Voting – we all say we want democracy but then many of us don’t bother. How much time does it take to put an “X” on a bit of paper and fold it and stuff in a box, if you combine that with a evening stroll you could have a pleasant walk, (away from the kids?), with the other half. Or you could pop in on the way to or from work if you drive. Yet the fact is even a general election often draws only 60-70% of electors.
Local elections often draw less than 30%!
Even postal elections, which the Union organises, and require only a prepaid envelope stuck in a box on any street corner you go past anytime in a couple of weeks can draw 30% or less. Yet this is the direction the Government is proposing we move in.
My take on it is that it’s against democracy and the secret ballot. Give a family three votes for three adults and who is going to ensure that one dominate character in the family won’t fill them all in.
Even more preposterous, recently I read a proposal that we should lower the age at which can vote to 14, and give parents extra votes for their children before then. One response on the BBC website that captured the ridiculousness of the whole idea was as follows….
“Why stop at 14? Why not give children the vote the moment they are born? Just picture it, Tweedledum for Prime Minister, Tweedledee for Chancellor, Laa Laa for Home Secretary, Po for Foreign Secretary, Humpty Dumpty for Deputy PM and Little Weed for Leader of the Commons. Hang on, did I miss something? Sorry, I forgot, we've got a worse parliament than this already.”
Though perhaps a more serious and important point, which captured the insidiousness of the proposal was this… “You can do no better than read of the multiple vote system advocated by Neville Shute in his novel "In the Wet". Everyone got one vote. Parents had another. People with a certain level of education another. Those with a business another, and so on, up to seven votes in total. The idea was that, the greater your stake in the country, the more say you had at the ballot box.”
I’m sure that with our present government it won’t be long before they propose that for every £50,000 a company is worth on the stock market the Company Chairman (sic) gets an extra vote too!