What’s the point of voting now?

• NORMALLY a year in which many elections are scheduled can be a cause for optimism among the ordinary voters.

And yet I sense that this year has filled the great proportion of the electorate with grim foreboding and a feeling of utter powerlessness.

Why? There doesn’t seem to be anywhere we could put our crosses that could realistically lead to better times ahead.

Meanwhile, in its chaotic final days, this utterly discredited government is slipping through really unpleasant and inhumane measures.

They want to criminalise the homeless. They want to make sick notes virtually inaccessible at a time when there have never been so many people terrified by the shambolic state of our National Health Service.

The so-called populist pitches by the main political parties are negative in nature. From the Tory party it’s about punishing the vulnerable on the grounds that we can’t afford as a country to allow a dignified life to the poor.

And astonishingly from the Labour Party it’s about persuading people that they’re not a soft touch for those in need; and that they will stick to the status quo on the very “fiscal rules” that have landed us in this mess in the first place.

And though Labour says it’s more humane than the Tories, it is not humane enough to promise to end the two-children cap on benefits, which shamelessly condemns the very youngest to growing up in abject poverty.

Meanwhile in our first-past-the-post system, small parties have no chance.

Throughout my life I’ve banged on about the dangers of apathy and how we should never miss exercising our right to vote, a right that people fought and died to win.

For the first time I find myself seriously asking: “What is the point?”

BR DAVIS, NW1