It really says a lot about the state of British politics that the televised leaders’ debate I’m most looking forward to is the one between Russell Brand and Al Murray. The way things stand, it looks more likely than a Cameron v Miliband debate. It also looks the more interesting.

A Brand/Murray smackdown would be hugely serious and relevant since it would go to the heart of what ails the UK’s democratic condition today: whether voting in elections is worth bothering with at all. Russell Brand has spent the past six months arguing the party system is so busted that true and lasting change can only be achieved by turning our backs on it and, come election day, staying at home in droves. Al Murray, on the other hand, embraces the political process by choosing to stand against Nigel Farage as the Pub Landlord, in effect saying that voting counts because it can take real power away from those whom you fear or mistrust.

Surely the two of them should come together and have a debate: it would be the biggest political locking of horns since Gladstone and Disraeli. I realise these guys are actually comedians. I’m aware I’m sort of one too. And I’m not arguing here that comedians have a special wisdom that automatically fast-tracks them on to the political arena, even though our stock is up at the moment, what with satirists being gunned down in Paris. It’s just that I see no proper, mature engagement with democracy anywhere higher. Conversations about a TV debate between Cameron and Miliband have stalled on which minority leader’s addition would most annoy the others.

That’s what’s been most dispiriting since this election campaign started: while we’re all desperate to talk about health, wages, cuts and welfare, our political leaders can’t get past talking about talking. When they do grapple with content, it’s done in negatives: Cameron says Labour won’t mention the deficit and Miliband says the Tories won’t discuss health. Next to Russell Brand and Al Murray’s energising attempts to ignite the election, the collective noise from Westminster sounds no better than the bass-level wheeze of a punctured lung.

Politicians have always been protective about their brand, but a collective caution seems to have overwhelmed them. It’s difficult, despite the policy reviews and speeches, to know precisely what Labour is in favour of. Which spending budgets will they protect and which ones will they abandon to the fires? Dummy and alternative manifestos are being written then torn up at Labour party HQ, as the fight goes on to limit commitments to anything.

On the Tory side, we know they’ll give us a referendum on Europe but won’t say which side they’ll take. Nor will they supply us with any basic indication of how the laws of maths can deliver us from debt by taking more money from the poor than from the rich. The Liberal Democrats have currently no vision of the future that can take them beyond election day itself, since they don’t know how many of them will be left, who’ll be in charge of them and who that pitiful soul will be able to talk to. Meantime, Ukip don’t seem ready to propose anything other than huge capitalised single words such as IMMIGRATION and EUROPE.

Then there’s the real imponderable: devolution, regionalism, constitutional reform, English votes for English laws. Call it what you will, the stark fact is that on this most fundamental of issues – what form our future democracy will take – we only have vague suggestions from everyone. All the parties want to run the country but won’t say what country it is they want to run.

No doubt policies are up and viewable on websites somewhere. But the stupefying reality is we still don’t feel we know. They’ve had months, years even, to prepare and mighty budgets for media spend, and yet we feel so little the wiser. You get the impression they’d love their manifestos to go out encrypted.

It’s easy to see then why the Brand mantra – “Don’t Vote” – has so much appeal. Post 2010, we all got austerity measures, bedroom taxes, NHS reforms and tuition fees that absolutely nobody voted for because absolutely no political manifesto mentioned them. So why shouldn’t we abandon our political masters and stay at home? Looking at the polls, no one knows how this thing is going to end up, so why bother? The experts can’t even agree whether we’re now in a four-party system or a five-party one; what chance have the rest of us got fathoming what’s going on?

I would argue the opposite, that now is the best time in a generation to go out and vote. With such a fragmented system on offer, nothing is inevitable. Uncertainty may create instability, but it can also generate churn and change in a way that doing nothing never can.

The truth is, we haven’t been abandoning politicians – they’ve been abandoning us. The main parties have run recent elections focusing on smaller and smaller tribes of supporters in the hope that the bare minimum will squeeze them through. They realistically hope to form a government on the basis of 33% of the vote and they will point to those of us who choose to sit this one out as a validation of that complacency.

No politician voted into office is going to take the number of people who didn’t vote into account; what they will do is heed the number who voted, but not for them, if that number is overwhelming. The 45% who voted yes to independence in Scotland, because it was so large and because it was underwritten by the force of an 84.5% turnout, is driving the agenda in Scottish politics as powerfully as if it had been on the winning side. This says a lot about how weird democracy is at the moment, but it’s also a bright example of how effective a massive turnout can be.

Now, each one of us has the opportunity to look at our constituency result in the last election and see what would best make a difference this time round. Alternative answers such as Green, nationalist, pro-NHS, even the Pub Landlord, no longer look like stupid also-rans. This time round, the day after the election, party leaders are going to look at the numbers – how many voted and how many didn’t vote for them. If both those figures breach certain tipping points then, irrespective of the number of seats won, and regardless of the make-up of the new House of Commons, the political agenda will have changed utterly.

It may cause confusion, anger and upset. It could all end badly, but it’s there as an opportunity if we want to have any sort of impact on the national political agenda. It will only happen if we come out in numbers; there’s nothing to be gained from sitting at home, apart from the chance to watch again the Pub Landlord slugging it out with Russell Brand and us dreaming of a Brandlord coalition that might have been, had we bothered to vote for one.