The Problem With Not Voting Is That You Eventually Run Out Of Food Banks

Clambering down into the trenches of social media political discourse is almost always a mistake, but when elections come around, I'll admit that sometimes I can't help myself. And at such times, there's one character you'll almost inevitably run into if you move in progressive spaces: the person who makes it their mission to convince everyone around them not to vote.

The conversation generally goes something like this. They will vigorously set out their stall that anyone who votes, even (and sometimes especially) those who vote for the least of all evils as a method of harm reduction, is actually a filthy collaborator with blood on their hands through their implied complicity with the imperial state. Such voters are, by mere participation in the electoral process, not only 'endorsing' a deeply broken and undemocratic system, but also personally responsible for absolutely anything bad that were to happen if their preferred candidate were to win - which is supposedly a greater stain than standing by and letting much worse people into power. The only morally pure option, apparently, is to not vote at all - to 'boycott' the election, as if a lower turnout will itself somehow push things to change in a progressive direction, rather than being simply the result of a segment of leftists voluntarily kneecapping themselves; as if deliberately withdrawing from an extremely consequential decision-making process and thus handing even more disproportionate influence to the most determined right-wing voters in your area is somehow the road to societal improvement.

Another netizen will undoubtedly respond with concerns about what might happen if the worse candidate were to get into power. What about the people who will face destitution when the social safety net gets obliterated? What about the people who will lose their jobs thanks to austerity policies? What about the people who will no longer be able to feed their families or afford rent? What about those in already marginalised minority groups who will face even greater marginalisation and discrimination? What about the people who will be ripped from their homes and deported amid even more draconian immigration crackdowns?

If the first person feels sufficiently pushed to actually give what they think would be a solution to any of this, rather than simply accusing their dialogue partner of being principally to blame for everything bad in the world for daring to contaminate themselves with electoralism, they will generally throw out the following two words, as if it's all so straightforward and self-evident: 'Mutual aid!'

One frequently gets the sense, with this particular style of extremely online poster, that such a reply is being delivered with a tone of throwing up their arms and rolling their eyes in exasperation. 'Duh, if any of that bad stuff happens we'll just do mutual aid! Are you a leftist or what?'

Even while it's difficult to discern which of these accounts are real and which are entirely manufactured psyops specifically designed to deflate progressive turnout, it is clear to anyone who spends enough time in these spaces that there is indeed a kind of person for whom 'mutual aid' (and its cousins, 'direct action' and 'community organising') is a term thrown around largely like an incantation, a thought-terminating cliché to assuage any feelings of guilt or worry around the consequences of potentially letting the worst, most destructive candidates get into power. 'Bless me Father for I have sinned; it has been four years since my last confession. I actively decided not to vote and a conservative hardliner won the election.' 'I absolve you of your sins. Now go and pray fifteen Mutual Aids and ten Direct Actions.'

There's an almost unlimited number of angles from which one can attack the idea that 'boycotting' elections in liberal democratic countries carries any moral or material benefit: the strange misunderstanding of the aims and incentives of organised boycotts; the unbelievably naïve willingness to toss away hard-won political victories on the altar of 'purity'; the lack of empathy and care required to throw so many to the wolves seemingly in the accelerationist hope of triggering some sort of uprising; the undeclared but obvious assumption that inaction, even purposeful inaction, automatically carries less influence and moral weight than action; the simultaneous (rightful) complaining about the very tangible material impacts of the worst legislators while also claiming that 'voting doesn't do anything', as if those legislators got there by magic and not because people voted them in; the blindness to the fact that even while things are bad now, there truly is no depth to which they cannot sink, even beyond one's wildest nightmares. It's an attitude that treats events like elections as personal moral tests, as if the main objective is to remain pure enough to make it into Leftist Heaven, rather than political processes that will have outcomes regardless of whether any one of us personally chooses to participate. It's a mentality that expects us all to believe that, to use a classic example, 'boycotting' a trolley problem would in some mysterious way be materially different from just deliberately not pulling the lever because you like seeing lots of people get run over.

But this piece isn't about all that. It also isn't about whether mutual aid and grassroots community action is good - it obviously is; that's not even a question. You can vote and still be involved in your local free breakfast program or clothing bank or bail fund or needle exchange or support group or pro bono legal work or anything else. Building and maintaining systems that can go some way towards supporting each other even when the state fails is never not worthwhile, and I'm certainly not saying that mutual aid is bad or useless or that everyone who talks about it is doing so in bad faith; that would be absurd. My focus here is the rhetorical, emotional purpose served by invoking 'mutual aid' as a kind of miraculous panacea to every potential material impact of right-wing electoral victories, as part of a package of trying to convince people not to vote and dismissing concerns about the potential consequences of that choice. Don't even worry about what might happen if conservatives get into power - we'll just use mutual aid to plug all the gaps!

