I’ve been spoiling my ballot for over 20 years. This year will be no different.

Growing up, politics was important to my family. I was raised in Sutton-in-Ashfield, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire striking miner and a trade union officer for the Knitwear, Hosiery and Apparel Workers Union.

Dad was down the pit and Mum was in the factory, and both called themselves socialists. They believed in the trade union movement and the Labour Party. I did too, up until 1997.

It was the year that my mum died in a car accident on the M1, driving from a union meeting to get to the girls in the factory to feedback what was being discussed. They were going on strike, like many other factory workers whose jobs were at risk.

I went to university after she died, and that’s where I redefined how I wanted to engage with the political system.

I’m now a sociologist and I understand how power works. I’m also a working class woman so I understand how power works against me personally.

Our party political system exploits that tiny bit of power each one of us has by begging us to use it once every five years. Once we do the political parties retreat to Westminster, or the town hall, and they’re rarely seen again until the next time they need your vote.

I have decided not to allow them to use my power, therefore I spoil my vote.

I spoil my ballot using a sticker distributed by anarchist groups. Last time the sticker featured the famous quote, ‘What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.’

This small act of resistance makes me feel that I have some power. It sends a message to those wanting my vote that they govern by consent, and that this consent can be taken away. It is not a given.

It’s a completely different feeling to the first time I used my vote. It was 1986 and I went to the polling station with my mum – we were both really proud of each other. And of course, we voted Labour – we hated Thatcher, after all. The Labour Party was part of us, and we were part of it. It was the way I was raised.

I remember my younger sister’s birthday on 4 May 1979 after the general election had just taken place. The Conservatives had won, Margaret Thatcher was the first woman prime minister – and the first woman my mum admitted to being afraid of.

While my sister and I were helping Mum prepare the birthday cake and the tinned salmon – signalling a special occasion – she used the cake to help explain the economics of neoliberalism.

If the cake represented the country’s wealth, we (the working class people who made the cake) would get the tiniest slice to share among us all, and the rich would get most of the cake.

The only Conservative voters I knew were our family GP and my headmaster. The former always stood in the general election, always got a few hundred votes and no one seemed to mind.

The latter was a nasty man who always wore a Conservative tie to work with a small badge on his lapel. My mum would purposefully put ‘Coal Not Dole’ and Labour Party stickers on our blazers to piss him off.

This is how working class resilience works: we don’t have power but we never let them forget that we are still there. I didn’t realise at the time that my way of reclaiming my power would be in choosing not to vote.

Tony Blair was the last prime minister I voted for. New Labour offered us so much hope; we’d had a generation of Conservative governments and our communities were on their knees.

I think the thing that kept us going for so long was our subculture – the music, the drink and the drugs. As a young person, the rave scene was part of our resistance. Our industries were closing and we were out of work. The country was moving on, but those of us in the old manufacturing areas were being left out.

We believed New Labour would help us but it wasn’t long before I realised my hope was misplaced. The Sure Start Centres, the social exclusion policies – all of them aimed at diminishing working class people, forcing us to be different, because who we were was not good enough.

The Iraq War then showed us that this government was just another government.

In my 51 years I have seen inequality rise, poverty rise, housing being used as assets rather than homes, good jobs in the media, politics, the arts, law and medicine going to people because of who they are, who they know and whether they can afford to live in London, rather than offering a fair chance to all.

Until the political system truly represents working class people with deeds, not words, I will not vote. Despite Sutton-in-Ashfield having a Labour MP since 1955, the people who live there are still some of the poorest people in the country.

In our political system the only winners of this particular game of musical chairs are those that are playing. The spectators – the electorate – just get to look on and hope that the players notice they are there.

I know – and have known since 1979 – that every single election is the ‘most important election’ with the ‘most at stake’ until the next one.

Everyone needs to decide whether to vote and who to vote for based on their own knowledge and experiences. I do that every time there is an election. As of yet, none of the candidates have persuaded me to hand over that tiny bit of power I have.

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