Last updated 09:34, Wednesday, 30 April 2008

In common with so many other pretty, well-kept Cumbrian villages, Wetheral wears its most commonly used description with a degree of pride. Sleepy village. There may be a touch of the Miss Marple about it – but it’s still complimentary.

The village of Wetheral

On May 1, polling day in the Carlisle City Council elections, all major parties will fear apathy more than defeat. Indifference is the enemy of freedoms we sometimes forget are privileges in need of protection. More than silence fills the vacuum when voices are withheld.

In the majority of circumstances it is accepted cheerfully as exactly that. For the most part, life in Wetheral is reassuringly uneventful – not boring but pleasingly tranquil. People who live there like it that way. Many more who don’t live there wish they could.

There’s a great restaurant, a friendly pub, shop with tea room, a village green, gothic church, attractive hotel, lovely properties priced well beyond the reach of ne’er do wells. Perfect. A picture postcard idyll on the River Eden’s bank; green and pleasant, neighbourly, quaint... and sleepy, in the snoozy, smiley sort of way that makes estate agents happy.

In fact, there’s a sense that should an invading army of suspicious strangers march into the village overnight, the good people of Wetheral might greet their visitors cheerily in the morning, enquiring after their health, offering a cup of tea.

They are well used to the status quo here. Content with what they know and not looking for surprising change, they have no reason to expect surprises to land on their doorsteps either.

That, according to long-time Wetheral resident John Warmingham, is how change came to happen without anyone noticing.

“Phew! Overnight the BNP has invaded Wetheral, with the resident population fast asleep,” he wrote in a letter to The Cumberland News.

Mr Warmingham is a regular correspondent to these pages and keenly engaged with all matters politic, be they at parish, city, county or national level. He’s a bit of a nightwatchman for his village’s sleeping majority. John keeps an eye out for blips of shifting light and shade on the political horizon. And he was one of the first to remark on a change to the norm of his parish council make-up.

Two British National Party Members, Tony Carvell and Brian Allan, claimed places on Wetheral parish council last week. It would be wrong to say – as has been reported over the last few days – that the seats were won. There were too few candidates to force a poll. Messrs Carvell and Allan were unopposed. None bothered to stand against them in contest. Democracy was caught napping. No voice of approval or otherwise was invited, so none was heard. No winning, no losing. Fait accompli, as the French would say.

“They slipped in through the back door,” said John, 67, a man who prefers not to keep his opinions to himself. But that’s not strictly true. They walked through an open front door, as they were perfectly entitled to do and were offered the courtesy of vacant seats no one else appeared to want. Their responsibility now, having accepted them, is to represent the interests of local people who didn’t elect them.

“The odd thing is, there has been little or no discussion of this in the village,” John said. “You’d think somebody might have seen fit to indulge in idle gossip – at least in passing. But no. There seems to have been a bypass of any strong feeling, one way or the other.

“I suspect perhaps people are embarrassed. I mean it’s not good, is it? Not enough people interested in local politics to stand for election, not enough people engaged in local affairs to notice and not enough people caring sufficiently to realise they’d acquired two new BNP councillors until they’d seen it on the TV news or read it in the paper.”

John smarts a bit at all that. He admits even his antennae for significant local events and issues might have slipped a bit on this occasion. He didn’t become aware of the changes on his own parish council until a friend telephoned him from Greystoke to tell him he’d seen them reported on local television news bulletins.

John confesses that proved not to be his finest hour. Eye off the ball, dozing during democracy duty; it’s not the best form – for a nightwatchman who, had he been so concerned in the first place, could have stood himself.

“I’m more of a guerrilla warfare chap these days,” he said. “I prefer to stir things up, rather than stand for election. They also serve, who argue a lot.”

Politically he describes himself as sort of Conservative, having had a brief flirtation with UKIP, no fan of New Labour but – more than the sum of all those elements – disturbed by electoral indifference.

“The thing is, had someone released a couple of dozen grey squirrels on our village green, without anyone knowing it was a plan being considered, there’d have been uproar. I’m puzzled that there’s not more discussion or question of how we arrived at a new parish council without call for canvassing or election.”

Fingers can be pointed and accusations levelled whenever the accepted principles of democracy trip and fall. Choices about, involvement in and engagement with decisions impacting on daily life require effort, attention and wakefulness. Wetheral is not alone – nor even unusual – in snoozing through change. It happens all the time and in all kinds of locations. Take it to its logically progressing conclusion and we could one day become a nation sleepwalking into government by far right, far left, police, army, clowns or remodelled Red Brigades prioritising the inalienable civil rights of natterjack toads.

Latest illustration of the contrasting consequences of indifference and involvement came when plans for Carlisle Airport hit crisis over planning conditions and restrictions and Stobart boss Andrew Tinkler threatened to pull the plug on his £35m project, moving his entire business operation out of Cumbria to Widnes, taking more than 500 jobs with him.

