Why the election is like The Wire

If you’ve ever seen The Wire, you’ll know that all elections matter. Not in a “Big Society”, “One Nation”, insert-Oxbridge-auto-slogan here kind of way; but in a real, power-playing, webbed-up way.

You see the guy who collects your bins? He’s there because of the local council. The woman in adult social services who looks after your grandmother? Council. Investments in, or machetes taken to, our schools, our streetlights, housing, planning? Those decisions are made at the Town Hall too.

Whether you despise politics for its relentless, often bland, message-massaged droning, or you’re part of the set that makes things happen, the decision you make today – indeed, the decisions you make to engage in community life or let it happen around you – will count for a lot.

I only realised how truly linked-up these things are in my mid-to-late twenties. I voted for the first time in 2009, aged 26. A year later, I was on the ballot paper myself for the area between Holloway and Tufnell Park. I felt proud, but in spite of being part of the process up close for a while, I too was frustrated by the culture.

I was reminded of those frustrations this morning as I was out doing some election day leafleting in Swiss Cottage. I don’t do that sort of thing very often anymore; frankly I find it dull. But I was compelled to stop and chat to a man in a stairwell, standing, watching the world go by. “Trouble is, they get in and forget about you. I’m not going to vote. They’re all the same.”

The view is common, but as someone who still often shares that disappointment, I had to disagree. Because unless you participate, at the very least by casting the vote that’s rightfully yours, you can’t really complain – about housing, planning, schools, bins, and so many other things that shape day-to-day life. Voting, whether in the local elections or in the European elections to express a preference on immigration or the expansion/outsourcing (delete as appropriate) of democracy, is how we manage our society. It’s how we make, break and remake the rules.

In a place like north London, somehow, everyone knows everyone else. We’re all webbed up. The people who hold the keys to the Town Halls will shape the future of our local businesses, jobs, housing estates, media, schools and more.

As The Wire’s Omar Little wisely understood: “the game is out there, and it’s either play, or get played”.