Thursday 8 July 2010

Turkeys voting for Christmas

Which career is the least popular? I haven't seen any popularity charts but I think the tax man would rank high in this poll. I don't think that many of us say thank you for having tax taken off us. However I would also guess that much less popular is a career in politics. Politicians never had good publicitiy and it hasn't improved in recent years. So one popular move is to vote for less MPs which would save the country money and give us fewer numbers of these unpopluar people. This was put forward by Nick Clegg a couple of days ago so that should go down well.

He also proposed a referendum on the voting system for the next election. What is the reason for looking at change? Well less and less people are voting. Apathy rules OK. Most votes don't count so it is easy to see why people don't vote. If we don't vote we don't have a democracy and democracy is important because we want political decisions to reflect the will of the people. The people aren't always right and with authority comes responsiblity. It is easy to come up with the strictest of regimes if we are not responsible for any backlash.

However a change in system will change the composition of our MPs. How do you get MPs to support change which means they have less power? How do you get them to vote for their numbers to fall? Well they should vote to improve our democracy and not vote for what best serves their purposes. The words Christmas, voting, for and turkeys come to mind but not necessarily in that order.

Change the world

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