Before the election, the editor of the New Statesman invited me, among many others, to state my voting intentions. I did not think it important, so I held my fire. In Brixton, where I live, an area largely home to working-class Caribbeans, not voting is taken for granted. I did as I have done for years, and stayed away from electoral politics. At the start of the campaign, I asked at my local pub who our sitting MP was. Nobody knew and, more than that, nobody thought they were missing out on anything.

The following day, I approached about half a dozen kids, aged 15 or 16, who were equally ignorant and appeared quite pleased that they did not know. All this leads to one huge fact: that we "no voters" won the election, but the Labour Party seized the power.

We did much more than win the election. Our natural allies among the voters bolted from the two-and-a-half-party stable at the first opportunity. Martin Bell, the man in the white suit, won over many of the traditional "no voters" and got nearly 14,000 votes in Brentwood and Ongar, a safe Tory seat, the incumbent MP defeating him by less than 6 per cent. I doubt, though, that I would have voted for Bell. Beyond registering a simple protest, there is no tomorrow in it.

But I would certainly have cast a vote for the independent candidate who spanked the other parties out of town in Wyre Forest (covering Kidderminster), if only to see the expression on the Labour candidate's face at the count. The election was ignored by most of the heavyweights among London journalists - political editors and the like - with the exception of the NS's own Nick Cohen, who first forecast in these pages that Dr Richard Taylor could win. Here was a classic example of huge funds being poured into the NHS but used in the wrong way. A new hospital, to be run by the private sector, is being built in Worcester, about 18 miles away from the facility in Kidderminster. The cost has been enormous, wastefully so. The old facility was downsized. The decision ignored the needs of local people. The planners executed their plans because they knew what was best and the masses did not. They had their comeuppance.

And please believe me, wherever money is pumped into public services, the revolt will continue unless the democratic processes are broadened and deepened. We are on the cusp of a new movement. Taylor tells us that he intends to extend his campaign to areas where new hospitals are being imposed on the people willy-nilly, perhaps at the convenience of private buccaneers.

So much dissatisfaction rests just beneath the surface in the NHS. We know that nurses are being brought from all over the world to make up for the shortage of labour in our hospitals. What we do not know is that violence has broken out between nurses on the wards. A culture clash, we are told. Nigerians, they say, are too discourteous, West Indians are brash, Filipinos think they are superior, and so on. These nurses have been herded into the wards as though they were cattle. Now we reap the whirlwind.

More than 50 years after Attlee and Bevan established the welfare state, we are still asked to vote for this party because it will give us a little more of this, and to oppose the other party because it is offering a little less of that. We are treated as pigs to be fattened, fed from a trough (the public services) through which our betters pump the swill. Increasingly, in my little village in south London, young people from 13 upwards hate school, literally hate it. We parents wonder what is going on. I think it is simple. What is taught has no bearing on their lives, their expectations and their interests.

The mass of the population is much more advanced than half a century ago. It is not that the election campaign was especially boring, or that we were especially apathetic. The people are more developed, wiser, much more certain about what the politicians lack and what they have. Both parties have sensed that now. The new slogans are: "We must listen" and "We are humble". Trouble is, they are not trained to hear, and they cannot interpret what they see.

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