Why Waste Your Time (WWYT)?
WWYT has a couple of (ok, unwitting)
celebrity supporters.
If voting were a matter of three or
four mouse clicks, a few seconds, then I'd bother. I'd weigh up the
pros and cons of voting green, for an independent candidate, or
spoiling my ballot paper in protest (this would be my only option if
the choice was confined to the three (all the same) main parties –
although I don't see the online vote-ware having a “b****cks to the
lot of 'em” button). I don't not vote through apathy, but because
of some sound reasons, because nothing changes (thousands of years of
democracy, still famine, wars, still a small ruling elite tell their
enslaved masses how great their self-serving 'system' is), and
because there's more important things in my life. I don't go down to
the polling station and scrawl profanities on my ballot paper to make
a point. The point is: you lot don't matter to me. Why should I stop
listening to Ian Dury, stop watching that Coen Brothers film, put
down my Thomas Pynchon and spend time on them?
Nope, it's not going to happen.
Neither is online voting. Not because
there's any real security issues (banks transfer millions across
internet connections. No-one would spend the money hacking the voting
system, it would be cheaper to buy (sorry, lobby) your way to getting
what you want. We'll not have online voting because it would pull in
all those votes for the minority parties that would genuinely
threaten the present, just about elected elite (less than half the
votes of the small turn-out, and they still have to form an
unelected, unholy alliance to gain power) don't want the system that
brought them to power to change.
First celeb: Terry Deary:
“A bunch of clueless muppets in
Whitehall are determining what children learn.”
“All
great men are bad men It's
not so much that power corrupts, it's that bad men seek power and
power corrupts them still more. I can't think that any MP in power is
there purely for noble purposes. Only one guy went to Parliament who
could have made a difference, and that's Guy Fawkes.”
Second celeb: Russell Brand (who I
didn't much like, and now do):
He's got some right stick. Some folk
think that if you don't stand for the national anthem and belt it out
you should be hung drawn and quartered. Some folk (some tory mp folk
to be exact) want the national anthem at the end of the night's telly
to make a come-back (how does that fit with 24-hour broadcasting?).
Different strokes? Only if they're strokes I like, apparently.
We have the right to vote. Not the duty
to do so. The right to vote, if we want to. We also have the right to
free speech and to dissuade others from voting if we so wish. Make it
less time-consuming, remove the risk of going to the polling station
and still being unable to vote (as happened to thousands at the last
round), and provide a genuine alternative that wins my mind and my
heart and I'll vote.
Russell Brand:
“The
reason these coalitions are so easily achieved is that the
distinctions between the parties are insignificant. My friend went to
a posh "do" in the country where David Cameron, a man whose
face resembles a little painted egg, was in attendance. Also present
were members of the opposition and former prime minister Tony Blair.
Whatever party they claim to represent in the day, at night they show
their true colours and all go to the same party.”
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