Two out of three didn't vote, so did we get what we deserve?

AFTER all the election ballyhoo, has much really changed?

Not around here, it hasn’t. Sadly.

UKIP’s success nationally may have traumatised all three main parties, but they didn’t make much of a breakthrough in Wiltshire.

There’s obvious interest in them locally. A talk by their leader, Nigel Farage, packed out the Guildhall in December 2011.

And although they fielded candidates in only 12 of the 27 Wiltshire divisions within the Journal’s circulation area, almost 4,000 people here voted for them.

They gave Conservative stalwarts John Noeken and Fred Westmoreland a run for their money in Amesbury. Yet they gained only one seat in the county, in Melksham.

Sorry if I sound disappointed. I’m not banging the drum for UKIP, or any party in particular.

But I’d have liked to see the county’s Tory administration, supremely confident in its unassailable majority, given more of a wake-up call by voters.

Despite widespread public dissatisfaction over issues such as parking charges, the market revamp and our potholed roads, all but one of Trowbridge’s ruling cabinet have been re-elected.

Even more depressing than the prospect of four more years of the same elected dictatorship is the fact that two-thirds of us didn’t bother to vote at all. So maybe we got the leaders we deserve?

Although to be fair, in half a dozen divisions, five of them in our area, there wasn’t anyone to vote for anyway. Nobody felt like wasting their time standing as a candidate against a Conservative.

I quite understand that it made sense for other parties to concentrate their resources where they had some chance of success, but this is an appalling state of affairs.

There are people giving their lives in the Arab world right now in the fight for a democratic voice. Our complacency as a nation about our lack of a properly representative system - one in which every vote counts, makes me ashamed.

Anyway, we’ve chosen our leaders – at least, some of those among us who had a choice have done so.  And we’ll just have to live with their long-distance diktats, Heaven help us.