Nil Carborundum

One of the phrases I recently heard,
after not hearing it for many years, was
'If voting changed anything it would be abolished.'.

It is a phrase most associated in the British press
with former Lord, turned radical English Socialist,
Anthony Wedgwood Benn (1925-2014)
who said it often, and always
when he did not get the change he wanted.

He was a man with a tireless appetite for change.
This appetite seemed to increase,
the fewer the changes that were happening around him
and the more what change there was
was change that was 'going in the wrong direction'.

He was a man who strongly believed
in the representative democracy of the UK
widening who it represented
and being increasingly accurate
in how that representation worked,
thus making The New Jerusalem
of British Socialism a reality that endures
whilst banishing the blues of poverty,
and the blue of Conservatism, to History.

But apply the phrase to an earlier era
and the effect is not quite the same.
The suffragettes fought pitch battles,
protested in public and were force fed
in prison to end their hunger strikes.
Some martyred themselves for the cause
of extending the franchise to women.

Tell them that they would gain nothing,
and nothing would change for them getting the vote 
and what did they have left of their protest about
beyond merely protesting for the right to protest?

Votes are votes, and votes matter,
particularly where they are proof
that those in power have listened
and they will extend justice further. 

But in the absence of votes,
and the absence of change,
protest is all people have left
which however temporary it is
and however short the feeling
it gives of people feeling alive.