HOW IS election fever down your way? No, me neither.
 
The electorate shuffles towards the local polls tomorrow, and a general election later this year, disengaged from politics and significantly apathetic about outcomes.
 
Many factors have doubtless contributed to this malaise. Fourteen years of economic hard times. The inability or unwillingness of either party to offer solutions to the multiple problems families and society face.
 
The extreme rancour of political conversation mediated through social media. The venality of too many politicians.
 
The establishment has certainly worked to create this democratic depression, not least by extinguishing anything that might stimulate even a modicum of hope.
 
The potential of Brexit has been left unfulfilled, as was always going to be the case under a Tory government. And the even greater promise of Corbyn’s Labour was systematically eviscerated.
 
Certainly, it is hard to recall a moment of greater indifference towards conventional electoral politics. That is not the same as political apathy  —  witness the pro-Palestine movement engaging hundreds of thousands week in, week out.
 
But the whole voting thing? Many people, even among the usually involved, find it a struggle to pretend even a simulacrum of excitement.
 
Not even being told that we are moving onto a “war footing” by the government and opposition has penetrated the carapace of disengagement. Perhaps that is because people simply don’t believe it  —  “defence” ranks about eighth on voters’ list of priorities.
 
Nor is it as if there is nothing going on in local government. Indeed, local authorities, including mighty Birmingham, are tipping into bankruptcy one after another after 14 years of relentless cuts in government funding.
 
But since neither governing party is offering much hope of a relaxation in austerity, that is a concern hard to translate into a useful vote.
 
Of course, there are flutters of interest here and there. Will voters in the north-east rebuke the Starmer authoritarians by electing Jamie Driscoll as their independent socialist Mayor?
 
Will Tory metro mayors hang on in Tees Valley and the West Midlands? The answer to that one may determine whether there is a general election sooner rather than later.
 
Watching Rishi Sunak in the Commons you get the feeling that he wants to be away, spending more time with his money in California. Even the Prime Minister can raise scant enthusiasm for the practice of politics at present.
 
As for Keir Starmer, it baffles the imagination to try and envisage him as enthused. Perhaps a good stiff sentence for a malefactor raised a smile back in his prosecutorial days.
 
But no-one has been more effective at squeezing hope and commitment out of politics as he has step-by-step realigned Labour with the agenda of the Treasury, Nato, the City and Rupert Murdoch.
 
Of course, another Tory MP has defected to Starmer’s Labour. Why ever not? It is becoming the central rallying point for bourgeois politics as the Tories unravel.
 
And what Labour offers for the next period is very similar to what Dan Poulter has been voting for over the last 14 years. Who can wonder at public disgust with the whole thing?
 
However, lack of electoral interest does not mean that politics thereby stops. Nor is apathy the same thing as calm.
 
For example, the apparent disintegration of the Tory Party is releasing a certain amount of political energy. Some of that is being scooped up by the Reform Party, and rather more of it by projects to remake the Conservatives in opposition.
 
Both are aimed in the same political direction, however: developing a right-wing populist alternative to the evident failures of centrist liberalism.
 
It hopes that a mixture of Trussian economics and Braverman-style authoritarian culture wars can get sufficient people enthused.
 
It’s a bad scheme, but not a mad one. Evidence of polls and actual elections alike show the new hard right prospering in much of Europe, and Britain is not such a picture of blooming economic and social health that there is any reason to expect an exception here.
 
The populist project has its stress fractures, however. The gross unpopularity of neo-Hayekian economics in the style of the unrepentant Liz Truss is one.
 
As a free-standing proposition, a libertarian economy would poll in the low-to-mid single figures. It needs the aggressive promotion of social conservatism, which has a constituency, to turn electorally viable.
 
Hooked to the historic form of the Conservative Party and that viability becomes threatening. Jeremy Corbyn secured mass support by offering a plausible alternative to the politics of slump-and-cut through the vehicle of the Labour Party, however poor the historical precedents for such a thing.
 
Suella Braverman will offer a different alternative. The narrative will not be of economic change but of social authoritarianism as an all-purpose solution to a society under strain.
 
Some Conservatives are smarter. Nick Timothy, once Theresa May’s consigliere, for example, unites culture warrior rectitude with demands for action to reindustrialise Britain, through the market if possible, but without it if necessary.
 
To repeat, there are lots of places where a right-wing populist approach is working right now, at least in terms of winning votes if not changing countries, and almost none where imperial centrism is successfully seeing it off. Imagining that Starmer will pull that trick off is, well, challenging.
 
On the left, enthusiasm and energy are at least being displayed by George Galloway’s Workers Party. It has wind in its sails since the famous Rochdale victory and now plans to stand a candidate in every general election constituency in Britain, all 633 of them.
 
Winning any, apart from Galloway’s own, is an improbability, even if whispered talk of securing up to 7 per cent of the vote nationwide does not prove chimerical.
 
And standing against those Labour MPs who defied the whip to vote for a Gaza ceasefire last November will strike many as short-sighted. This obviously goes beyond the “no ceasefire, no vote” slogan by a margin.
 
However, the Workers Party is articulating the anti-Labour rage which has engulfed sections of the population since its backing for Israel’s genocide compounded three years of authoritarian right-wing repositioning.
 
The well-known reservations about Galloway’s positions, perhaps most importantly on climate change, mean that any charge led by the Workers Party will leave some on the left behind who would have backed a Corbyn-led initiative.
 
But the Workers Party has the buzz which you get from engaging with the enemy, and don’t from dithering.
 
And buzzes are at a premium right now. You can’t build the united front needed to offer an alternative to both imperial centrism and dictatorial nativism on buzz alone, but it is a necessary ingredient.
 
The fog of pessimism and inertia hanging over British politics will not be easily dispersed, and dispersal will not be the work of any one politician alone but of the initiative of mass movements.
 
But anything that advances the contours of a socialist alternative, and that puts the working class front and centre, assists in penetrating the gloom.
 
That is what the mass movement for Palestine and the threat of extending war both demand. And it is the spirit of May Day for sure.