My focus is on the fact that the concept of 'mutual aid' serves the exact same function for a lot of vocal anti-voting leftists as 'charity' does for a certain kind of conservative. They are barely distinguishable, because at their core, both are predicated on a desperate desire to believe - or at least pretend to oneself - that it is possible to have right-wing state policy without right-wing outcomes.

Many conservatives love being able to bandy about the concept of 'charity' because it provides their conscience a wonderfully convenient get-out-of-jail-free card. They can pretend that they're not the nasty side of politics, taking away people's benefits, driving people into destitution, forcing people into food banks, pushing disabled people into early graves, kicking the social ladder out from under people, hollowing out the social safety net one cut at a time, rendering the country poorer, hungrier, colder and more precarious - because all of this can supposedly just be solved by charity! Charity is the answer, of course, not state handouts. Never mind that their policies are often the very thing primarily driving a rise in poverty; charity is there to pick up the slack.

Here in Britain, the poster child for this sort of... well, you could call it compassionate conservatism, or you could call it hypocritical and transparently disingenuous nonsense and a desperate balm to make peace with one's own bone-deep selfishness, is Margaret Thatcher. As she told a meeting of Conservative Party activists during her re-election campaign in 1983,

We are committed to a civilised society where the poor and the sick, the disabled and the elderly are properly cared for. Cared for by the community, cared for by their families, cared for by voluntary organisations.

Notice that she didn't say 'by a properly-funded welfare state supported by fair and progressive taxation', because offloading our collective duties as a society onto charities and voluntary organisations was kind of her whole deal. Framed differently, she may as well have announced the campaign slogan 'You're On Your Own, Suckers'.

Her determination to prove that the country's needs didn't actually require government spending and could instead be met by charity and philanthropy led in part to her symbiotic relationship with fundraising hero and... uh, I'm just checking my notes here... oh yes, one of the single worst individuals in modern British history Sir Jimmy Savile (whose knighthood she relentlessly lobbied for, despite warnings). His extravagant fundraising for the likes of the spinal unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital provided highly convenient cover for the Thatcher government's slashing and burning of British public services by acting as high-profile proof of concept that such services could be sustained without state funding and could be supported through charity instead - plus, huge amounts of fundraising money always help to disguise the impact of cuts in the immediate term. (What was in it for Savile? A scarcely believable degree of access to vulnerable patients, including those with spinal injuries, which he used to commit heinous abuse on an enormous scale for decades.)

But we don't even have to look to the past for examples of right-wing politicians pointing to charity as the answer to what they have inflicted. Over the fourteen years of Conservative government in the UK between 2010 and 2024, we in Britain became tiresomely familiar with a party line that I'm going to call 'Blessed are the Food Banks'. Thanks to Conservative austerity policies following the 2008 recession, the need for food banks soared over this time period, to the point that, to cite the Guardian, the UK now has three times as many food banks as cinemas, twice as many food banks as hospitals, and more food banks than public libraries. I can remember a time when they were a rarity, but they are now a standard fixture of our society. In 2010, Trussell (a UK anti-hunger charity and a major provider of food banks) operated just 35; today we have roughly 2,800 total across the country. It is, technically, in isolation, good that they exist; it's good that people have responded to need in their communities. But to any sane observer, their existence in such numbers is emblematic of an absolute tragedy - a withering indictment of a decade and a half of Conservative policy, powered by repeated Conservative election victories. Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown threaded that particular needle well in the article cited above:

[Food banks are] of course a testimony to the human decency and heroic endeavours of thousands of fellow citizens who feel the pain of others and believe in something bigger than themselves. But the fact that food banks have had to come into existence in one of the richest countries in the world is a scar on our collective conscience and a permanent stain on our country's character.

If you had asked a Conservative MP during those years, however, you'd have got an altogether different answer. They tended to be effusive in their uncomplicated praise for food banks and those who staff them, insultingly blind to the fact that their policies were the very thing driving so many people to food banks' doors in the first place. For a couple of representative examples, in January 2020 Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey described them as the 'perfect way' to help those in poverty, referring to 'the challenges that people face at difficult times in their lives' as if her own government department wasn't itself one of those challenges; and in 2017 MP and reincarnated Victorian factory boss Jacob Rees-Mogg called the existence of so many food banks 'rather uplifting' and evidence of 'what a good, compassionate country we are' given that 'inevitably, the state can't do everything'. That just about sums up their collective approach: poverty is inevitable, and is nothing that government can help with or is on the hook for, so isn't it lovely how our communities are pulling together to help those in need?

