Olly Zanetti: Electile dysfunction
The recent general election in the UK has shown that politics needs to change.
If you live in the UK, you can't have failed to notice that we've had a general election recently. The result was one of the most uncertain in living memory. No party got a majority of the votes, instead the electorate gave a collective sigh and shrug of their shoulders to each of the main parties. The government now in power is based on a hurried alliance between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
But does this matter? Well, of course it does. The new government doesn't represent to majority of British opinion. In fact, of the 48 million people of voting age, only around 10 million actually put a cross in the box for the party the new Prime Minister stands for. The support of 20 percent of the people is hardly a glowing endorsement for power.
So there is clearly a problem here, but it gets worse. Though about 93 percent of those eligible to vote are registered to vote, only about 65 percent of them actually made it to the polling station on the day. That's around 19 million British adults whose opinions weren't registered - nearly twice as many as voted for the new Prime Minister! Blaming figures like this on apathy is common (and in many cases, it’s pretty accurate) but perhaps we need to look at the problems in the way politics works more generally.
If you've seen a lot of purple incorporated into people's outfits recently, here's why. The pressure group Take Back Parliament, who want us to adopt proportional representation voting system so that each vote an individual makes actually counts nationally, have asked people to wear the colour to show their support. There are good arguments for the reforms they suggest. Take the Liberal Democrats for example. In the election, they got 23 percent of the vote but only got nine percent of the seats in Parliament. If you wanted to vote for one of the smaller parties with a system like this, you might as well not bother.
But voting reform is only a start. What's needed just as urgently is reform of people's wider engagement with politics. A cross on a piece of paper every five years shouldn't be the end of the story, rather just the beginning. MPs work for the public and their job is to represent our views, not their own. So we need to tell them what we think. This might be in the form of a letter, a petition or it might be through a protest or some direct action. The most important thing is for everyone to be engaged.
Issues that matter like climate change or unfair distribution of wealth have been around for ages and show little sign of going away. This is because the current political system has failed. Now, more than ever, we need to make sure our voices are heard.
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Electile dysfunction (text) by Olly Zanetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (2)
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Sure, there are millions of people campaigning for our environment but they are the minority. Most people are either ignorant to the problem or are simply selfish and don't see why they should change their way of life because they don't believe climate change will affect them. The only way we can prevent this problem from getting worse is if EVERYONE does their part. Until then, we will never solve this crisis. It doesn't matter who is in charge.
One of out latest campaigns is called 'Letter to the Future'. We are encouraging anyone to sign it if they want governments to invest in a healthy economy and a healthy environment. As well as protecting jobs, we want them to tackle climate change and to protect our seas, countryside and wildlife.