LONDON: Events in the Middle East offer a powerful demonstration of the lengths to which people are prepared to go for the chance to participate in free and fair elections. In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, demonstrators have given their lives in the hope of achieving basic human rights. The right to choose a government, the right as adult citizens to participate in shaping the society they live in. Yehia, who runs the cafe in my local park, is originally from Egypt and went back to Cairo to take part in the demonstrations. Seeing him just the other day, freshly returned from Tahrir Square, I was struck by the radiance of his suntanned face. “Anything is possible,” he told me, “if the people want it enough!”

The democratic process in the UK is far from perfect — the unelected House of Lords; the fact that prisoners cannot vote; the extraordinary system for party funding; the whole lobbying business, to name just a few of the more obvious obstacles — but it is certainly a lot better than the pseudo-elections of a military dictatorship. We do, most of us, have the right to express a preference as to the sort of society we wish to create for ourselves. We do, however imperfectly, have the chance to be active participants in the democratic process.

The 2010 general election saw the highest voter turnout since 1997, yet more than a third of the electorate still failed to cast a vote. If the non-voting 35 per cent were evenly distributed across the whole of society, such a level of political disengagement would be worrying enough. But research has again and again exposed a significant connection between social inclusion and political engagement.

The Electoral Commission produced a research report in 2005 which concluded that “those experiencing social deprivation tend also to be among the most politically excluded within society ... We have explored the main factors that are thought to drive social exclusion and political exclusion. These include unemployment and low income, poverty, education, skills and training deprivation, health deprivation and disability, access to transport, fear of crime, neighbourhood and housing.”

In other words, the very people who stand to suffer most from the government’s plans for benefit changes and cuts to public services are the very people least likely to have participated in the election that brought the government to power. It would be hard to describe this situation as truly democratic.

It’s something I find enormously frustrating, not least because adults with mental health problems are one of the most excluded groups in society, as the government’s own social exclusion taskforce concluded in 2004. I’m not aware of any statistics relating to voter turnout among this group. But anecdotal evidence would suggest that it is likely to be well below the average. In fact, among the service users I’ve questioned, voting would appear to be the exception and not the norm .—Dawn/Guardian News Service