Food banks - as just one data point of our crumbling social safety net and tumbling living standards - are, of course, not a substitute for actual solutions. They're not a substitute for higher wages, better jobs, affordable rent, tighter worker protection, more secure employment, a functioning benefits system, a well-funded healthcare system, or anything else. Being able to point to food banks and suchlike is a guilt release valve, an unthinking self-reassurance, for the right-wingers who bear a chunk of the blame for why we don't have those things. They might be able to mitigate some of the effects of austerity - and, under such dire circumstances, nearly three thousand food banks is better than no food banks - but they will never be able to fully compensate for right-wing government policy. One in eight UK households still experiences food insecurity, including 6.3 million adults and 2.2 million children. Over 4 million children - almost one in three - are living in poverty. 4% of parents report regularly going without food. Perhaps most damningly, a 2025 report by Michael Marmot, Professor of Epidemiology at University College London, linked one million excess deaths between 2009 and 2020 to deprivation, with 148,000 of those deaths directly linked to austerity policies. In his own words, 'Arguably, austerity killed 148,000 people.'

This is not a failure of charity. It isn't a problem of the British population simply being insufficiently generous or not doing enough mutual aid. It's the natural consequence of fourteen years of electing Conservative governments. Four consecutive elections put them in power, and a hell of a lot about the present state of the UK traces its roots back to that fact. Another thousand food banks won't fix this.

Because that's the thing: you can't actually offset every bad outcome of conservative policy with community initiatives and charity programs, despite both many right-wing politicians and anti-voting leftists insisting otherwise.

Charity and mutual aid aren't identical, of course. Charity - and especially the versions of it promoted by conservatives - often carries paternalistic undertones, a sense of those 'with more' generously and voluntarily giving to those with less, and an implication of discerning between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor. Mutual aid tends to have a far flatter and more reciprocal structure, being geared instead around a community helping each other to try to ensure everyone's needs are met, regardless of anyone being 'deserving' or not. But I don't think this distinction particularly matters all that much in this context, because they have something crucial in common: they will never be able to reach everybody.

You can't 'mutual aid' your way out of every situation. You can't 'community organise' for literally one hundred percent of people in need. There will always be those who fall through the cracks, who can't be reached, who need help that just can't be effectively provided right now on a voluntary community basis: people who could be helped if the resources of the state were set up to do so, but for whom no mutual aid network will ever be fully enough. I am not saying that I cannot imagine any system under which we would be able to support each other without a state. But we don't live in that system, not yet, and we know what it looks like when communities are left to try their best not to drown when a bunch of the worst bastards on the ballot get into government and decide to flood them with horrific, destructive policy: it looks bad, and people die who wouldn't have otherwise. Right now we still have a state, and that state still wields a lot of power, regardless of how any of us believes our society should ideally look. I am saying that, as things currently are - with the majority of the wealth hoarded by a tiny minority of the population, with the means of production still dictated by the very few, with unfettered capitalism hostile to both people and planet raging on, and especially when under actively antagonistic governments that serve to make it all worse - there is no amount of mutual aid that will catch everyone.

Again, to be clear, that doesn't mean that it isn't still worth doing. Programs to help each other are always a good thing, just like how it's still worth us all wearing seatbelts even if they're not fully guaranteed to save everyone's lives. What it means is that any idea that we simply shouldn't concern ourselves with who holds the reins of elected office because, whatever happens, we'll just 'mutual aid' our way past every issue is staggeringly naïve. The eye-rolling, hands-throwing arrogance of the terminally online leftist who blithely tells everyone not to vote and just 'do mutual aid instead' manages to perfectly replicate the delusional callousness of a Conservative MP being told about hunger and poverty in Britain and responding, 'Just use food banks!' How about we have a system in which people don't need food banks? In which we don't need to plug ever-widening gaps in the social safety net with mutual aid? In which those of us both within and outwith government recognise the influence it currently has in either improving or wrecking people's lives, and at least attempt to steer that influence in a beneficial way, rather than pre-emptively giving up on that entirely and expecting voluntary work to fully compensate?

But an approach that pragmatic doesn't stand a chance at getting past the final boss: the fact that for many of these people - on both sides - the insistence on charity or mutual aid over any sort of government action is ultimately rooted in ideology, rather than in a material assessment of cause and effect, an assessment of how to ensure the greatest number of people thrive and eradicate as much unnecessary suffering as possible by using whatever levers are currently available. It is rooted in the sense that there is some moral imperative behind rejecting anything that government can do - really, rejecting the idea that government even could do anything - in favour of somehow more 'pure' voluntary models. 'It's wrong to rely on the state; you should be relying on each other' is something that could come out of the mouths of either group.

