Election Night - The leaders left the Citadel to meet the "real" people. But the people aren't interested: they don't even want to storm the Citadel

We scramble to find the language to explain the disorientated times. This election has introduced the concept of "real people" - a strange species living in a land called the "real world", which can be ignored between elections. Everyone has attacked "the elite"; and the more powerful the castigator, the more damning the abuse. William Hague and Tony Blair have made a virtue of leaving "London" to meet "real people". By "London", they did not mean the metropolis of slums and suburbs, but official London: Whitehall, Westminster, the City, Fleet Street, the BBC. The Citadel: their home and mine.

An astonishingly large proportion of the population has shrugged off the enormous condescension of The Citadel. They haven't stormed it, they have just ignored it and given up on its masters doing anything to help them. The mass refusal to participate should force conventional wisdom to confront The Citadel's folly.

Consider the second false dawn of the new era. As I write, Tony Blair is telling his supporters at the Trimdon Labour Club that another "historic" victory has been gained. History has never been greeted with less enthusiasm.

The pundits are putting the best gloss on it and saying that we have seen the "lowest turnout since 1918". They are failing to phrase their description accurately, and are following a lazy consensual style which implies that Britain was always, somehow, a democracy. We heard it in 1997 when we were told that the Tory performance was the "worst since 1832". Britain was not a democracy in 1832. All adults did not get the vote until 1929 - if you include women as adults, which, what with one thing and another, I think you probably should. All working-class men did not get the vote until 1918. Even if you want to be misogynist about it, you must still note that the electoral roll on which the 1918 turnout figure was based was somewhat inaccurate - the 1.25 million male voters lying dead in the mud of Flanders distorted the statistics somewhat.

The mass refusal to participate in the 2001 election is not, then, the lowest turnout since 1832 or 1918 or 1929, or any other date you care to pick. It is the lowest turnout in the brief history of British democracy. Full stop. End of story. And the start of . . . what?

Well, whatever's coming, it's not democracy. In virtually every other grown-up country, if Tony Blair had managed to scrape together the support of a mere 43 per cent of that bare majority who bothered to vote, he would be in negotiations now with the Liberal Democrats, Greens and democratic socialists (or - this is Blair - the Tories) and trying to construct a coalition. We do not have a fair voting system, and Blair will have a crushing majority on 43 per cent of a turnout of less than two-thirds of the eligible adults who could be bothered to vote. We should hear less bombast. There should be less triumphalist prattle about new Labour representing modernity, when the electors have proven that contempt and indifference towards The Citadel are the dominant modern emotions.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, cannot represent the genuine conservative interests in England, let alone Scotland and Wales. The nationalists are not sure if they want independence for their respective nations. The Lib Dems took their eye off the ball for a second and found themselves on the far left of British politics, because they had stood still while everyone else stampeded past them to the right.

It is easy for journalists to mock. There's a style in the trade that is just as inauthentic as the political elite's attempts to pose as the friends of real people outside official London. But the collapse in the turnout should leave me and all my colleagues - bright and populist men and women all, who strain daily to make politics interesting - dejected. We're in the game, as much as the politicians. So are the opinion pollsters. (Will anyone take Bob Worcester's MORI and Gallup seriously, after tonight?) Or the political press? Or the think-tanks?

There should be a cultural revolution after this democratic disaster. But The Citadel has its defences. Matthew Taylor, of the privately financed Institute for Public Policy Research, put it well when he said that his new Labour cronies would prefer to win on a 25 per cent turnout than lose on 75 per cent. Power is everything and I am sure that worries about democratic legitimacy won't surface on the Today programme too often.

All night and well into the morning, reassuring voices have been offering other explanations for the failure of politics. Gordon Brown has said that turnouts are falling across the world, which is true, but misses the point. Jack Straw, as doltish as ever, says that we aren't voting because we are "contented".

Doubtless some are. Doubtless, too, many have not gone to the polling stations because they knew that new Labour was going to win. But "everyone knew" that Harold Macmillan was going to win in the 1950s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, but we've never seen anything like this.

The bleeding obvious is always the last fact that The Citadel will accept. The obvious fact of this year's election is that all the mainstream parties have given up on the working class, and therefore the working class gave up on them. There has been malingering in all constituencies, but the working-class constituencies have seen the sharpest falls.

The fault lies with a new Labour Party that rejects equality and has little or no time for liberty and fraternity. The party is pushing us towards an American future; but we will be an America without the consolations of sole superpower status or a decent film industry. In the United States, only half the population votes, two million are in prison, the chasm between rich and poor is dizzying, and health and education depend on the ability to pay.

It is a dismal and immoral future. The millions who failed to vote realised it offered them little, but by abstaining, they made it more likely.

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