Saturday 9 May 2015

On the recent UK election

(This is part of a comment I made on one of the blogs I frequent. I don't think it's bad).

As you might expect given my previous statements, I didn’t vote. As I have written elsewhere: “To vote for a political party is to underwrite both that party, and the system within which it exists. It will be taken as an expression of satisfaction with the party’s previous policies, however evil. And it enables the next political government, whether or not you voted for it and however badly it behaves, to claim that you gave it an endorsement of legitimacy.”

Moreover, for me it cuts no ice for anyone to say they only voted tory because the alternative would have been worse. They still voted for the tory party. And the tories won. So, every tory voter bears a share of the consequences of what Cameron and co have already done, and will do in the future.

If I had voted tory, I would have been giving my sanction to their snoopers’ charter, and to all the other evil policies they may choose to implement in the next few years. But by refraining from voting, I have withheld all approval of, and feel no moral responsibility for, any bad thing that Cameron or its minions have done or may do.

Let’s face it; today’s political system has failed. Any system that allows a political élite (or “sovereign”) moral privileges to rule over everyone else will eventually end in tears, no matter how many “bags on the side” you try to put on it. Parliament itself is no more than a bag on the side, a mediaeval attempt to limit monarchical power. Suffrage is just another bag on the side. The fact is, the system is out of date and unsustainable.

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