suggestion that the electorate has better things to do, perhaps involving a kettle and a strong view on whether the biscuits have gone soft.
This, of course, is the natural progression from the raving loonies coming second to actual madness in Gorton and Denton only months earlier. There, the native Briton’s heroic indifference allowed organised blocs and earnest environmentalists to carve up the spoils while the sofa class exercised its inalienable right to remain horizontal. Now, in the realm of the Metro Mayor—Andy Burnham’s former fiefdom, no less—the apathy has achieved something close to perfection. A city-region billed as vital, dynamic, and bristling with devolved importance has mustered the enthusiasm of a wet Wednesday afternoon in Stockport. Staggering, one might say, if one were the sort to stagger. Horrific, declares our man on X, and for once the hyperbole feels almost measured. Manchester, important? Undoubtedly. Important enough for three-quarters of its eligible voters to interrupt their torpor? Evidently not.
One must admire the Metro Mayor experiment for its exquisite pointlessness, a masterclass in administrative theatre. Created with all the fanfare of a new public convenience, these regional overlords were to bridge the gap between Whitehall’s lofty abstractions and the gritty realities of the provinces. Yet here we are, post-Burnham’s ascension to the Commons (MPs and mayors being, it seems, incompatible in the way that certain chemicals react badly in the stomach), watching a by-election that cost millions and engaged fewer citizens than a moderately successful pub quiz. The candidates from Labour, Reform, the Greens, and sundry others vied for the honour of chairing a cabinet of borough leaders, setting priorities that might, on a good day with a following wind, influence the frequency of trams or the sternness of parking enforcement. Power, in other words, of the sort that makes one wonder why anyone bothered leaving the house—except, of course, they mostly didn’t.
Andy Burnham himself has lately been musing about Australian-style compulsory voting. One can almost hear the collective sigh of a nation that invented both habeas corpus and the tactical abstention. Australia, that sun-baked land of rules, cricket, and democracy sausages, drags its citizens to the polls with the gentle threat of a modest fine, achieving turnouts that hover in the high nineties. The result, we are told, is a more representative electorate, less prone to capture by the motivated fringes. Burnham, fresh from his mayoral perch, now eyes this mechanism as a cure for the democratic narcolepsy he helped preside over. It is the sort of proposal that makes one reach for the gin: not entirely mad on paper, yet freighted with the delicious possibility of biting its proponent squarely in the posterior.
For if compulsory voting were introduced, the great unwashed—those indifferent masses who treated the Greater Manchester contest as optional background noise—would be compelled to render a verdict on the very devolved structures that failed to stir them. Metro Mayors, suddenly answerable to a fuller cross-section of the populace rather than the diligent few who can be arsed, might find their grandeur somewhat deflated. No longer could one rely on low turnout to mask the gap between rhetoric and delivery; the sofa warriors, roused from their slumbers by the faint threat of bureaucracy, might spoil their ballots with artistic genitalia or, worse, vote for the candidate promising to abolish the whole pointless apparatus. The irony would be exquisite: Burnham, architect of the mayoral model in practice if not in name, inadvertently engineering a system that exposes its hollowness. One secretly hopes it does bite him, if only for the poetic justice. Few spectacles delight quite like a reformer hoist with his own petard, preferably while wearing the ceremonial chain of office.
Of course, the British recoil is instinctive. Compulsion sits ill with a people who regard rules as personal insults and authority as something to be endured with a raised eyebrow and a quiet pint. Force us to vote and the polling stations would become carnivals of passive resistance: donkey votes for the first name on the list, essays on the futility of the enterprise, or perhaps a surge in support for the Monster Raving Loonies, whose porcine candidates at least possess the virtue of honesty about their absurdity. Australia manages it with barbecues and conformity; we would manage it with complaints, exemptions, and a thriving black market in plausible excuses involving errant dogs and urgent plumbing emergencies. The bureaucracy would bloom like Japanese knotweed, the fines would mutate into poll taxes by stealth, and the noble experiment in civic duty would end, as so many do, in a quinoa kebab of moral superiority tasting faintly of damp resentment.
Yet the alternative is the status quo: democracy as optional spectator sport, where importance is proclaimed from the podium while the electorate votes with its feet—usually in the direction of the television remote. In Greater Manchester, a mere 25% bothered to show up for a role that Burnham once occupied with characteristic vigour. The message is clear enough: Metro Mayors, for all their devolved pomp, have yet to convince the public they are worth missing a lie-in. If compulsory voting arrives as the reluctant remedy, it may finally force the conversation these experiments were meant to provoke. Whether that conversation ends with the abolition of the Metro Mayor model or merely its reform is anyone’s guess. One thing is certain: the apathy was staggering. The remedy, if applied, promises to be even more so.
Despair, as ever, remains the rational response. But at least under compulsion, we should have earned the right to complain with a full ballot paper in hand—preferably one marked with the quiet dignity of a crossed-out list and a doodle of a pig in a mayoral robe. In Britain, that might count as progress.