We Need to Address 'Voter Apathy' before it's too Late argue Areeq Chowdhury and Stephen Lambert.

IT's DISCONCERTING to see so few people vote in our society. And it's even more disconcerting to hear how little we care that few people vote. Voting is the basic feature of public participation in civil society. Univeral suffrage was finally reached in 1928 in Britain when all women over 21 got the vote. Yet time after time, election after election, millions of us fail to do so.

It's futile to suggest that all politicians are the same, thast most of them are in ''to feather their own nests'', or that your vote won't make a differerence to the outcome. Vote for the candidate or party you believe in, or vote for the least worse one. Vote for the ideals, values or principles that you support. if your candidate or party loses, campaign and try to change the view of family members, workmates, friends or neighbours the next time.

Our liberal, representative or indirect democracy, based on the values of democracy, freedom of speech, tolerance, equality, liberty and the rule of law, didn't simply happen by choice. if only our schools taught us the meaningful history of the struggles and sacrifices of our ancestors and great-grandparents both here and abroad, rather than factual recall of dates, the traditions and tribulations of English kings and queens. if it wasn't for the Levellers of the (17th, the Chartists of the (19th, working-class movements like the trade unions and co-ops the suffrage movement of the early 20th century, working people and their families wouldn't have a proper or meaningful say in the national and local governance of the United Kingdom. Conversly,  millions of people died or suffered appalling injuries during the secondf world war to safeguard our freemdoms and democratic valueas and traditions which we all take for granted without blinking, from the tyranyn of Hitler's fascism.

Switch on the news on any given day and you will be exposed to pictures and figures of those fighting for democracy or as a result of the actions of others seeking to suppress it. On June 8 2017, we'll be asked to choose the person, the party, and the ideals that we want to help shape our future society and economic and social well-being. One hundred and four years to the day, there was a North East woman who died in hospital after stepping in front of a horse. Her name was Emily Davidson from Morpeth, Northumberland, who was a leading suffragette.

She was someone who spent much of her life fighting and campaigning for women to have the right to vote. She was imprisoned nine times, undertook protests which included hunger strikes and seeking refuge in the chapel of Parliament on the night of the Census. She died trying to throw a 'Votes for Women' sash a round the neck of the King's horse at the Empsom Derby in 1913.

But it's not sufficient to recount tales from the past and then expect people to cast their ballot. In April, the Government announced that they will erect a statue of another suffragist, Millicent Fawcett, in Parliament Square to comemorate  the 1918 Representation of the People Act which gave women aged over 30 the right to vote in all British elections. Yet we have governments that will honour campaigners with statues or palques but pay lip-service to the ideals they stood for by doing little to reverse what's been described as a democratic decline or worse a ''democrtatic deficit''.

The recent 'Metro-Mayor' elections which took place across much of England saw voter turn-out of less than 28%. In the West Midlands connurbation, the election was decided by 4,000 votes, while at the same time 1.4 million didn't participate at all.

Howcome. Is it really because  believe that it doesn't make a difference? Every pavement walked on, every food item we eat, will have been influenced by a political decision taken somewhere whether that be in the local Town Hall or in the House of Commons. If it is the case that our citizens don't recognise that, then surely we must  put that right, It's the Government of the day's civic responsibility to do so.

Those elections weren't a one-off. They symbolise the problems we face. In the least well known about elections, such as the Police and Crime Commissioners, as many as eight of 10 didn't vote. But even in the most talked about votes, the ones covered by every day by the media, the ones in which millions of pounds are poured in, and where every celebrity from List A to List Z is telling people to take part , the problem persists.

In the EU referendum last summer, 13 million people didn't cast a vote. The result was decided by a margin of just over 1 million. At the 2015 general election, there were more than 15 million non-voters or abstainers. This is a crisis of political participation. It's a crisis that is largely neglected by the national media. And a crisis that ahs been side-lined by central government.

This is a crisis that can't be just put down to individual responsibility. People aren't simply to ''lazy''. We don't believe that there is anyone out there who is truly ''apathetic'' and cares little about how their future will be affected or determined. No doubt millions of our fellow citizens will not vote on June 8 2017. Maybe it will be 15 million or even more at 20 million this time! How far must electoral turn-out in Britain drop before we as a nation decide to take action. There needs to be a civic awakening and a democratic push by the next government to undo this demise. Otherwise, year by year, election by election, we will slowly become a democracy in name only.

Areeq Chowdhury is Chief Executive of WebRoots Democracy and founder of the Institute of Digital Democracy

Councillor Stephen Lambert is both founder and Executive director of Education4Democracy.

Both organisations belong to the national network, Democracy Matters.