Up to that point the few voices most frequently heard on all airport development matters had been opposed to the regeneration scheme and in favour of protection of great crested newts, badgers and birds’ nesting sites.

What rose in full-volume engagement when that eco-battle appeared won, was an 11th hour cacophony of thousands of angry voices raised in calls for the airport and its related make-or-break prospects for Cumbria to be rescued from bureaucracy and green crusaders.

So far as anyone can tell at this point, majority rescue demands were met... but only in the nick of time, only after delicate emergency negotiation and only after people-power had shown its vocal muscle.

More people vote for contestants in television talent contests and to evict celebrities from TV reality shows than bother to turn out to elect their political representatives these days. It’s likely too that more young people would prefer to be in one of those shows, taking a chance on speedy fame and fortune, than play their parts in forming the framework for public life in their localities and across the country.

In the 2003 local elections in Carlisle only 31.7 per cent of voters took part. The lowest turnout was in Currock where barely one in five voters made the effort to visit a polling station. When voters were asked why they couldn’t be bothered, many said that it made no difference which party was in power... all politicians were more or less the same. That cynical view is one of the factors driving down voter numbers every time a poll is called. But only one of them.

“A lot of people feel ground down by politics these days and unable to make any difference” – back to Wetheral’s nightwatchman, John Warmingham.

“Many of us feel no one would listen no matter what we said, that what politicians do they do whether we want them to or not. The consequence of that is, what’s the point?”

And the word for that is apathy, grown from disenchantment, which in itself tends to come from persistent lack of involvement.

The neglected vicious circle of diminishing democracy notwithstanding, it is wrong to assume all politicians are the same. They are obviously not. If they choose to disguise their true message in a flimsy veil of finely spun dishonesty, it’s probably an attempt to appeal to our lowest common denominator of dangerously limited attention span. And that’s more our fault than theirs.

Our electoral process, allowing us all a say in what happens to where we live, how our lives are ordered and how best we fund the necessary expenses required to pay for all that, relies totally and entirely on our being bothered to take an interest and cast a vote for candidates who can be bothered to ask to represent out interests.

It’s really that simple and not a great deal to ask for a democratic freedom many people in less fortunate, more cruelly oppressed countries would – and do – give their lives for.

All politicians are the same in the way that all squirrels are the same. If we fail to take an interest, there can be no complaining when a tree rat celebrates his victory.

Sitting Carlisle city councillors are marked with an *.

Belah: Stephen Gash (English Democrat); David Morton (Con)*; Elaine Thomson (Lab).

Belle Vue: Mike Clarke (Con); Glen Gardner (BNP); Ian Stockdale (Lab)*; Louise Winspear (Lib Dem).

Botcherby: Bobby Betton (Ind); John Blenkharn (Con); Michael Boaden (Lab)*; Karl Chappell (BNP).

Brampton: Alex Faulds (Lab); James Layden (Con).

Castle: Charlotte Arnold (Con); Simon Osman (Ind); Christopher Southward (Lab); Jim Tootle (Lib Dem)*.

Currock: Brian Allan (BNP); Lawrence Fisher (Con); Colin Glover (Lab)*; Olive Hall (Lib Dem).

Dalston: Trevor Allison (Lib Dem)*; Gareth Ellis (Con); Grant Warwick (Lab).

Denton Holme: Geoffrey Prest (Con); Joan Southward (Lab)*; Allan Stevenson (Ind); Janet Tootle (Lib Dem); Rob Walker (BNP).

Great Corby & Geltsdale: Helen Horne (Lab); Doreen Parsons (Con)*.

Harraby: Joyce Chisholm (BNP); Colin Farmer (Lib Dem); Michele Gwillim (Con); Carole Rutherford (Lab)*.

Hayton: Harry Cain (Con); William Graham (Ind)*.

Morton: David Barnes (BNP); Teresa Cartner (Con); Nan Farmer (Lib Dem)*; Ann Warwick (Lab).

St Aidan’s: Tony Carvell (BNP); Barbara Eden (Con); Paul Hendy (Lib Dem); Lucy Patrick (Lab)*.

Stanwix Urban: Deborah Clode (Lib Dem); Paul Im Thurn (Lab); John Stevenson (Con)*.

Upperby: Donald Cape (Lab); Georgina Clarke (Con); Les Griffiths (BNP); James Osler (Lib Dem).

Wetheral: Barry Earp (Con)*; Roger Horne (Lab).

Yewdale: Steven Bowditch (Lab); Michael Elliott (BNP); Fiona Robson (Con).

Abbreviations: BNP – British National Party; Con – Conservative; Ind – Independent; Lab – Labour; Lib Dem – Liberal Democrat.