The main purpose of this article is to make me want to vote by the time I’ve written it. Sorry to have to pare this down to personal basics, but I love politics, I believe passionately that everyone should vote, and I still desperately cling by the fingertips to the ideal that a national democratic debate can do some good to people’s lives. So I really do need a reason to vote, and at the moment I’m not sure I have one. I think it’s out there somewhere.

You might feel the same, especially if you’re a first-time voter. I can see you looking at the revolution in Greece and the one brewing in Spain, and then turning back to look at Nigel Farage and thinking: “Really, is that it? A man with a pint of bitter in his hand and in his breast pocket a Top Trumps card about people who are HIV-positive?” I can see you watching the leaders’ debates and thinking: “The conventional parties look—well, so conventional, but why waste a vote on the others unless you’re Scottish?” I hope, by the time I work this thing through my system, to have persuaded myself that there is a point in voting and that this time round there is a glimmer, a faint but tantalising one, that democracy may change for the better if we come out and make our voices heard in significant numbers on May 7.

But first, why the uphill struggle to find a reason? During the independence referendum in Scotland, I was cheered by the sight of a nation fully engaged, 16- and 17-year-olds taking their vote seriously, people passionately arguing on street corners and in pubs and supermarkets about the merits of autonomous revenue collection, currency zones, and the obsolescence or otherwise of Trident. Above all, the 84.6 percent turnout proved that once again politics was alive, that although the big-party system was crumbling, political engagement was stronger than ever. Hence the hope that something significant was about to take place across the rest of the U.K., too.

But cut to the morning after and the cheesy grin of self-satisfaction at a Scottish job well done immediately fell away. David Cameron came out like a sore winner, and, instead of healing wounds opened by the passionate debate, rubbed them the wrong way with his immediate talk of English votes for English laws. There may have been some cause for him to raise the subject, but not then, not there. It was a cynical and clod-hopping conclusion to a debate that had otherwise inspired passion and idealism. It was a childish shout at the end of a grown-up discussion.

The election drew nearer, and so did the boorishness of angry kids at play. Not just the name-calling at PMQs but the sneering, petty-minded headlines about the likes of Ed Miliband’s kitchen and Grant Shapps’s bank account names, signalling that we had come back utterly to how it had always been: a vindictive ground war of insults and gibes in which nothing of substance would be said. When something as stark as the HSBC tax scandal gets reduced in the space of a few days to a discussion of a shadow chancellor’s window-cleaning receipts, you know that the great operation to shut down argument has begun.