They come at it from two very different angles, but both carry the assumption that there is something fundamentally contaminated about getting any help from the government or trying to get the government to help. This can be seen in the way conservatives talk about 'state handouts' and 'government dependency' and 'personal responsibility' as if there is something deeply, offensively immoral both in the state offering help and in people receiving that help (but not in being dependent on charitable help, for some inscrutable reason); Thatcher famously called poverty 'a fundamental character-personality defect' and declared that 'economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul' - but it can also be seen in the way this particular brand of anti-voting leftist derisively spits at even the suggestion of voting, as if ballots are marked in blood and as if refusing to remove one's hand entirely from the steering wheel of electoral politics is an unforgivable moral crime, and it is the responsibility of progressives to simply abandon elections to all the worst voters in the country so as to keep our personal moral slates unblemished. 'Mutual aid' is used here as less a realistic proposition for how to ensure that people are supported and more a kind of affirmation of faith, barely more useful than responding to someone in desperate need with 'God will provide'. There goes the guilt release valve again.

This sense of there being a 'moral purity' in grassroots community action that bypasses the state, in contrast to some perceived 'dirtiness' in having anything to do with government, crops up all over progressive spaces. Discussions around different sources of aid, how best to support our communities, which kinds of programs do the most good, what sorts of avenues are available to us, and how to marry different forms of political action can quickly veer into a quasi-religious politics of purity and profanity, more concerned with entirely abstract values and the competitive maintenance of one's own moral incorruptibility than anything connected to the material reality on the ground. As one example, the queer community of decades past is sometimes romanticised by those of us who didn't live through it as something less contaminated, more pure, more radical, more morally edifying. We were apparently cooler back then, when government abandonment and a more hostile society forced us to rely on each other because that's all we had. The AIDS epidemic gets invoked as the height of our awesome community self-sufficiency and mutual aid, an example to follow today and proof of what can be done when we unite and pull together... despite the fact that no amount of mutual aid could have saved everyone in the face of government apathy and inaction, and despite the fact that so much of our radical activism back then was specifically geared around trying to get the authorities in each country to give a shit, because that was the only thing that was actually going to stop the crisis. What so many of those people would have given for anti-discrimination laws and marriage equality. We pulled together, we supported each other, we developed community networks, we protested, we got radical... and thousands and thousands of people still died completely preventable deaths. Mutual aid wasn't enough, not when so many of us were being so utterly failed by our respective governments. It wasn't that we were too cool and radical to need the state; it's that the state failed us, and we were left to scrape together what best we could under needlessly horrendous circumstances.

Ultimately, both groups here - conservatives and anti-voting leftists - need a thing to point to as a supposed simple solution to the inevitable negative consequences of right-wing policy, because the alternative is having to admit that they're essentially just willing to let strangers unnecessarily suffer and die for their personal ideological project. It's not about finding a solution; it's about finding a way to excuse the fact that they're freely refusing to take actions available to them that would have some of the biggest effects in preventing the worst outcomes, because they're ideologically opposed to those actions. This kind of conservative needs to believe that no actual widespread, unfixable harm will come from their horrid policies, because charity will always be there to pick up the slack - and if there is harm, then society just needs to charity harder. These anti-voting leftists need to believe that we can just let hard-right policy run amok by willingly handing the reins of the state entirely over to the worst actors, and somehow not end up with the obvious cause-and-effect outcomes of that, because we can simply plug all the gaps with mutual aid. Whether this magical thing to point to actually works, whether it's actually feasible for it to do everything it can apparently do, is secondary. As long as their consciences feel clean, as long as they have an easy rebuttal to anyone concerned about the impact of their actions (or deliberate inactions), as long as they can convince themselves that their stance makes sense, that's all that matters.

Voting won't solve everything or protect everyone, but neither can mutual aid. There is no amount of mutual aid in the world that would be able to fully compensate for a state that is slashing benefits, removing food programs, gutting safety regulations, defunding medicine, targeting community organisers, tossing out worker protections, outlawing healthcare, attacking unions, legalising discrimination, and ignoring disasters. There will always be those who slip through entirely preventable cracks, and I for one don't think we should be blasé about sacrificing them. And anyone who's loudly advocating for simply letting the people who want to do all that get into office because 'duh, we'll just do mutual aid' isn't materially much different from the conservatives who gesture insistently at 'charity' and talk about how wonderful it is while they destroy our social infrastructure. They're needlessly inviting an unnecessarily hostile state by refusing to do basic electoral harm reduction under the illusion that 'the community' will be able to patch up everything that conservatives break, when it can't. There is no right-wing state policy without horrible right-wing outcomes, no matter how inconvenient that is to anyone's politics.

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