have left me stunned. The Senior Cat has been shaking his head in disbelief. A former resident of the UK phoned me about something else but added, "Move too far left and you just get overtaken."
It isn't the election result my friends in Upover were looking for. At the same time I can't imagine that any of them would approve of the "rioting" being reported.
But who is responsible for the result? Is it Johnson or Corbyn or their parties and their policies or is it....the people who didn't vote? Apparently about 32% of eligible voters did not vote.
Now some of them may not have been able to vote for good reasons. Others though will have been of the "can't be bothered" brigade and the "it won't make any difference" brigade.
The first group can be forgiven. Things do happen which prevent people from voting. The second and third groups cannot be forgiven. They are what cause democracies to disintegrate. Democracy requires effort. If we want to live in a democratic society then we have to participate.
I am opposed to Downunder's system of "compulsory attendance at the ballot box". I think that is wrong. It is undemocratic. It is also undemocratic to compel voters to mark their preferences. I have always said I have a duty to vote but I should not be compelled to vote, wherever I place them, for anyone who supports something I find abhorrent - such as the death penalty. People who don't vote when they could vote put us in danger of allowing such things as the return of the death penalty to happen - and they are often the first to complain when such things do happen.
To "get Brexit done" won't be easy. The legislation will probably go through on the 17th and the UK will "leave" at the end of January next year but there is a lot of mopping up and tidying away and sorting out to be done. The rest of the EU is not going to make this easy. There are plenty of sour grapes to be swallowed there too. It has been an immense blow to Merkel and Macron in particular. They will want to make the remainder of the process as difficult and as expensive as possible. It will be used as a warning to other countries like Greece and Italy to remain or face financial and trading consequences.
All this might have been avoided if 30% of the UK population had thought about the likely consequences of not voting.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
What you have to bear in mind is that the UK was never in the EU by the will of the people. Ted Heath, Tory PM, took us in to the Common Market with no specific mandate, and when he lost to Labour, Harold Wilson the new PM gave the people a vote as to whether to stay in, or undergo the problems of unpicking ourselves and leaving. The country sighed and said, stay, as it was the easy way.
What amazed me was that it never occurred to David Cameron that the will of the people might say "at last, they want to hear us". I was not in the least surprised that the referendum went the way it did.
People have long memories - especially when they think they have been done over by politicians.
Post a Comment