http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... oting-poll

I don't even trust our councillors over here, so...

Where was the laziness option? Though I doubt many would have owned up to it.

I think that was covered by the inconvenience option.

The fact is that politicians ignore us for most of 5 years and then only pay attention to us come election time. So many of them are on the take and only in it for what it can do to help their careers it makes a mockery of the system. If there was a way for a ban on junkets and expenses unless they got more than 50% of the eligible vote then it would stop nearly all of them taking these "fact finding missions" to some sunny hotspot.

Link their pay to the minimum wage rather than the wages of FTSE board members. Then they really will have an interest in seeing minimum wages and average wages grow. Have annual referendums on how well they are doing. If they fail to get 50% support then their wages are cut to a living wage. On second vote if they fail to get 50% then their wage will be cut to minimum wage.

Which accounted for about 2% of the total responses although I suspect as suggested that that figure might be a bit on the low side.

Hard to pick one reason. I think I could agree to all of those reasons.

I suppose that you could actually combine the Inconvenience and Parties So Similar It Makes No Difference options to give a fairer representation of voter apathy.

Yes they are all so close that voting for one party makes no real difference.

If voters are sick and tired of our current MP's then they should put their money where their mouths are and stand against them.

No point crying about it if you are not prepared to do something about it.

An utterly pointless exercise. You're unlikely to get elected as the electoral system favours those with money to spend on campaigning and a constituency party behind them and far too many UK constituents would elect a shaved monkey if it was wearing the right colour rosette. Even if you do get to parliament, what are you going to do? You're one of 600, the majority of the rest are thrall to the whips offices and you'll be lucky to get one early day motion proposed in your first year. In reality, an independent MP has an much chance of enacting any change as the man in the street.

You'll spend four years of your life getting next to nothing done because the system is designed to be self-perpetuating. The only way to actually change it would be to get a sizeable lump of independent MPs in parliament all acting in concert to change things i.e. effectively a new party. Look at what happened the last time someone proposed change in parliament - went in asking for an entirely new system, got bartered/browbeaten down to a half arsed system that nobody wanted, and when that wasn't accepted the old guard stood up and said 'well, everything must be OK with this system then, let's carry on with it!'

Saying 'if you don't like it, why don't you become and MP and change it' is as much use as saying 'If you don't want them to knock your house down for the HS2, why don't you stand in front of the bulldozers?'.

If you want to effect change in the UK, the last thing you want to do is become an MP. And that is as much a symptom of the problem as anything is.

That amounts to an admission that all the things that are wrong are also ok.

You can never get a democratic mandate to launch your own party and seize the reigns of power because there is no single platform of cohesive action that meets the two requirements you have of it:
1. Is all that different from what's on offer already.
2. Appeals to more than a tiny sliver of the electorate.

UKIP think they have it, a pretty popular lump of policies, quite a lot of money and so on. They appeal to disaffected voters, but they don't get all that many votes still. Same for the Greens.

There's a law of diminishing returns in effect. Both the Tories and Labour have over the years discarded the support of certain factions that were dragging them away from the reasonable middle ground. Those discarded factions are small, and together they are incapable of mutual support by virtue of inherent antipathy to each other. So you can't collect up the pieces of Class War and the forgotten monarchists and expect them to form a party.

Fringe politics is just theatre that some people like because the technocratic realities aren't very exciting. But all those people who find the main parties hard to distinguish weren't actually asking for a magic new political entity to get inspired by, they will still be apathetic no matter what treats you offer them.

Also Thatcher raised the costs of doing so substantially deter such candidates.

Add the option to the ballot paper to use your vote to vote against a candidate. It might be a race to the bottom, but it would be interesting to see how it affected voter turn-out.

I’m not angry have just given up all hope for/on any and all Muppet’s of Parliament regardless of party

UKIP i will vote for in 2014 for the EU elections, because i believe leaving the EU 4th Reich can only be good for the UK

at the general elections in 2015 i think i will be a total bystander and just let it go by and will not comment or vote thereafter ...

If it effected how much they got paid or could claim in expenses you might see a big increase in turnout. No matter who you vote for they all have broadly identical policies so if you could hit them in the pocket people might vote against them to show their displeasure.