The biggest issue of this election campaign is not the delivery of public services, as Labour would wish, nor Europe, as the Tories would wish. It is an issue that has troubled the more acute political commentators for a decade or so, and it now looms larger than ever before. It is often called apathy; but that seems an inadequate word, implying lazy voters slumped in armchairs with cans of lager, in urgent need of a new Labour initiative, called "apathy to activity" or something of that sort, to prod them into life. It is not the voters who are on trial; it is the political class. And consumer resistance, or silent protest, or deliberate disengagement, would all be better descriptions of what is happening than apathy. In this election, that mood may not be expressed exclusively by people staying at home; we may well see more success for candidates standing entirely outside conventional party groupings, as Ken Livingstone did in London last year, and as a retired doctor proposes to do in Wyre Forest (west Midlands) this year, in opposition to the treatment of local health services.

What the electorate senses is that politicians have abdicated responsibility. We are entering a world in which, as Noreena Hertz puts it in her new book, The Silent Takeover, "corporations are taking over from the state, the businessman becoming more powerful than the politician, and commercial interests are paramount". She adds: "Political answers have become as illusory as the rows and rows of homogenised clothes, standard T-shirts and cardigans, folded in your local Benetton store. High street conservatism and conformity par excellence . . . Politicians continue to offer only one solution: a system based on laissez-faire economics, the culture of consumerism, the power of finance and free trade. They try and sell it in varying shades of blue, red or yellow, but it is still a system in which the corporation is king, the state its subjects, its citizens consumers."

Politicians behave as though they were insecure lovers; they live in fear that their corporate bedfellows will pack their suitcases and leave. The result, they believe, would be economic ruin. Once, invasion by a foreign power was the worst fear of the state and its leaders; now, it is withdrawal by a corporate power. Frustrated by their inability to control the economic giants, governments turn their regulatory energies elsewhere, oppressing the public sector with targets and demanding disproportionate paperwork from small businesses. This explains the simultaneous public demands for less government interference and less onerous taxation, on the one hand, and for more effective government action and higher public spending on the other. Voters know perfectly well that, while the Inland Revenue will pursue them for the last penny of income tax, and the Customs and Excise will pester their local greengrocer (if he still exists) for his VAT returns, companies in the FTSE 100 pay taxes well below what their profits justify.

Far from attempting to get to grips with corporate power, politicians woo it into the public sector, offering new markets in the provision of health, education and so on. Business representatives dominate the advisory bodies, task forces and quangos that sprawl over the political landscape. Labour was once criticised for being too closely entangled with unaccountable trade union bosses, and it was rightly punished by the voters. Now, both parties are beholden to unaccountable corporate bosses; to adapt an old northern working-class phrase, politicians and business people piss in the same pot. It is left to consumers and shareholders to impose what little restraint there is on corporate activity, through boycotts and through the kind of activism that Mark Thomas describes on page 31.

One can imagine the weary smiles, the worldly-wise sneers from the new Labour cognoscenti and their focus group gurus. Do the majority of people really care about such things? Do worries about ecological damage in the Amazon or exploitation labour in Asia or expulsion of Kurds from their villages preoccupy more than a middle-class minority? Don't voters want good jobs with good wages, decent public services and crime-free streets? All these questions are perfectly fair: at least two in three of the population will vote on 7 June, mainly for one of the three big parties; only a minority feel real concern about unaccountable corporate power and they will not be significant even among non-voters (if anything, the opposite). But the questions also miss the point: it is only by engaging idealism and vision and outrage, even when these are not shared by the majority of voters, that the parties can inject any real passion or excitement into politics and turn it into a spectacle worth bothering with. Politics always was a minority interest, like football or religion. A general election is the equivalent of a Cup Final or a Christmas Eve mass, which should attract interest far beyond the usual core support. It will fail to do so if even those naturally inclined to commitment have lost their enthusiasm. If the mainstream politicians cannot inspire, there are always darker forces lying in wait, as is already apparent in Austria and increasingly so in Italy.

Now count to 60 million

And talking of apathy. . . It is reported that only 56.6 per cent of households have so far posted back their census forms, which were supposed to be completed on 29 April. Most of the others no doubt are still scratching their heads over the questions. We were asked, for example, to give our working hours as an average of the previous four weeks. These included two bank holidays (to say nothing of school holidays), and no indication was given as to whether adjustments should be made for these. What is alarming is that the low response rate, and all the other wrinkles, will be forgotten when the results are published. For the next decade, they will be used to shape policy, to calculate future demand for doctors, teachers and houses, to compare us with other countries. They will form the basis for a thousand sociological theses and a million newspaper columns. And it will all be based on flawed information. No wonder we don't trust governments: they can't even manage to count us properly.