Vote For A Change

Up until a few weeks ago, I really could not care less about the election.

For me – national politics was a joke that I didn’t find particularly amusing, or particularly offensive; it operated outside of my social circles, my circus of ideas; it was something for other people to be interested in.

To be quite honest, I can’t even recall if I voted in the last national election – I know I voted locally, because that’s where I believe it matters – but national politics never seemed to matter.

The amount of bureaucracy, red tape, cliches, endless fuel for the tabloids, and – above all – blandness – of political influence at a nationwide level, just seemed irrelevant: I’ve likely had the good fortune to not have to live through the Thatcher Years – but politics, particularly in England, seems stuck in the old days.

The fact we’ve flipped between Labour and Conservative for the past 65 years seems akin to those years when your options on television were ‘this side or the other’. Even when Channel 4 and five came along, it was still a reflection of a largely bland offering of opinions/ideas/scheduling – with just the occasional moment of erotica or hard-hitting satire flashing across our screens once in a while.

Have I Got News For You was the comedy stalwart of Friday nights on the BBC (and even then it was on BBC 2 until late 2000), of which I was (and still am to some extent) an avid fan – but one of the mainstay jokes was that anything other than Conservative or Labour in government, was a ridiculous concept – and even when a politician with a sense of humour turned up – then LibDem leader Charles Kennedy – his self-deprecation and ‘new’ thinking, would be swept under a short clip of his inability to bowl a bowling ball; prompting howls of laughter from the audience.

Okay, so if you run the whole video it turns out he makes his second shot; but that just wouldn’t be as funny.

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But now we are here, in 2010 AD (In The Years of Dave) and there has been an explosion of ideas – first the interwebs, and then across the world of digital tv, and now filtering down into the world of UK politics.

There is talk amongs my friends and peers about ‘who are you voting in the election?’ – something that prompted me to actually think about this upcoming opportunity.

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And when I thought about it, I realised what disillusioned me so about national politics:

• I can see the value of local politics; enabling local government to do what needs to be done to keep things ticking over; maintaining the roads; taking away our refuse; ensuring house fires are tackled as quickly as possible; managing the yearly task of getting kids into education
• What I don’t see from a national level, is how I have any say whatsoever in decisions taken about the place I happen to live;
• Sure I get a vote every 5 years or so – but look what it’s worth!
• And, thanks to our history of Red or Blue power since the end of World War II; my options have been limited; I couldn’t necessarily vote for the party I want to – a protest vote wasn’t really even an option, seeing as my local protest vote was BNP!!

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It turns out, Proportional Representation is what I am after – or Single Transferable Vote.

This system moves the UK more to the true notion of democracy than it has ever had.

Ultimately, my suggestion is for us not only to be able to vote for any party we want – unconstrained by our location in the country – but for us to get more input in the way our country is run – either ‘in through the top’ at Westminster, or through our local powers.

I should probably expand on my idea of allocating 50% of our taxes – but that is for another day.

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In case you’ve missed the hints in this article – the first steps towards proportional representation are by voting LibDem at the upcoming election – forcing, at the very least, a hung parliament.

They might not share all of your views/ideas – but if you want to live in a Britain that DOES embrace our galaxy of ideas/views that are on offer in the UK – they are the ones who promise a move to that STV system: They are the ones who can bring about real change.