Bag's Rants

Time for a change but this is not it.

I was looking at the call for legislation on making voting compulsory and thinking it would never come about. Then I thought, why not? It is just as much target setting as most of the other laws being put in place and it won't give the real result we need but it will set a target, the target will be met and more funds will be generated. Read more here. Winners all round, or will it?

The issue really is voter apathy. We as the general public believe that the political system in the UK is so skewed that it really is useless voting. 'No matter who you vote for they always get in' is the popular phase. Whoever gets in will be useless, corrupt and there is very little to chose between them all. This leads to droves of people staying away and not voting.

So useless government gives voter apathy which gives low turnout. Some bright spark then comes up with how to make the government less useless by making going to the voters booth compulsory. The theory behind that must be is it works one way then you can reverse it by changing the one side you can control by force. Thus high turnout means no voter apathy. No voter apathy means the government is wanted. Twisted logic there but it is only to be expected from our spin doctors.

Typical of this lot. Set a target which bears no relation to the problem and monitor that. If it is reached, supported by £1K fines, then claim a success. The public is now interested in politics.

To be honest I don't see any reason why those not interested should be forced to vote but if they did make it compulsory then a lot more people would take up an interest in politics. I don't think our blinkered government actually considers that making people take an interest in what they are doing is not going to lead to better support of them. It would change politics as we know it and is likely to lead to a change in the way we do business.

Based on what this lot have done over the last nine years I believe that this method of Democracy has proven ill equipped to deal with modern times. It is about time we looked at alternatives. Let's get rid of the party politics and get governing by proportional representation. Where no party has a whip, except for entertainment, and the wishes of the people are respected. Can't see the current lot rolling that out.

posted by Bag @ 10:33 am