Oolite Bulletins

National turnout: 66%, turnout in my constituency: 60%, turnout in my ward: under 50% <sighs>

i gather voting is not compulsory ? we get fined if we dont vote......

Yeah, you've had that in Oz for a while now - how much is the fine?

Cody wrote:

Yeah, you've had that in Oz for a while now - how much is the fine?

For many years it was $50 - back when $50 was a typical fine for all manner of things. Nowadays it is only $25. The only fine that has ever been lowered. It should be about $250 by now, if it were keeping pace with other things. Some folks[who?] think the politicians aren't really interested in enforcing this law.[citation needed]

What's more interesting in Aussie elections are the thousands of people who are fined for voting more than once, and the people who continue voting for years after they die.

Despite it being notionally compulsory, the participation rate here is not much higher than other countries, about 75%. I haven't voted for about 20 years, maybe more.

Low turnout is depressing, but I don't think fining non-voters is the answer.
Politics needs to be more engaging and more accessible to people, and really only the politicians can do that.
One option I would like to see (but won't) is a 'None of the above' box on the ballot paper so you can actively say "I don't fancy any of them!". I don't know how the system would cope though, because 'None of the above' would probably win

The NOTA (None of the above) Party got 253 votes in Basildon!

What intrigues me is the lopsided imbalance in the UK system with respect to "number of votes a party got" with "number of seats won" (http://thestandard.org.nz/the-differenc ... tem-makes/) - minor parties essentially get shafted to the benefit of big parties.

Both New Zealand and Australia have proportional voting systems that try to address this - preferential voting in Australia, and mixed-member-proportional in New Zealand.

Smivs wrote:

Low turnout is depressing, but I don't think fining non-voters is the answer.
Politics needs to be more engaging and more accessible to people, and really only the politicians can do that.
One option I would like to see (but won't) is a 'None of the above' box on the ballot paper so you can actively say "I don't fancy any of them!". I don't know how the system would cope though, because 'None of the above' would probably win

In order to vote "none of the above" you cast an invalid vote.

Ranthe wrote:

What intrigues me is the lopsided imbalance in the UK system with respect to "number of votes a party got" with "number of seats won" (http://thestandard.org.nz/the-differenc ... tem-makes/) - minor parties essentially get shafted to the benefit of big parties.

Both New Zealand and Australia have proportional voting systems that try to address this - preferential voting in Australia, and mixed-member-proportional in New Zealand.

You have to remember, the UK isn't really a democracy. Leaving aside the unelected, heritable head of state, and the farcical FPTP voting system, the entire upper house of our legislature is wholly unelected, and stuffed with Party grandees and major donors (and I mean stuffed: it's the biggest legislative assembly outside of China). Even though it's wholly illegal to sell seats (for life) in the House of Lords, it is seen as entirely normal when some dubious business type becomes one of the Vermin in Ermine after "donating" a chunk of cash to the Tories, to Labour, or to the Lib Dems. All they have to do is avoid getting a receipt, and apparently it's all fine. Anywhere else, you would think that selling seats for life to the upper house of a legislature might raise an eyebrow, but not in the UK - where our most recent fit of parliamentary reform (in 1999!) was to finally stop people inheriting their seats for life in the upper house of our legislature. That one just beat out having to wear an opera hat to make a point of order in the House of Commons (we did away with that sort of antique nonsense in 1998). But we still have a host of buffoons in panto gear scampering around the place, and as far as I know the House of Lords still communicates with the House of Commons using hand-written notes (hand-written in Norman French). Oh yes - and the head wizards of one particular sect of one particular religion have guaranteed representation in the Lords, too.

Then there's our constitution. There isn't one. Parliament can do what it likes. If your 36% share of the 60-odd percent of the electorate who felt they had someone worth voting for happens to give you a simple majority (and it probably will), then you can pass whatever nonsensical laws you like - well, as long as they don't intrude on the privileges and perquisites of the City of London, who have their own special officer, the City Remembrancer, who gets to scrutinise any new legislation ahead of time to make sure it doesn't inconvenience the City of London Corporation. And then there's the peculiar statistical oddity whereby huge quantities of our politicians all just happen to have attended the same (very expensive, very exclusive - but on financial grounds only) schools.

So: not a democracy, more a bastard hybrid of feudal and corporate state, with the ruritanian hogwash and inherited privilege of the first, combined with the legislation-for-sale attitude of the second.

Disembodied wrote:

Oh yes - and the head wizards of one particular sect of one particular religion have guaranteed representation in the Lords, too.

<chortles> Ah yes, the Lords Spiritual! I take it you're not too impressed with UK democracy, Big D?

All so true, and yet casting a glance around the World, I really don't see much that in practice seems 'better'. Maybe Dizzie is right!

Disembodied wrote:

Then there's our constitution. There isn't one.

This, I'm okay with. The only constitution which would get majority support for introduction is one that codified the current mess, and made it even harder to fix later.

I suspect the lack of central written constitution is because the UK is one of the very few places not to have had an abrupt change of government - either violently due to civil, independence or external war, or slightly less violently through the "voluntary" withdrawal of an occupying power - since such things became fashionable.

Smivs wrote:

All so true, and yet casting a glance around the World, I really don't see much that in practice seems 'better'.

<nods>

If I ran the country, I'd disestablish the Church of England and nationalise the royal family!

There are quite a few other countries which are better - where their legislators are much more connected to their people - but generally I am worried that, all over the world, democracy ("the worst form of government, apart from all the others") is under threat. Mainly, this threat is financial, coming from globalised megacorporations, and a new class of ultra-rich, who opt not to pay taxes, and who have been facilitated in this choice by complex tax laws and lax-to-nonexistent international financial regulation. Democracy is expensive, and for a long time now the richest people and corporations have been choosing to absolve themselves of the requirement to pay towards their maintenance and upkeep. Hence the rapidly expanding gap between rich and poor. In the long run, this isn't a clever idea for the megacorporations or for the ultra-rich: both need advanced, stable societies to buy their products and to provide them with the goods and services and lifestyles they require. Neo-feudalism just isn't a valid option in an interconnected and communicative world (it wasn't really an option in a pre-literate, ox-drawn world either: small-scale peasants' revolts were a regular occurrence across medieval Europe).

The situation in the UK in this regard is considerably worse than it is in economies of similar size. In 2011, numerous cities across England rioted for days on end. It wasn't politically motivated, but as an expression of an underlying rage - and of a sense that people felt they had very little left to lose - it was striking. Things have got worse since then, in terms of housing costs and wages. Our one growth industry is food banks, mostly catering to people who are in work, and yet who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families. A society that contains a large and growing number of hungry people is inherently unstable, to say nothing of morally repugnant.

Smivs wrote:

Maybe Dizzie is right!

Of course he is..

As one of my favourite anarchists, Emma Goldman, once said, "If voting actually changed anything, it would be illegal."

And Democracies? There's never been one. All "Democracies" are, are thinly disguised Oligarchies, where dog-and-pony shows elections are held now and then to give the people the illusion that they get to have a say. But the same hands continue to steer the ship, regardless of who "wins".