JUDGING by previous years, the biggest winner in tomorrow's local elections is likely to be apathy. If the I Can't Be Bothered Party - to register your vote, simply tear your poll card up and chuck it in the bin - had a candidate standing in each of York's wards it would win by a country mile.

Where would the city be then?

If you complain about York's litter problem now, imagine the tides of rubbish that would collect in every street under the city's new, idle rulers. Your dustbins would never be emptied, traffic wardens wouldn't bother enforcing parking rules so the whole city would grind to a halt, and York's few remaining council care homes for the elderly would close for lack of proper supervision.

Shiftless teachers wouldn't bother making sure their pupils turned up, so the city would be plagued by hordes of bored youngsters from noon 'til night, the Barbican and York's various public swimming pools would fall into decay, and the buses would be even more unreliable than they already are.

Oh, and there would be nobody to collect your council tax.

Complete chaos, in other words. Unthinkable, isn't it? (Apart from the council tax bit.) Which is why, as much as you may dislike the pettiness of local political wrangling and the stuck-up attitude of some junior council officials who seem to forget their job is to serve you, not patronise you, tomorrow's election does matter.

The right to a vote didn't come easily. It took centuries of hard graft by our ancestors to finally wrestle the right to a say in the way our communities are run from those who would have kept it from us. A great shame to throw that away because you can't be bothered.

A good turnout at local and national elections is the best way to make sure we continue to live in a stable and decent society.

Large turnouts don't give the extremists a chance, because their influence is drowned by the decent majority. We don't have any BNP candidates in York, thank God. But how long would it be before we did have, do you think, if they cottoned on to the fact that because York voters are so lazy, they would only need a handful of votes in each ward to get elected?

So it doesn't matter who you vote for tomorrow (not to me, anyway, but I dare say to some of the local politicians it matters a great deal), just so long as you vote for somebody.

That way, we'll keep the extremists at bay and we can be sure the city council will continue to provide a Rolls Royce service when it comes to collecting our council tax.

SPEAKING of elections, wouldn't it be nice if, alongside all those TV polls to find the 100 Greatest Screen Stars Of All Time and the 100 Worst Britons, there were a poll to find the 10 Worst TV Producers? It would need to be a poll with bite, so that those who came top knew they could expect no mercy.

But imagine what fun we could all have, voting for the anonymous ITV apparatchik who imposed the dreadful I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here on us, not once, but twice.

No punishment would be too gruesome - except, perhaps, confining them along with all their fourth-rate celebrity pals on a rock somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, and leaving them there to stew. For good.

In Chris Titley's absense, his column this week was written by Stephen Lewis.

Updated: 11:37 Wednesday, April 30, 2003