A LAW MAKING IT ILLEGAL not to vote comes ever nearer. First of all you make it illegal for a citizen to refuse to register to vote. Then once this is bedded down and we are all learning, like the sheep we are, to accept such an illiberal measure; our politicians then decide to make us vote for them on penalty of a fine.
According to today’s Mail on Sunday, Mark Harper, Nick Clegg’s deputy wrote to Clegg and members of the Cabinet Home Affairs Committee. He proposed ‘…that we should introduce a civil penalty for individuals who fail to make an application to register when required to do so by an ERO [electoral registration officer]’.
The Mail on Sunday’s James Forsyth suggests; ‘Clegg and Harper’s reasoning for wanting to fine individuals is that the system of electoral registration is changing. In an attempt to reduce fraud, the Coalition is planning to move to a system where each person has to register themselves rather than having one person fill in the form on behalf of the whole household’.
Their intention to be so proscriptive will, they hope, solicit much sympathy once fraud is used as the reason. But as we know the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Remember earlier this month when there were proposals to spy on people’s emails? The good intention then was to help prevent terrorist acts and criminal behaviour. All good reasons: but as we know; over time, the net is cast far wider than originally intended: and so it will prove to be the case with making people register to vote.
Modern politicians, are professional politicians. They have little or no experience with any corner of life, other than that set in Oxbridge and Westminster. Our leaders like to think they have the Midas touch, but instead of gold, lead is the only metal they are capable of producing. Everything they touch has the stamp of failure marked out for it.
We as a people are ill-served by the inadequacies of those who are meant to represent us. Politicians as a class have never held the love of the people. But what we had in the past, are politicians who have participated in war; who owned a business or worked on the factory floor. Even Churchill who was to the manor born served his apprenticeship in what we like to call the ‘real world’. In his case it took him to South Africa as a journalist to report on the Boer War, where he was captured and escaped his internment.
Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a family grocer. Dennis Healy, Tony Benn, and Ted Heath were among dozens of other post war MPs who served in the armed forces during the Second World War, and all of them had experience of life outside of Oxbridge or the London School of Economic (LSE).
The point I am making is that today’s career politicians are of an inferior stamp to those who preceded them in British political history and are ill-qualified to lead the nation, let alone call themselves politicians or statesmen. Moreover I believe they are themselves becoming increasingly aware of their substandard qualities. They are surrounded by spin doctors and others recruited from outside the civil service. They preen themselves before for the camera; they take lessons in media communication; their reference back to what they think is the real world, is done through focus groups and opinion polls. No longer do we have the hustings at election time, when all the different candidates faced hostile question s and even the crudest of insults from the public in the local market place. Such experiences helped mould the politician worthy of such a name and prepared him for the debating chamber; as well as sharpen his or her wit ready for the bear pit of parliament.
THE VOTER is being short changed. Today we have the televised debate, first tried in 2010, where it became wholly responsible for the coalition government we are currently having to put up with . At the time Nick Clegg was the washing powder that the viewers preferred, and it left the country via the resultant coalition, more hesitant than at any other time in its past. Right or Left, a strong first past the post government is always the preferred option – everything else is obfuscation.
If I never see another televised debate during a general election, it will please me no end. Democracy is not served by such a circus: it is a popularity contest where white teeth and the facial structure of a potential leader seems to count for far more than what they believe in; which is, after all, nowadays much of a sameness within all the main parties. Which is no doubt why looks and personality matter more to the British public than policy: because all of the parties and their leaders are seen as fighting over the same middle ground at the expense of the principles they once represented, then personality is the only reference point left for the floating voter.
It is partly because of this very sameness that the public should be left to decide whether they vote at all; by staying at home the voter is saying ‘a plague on your houses’. For our politicians to suggest that we should be made to register to vote, says more about their own inadequacies than those who choose to sit at home.
I DO NOT THINK THAT the politicians will press this issue because to do so would meet with such resentment. We are already treated as potential criminals by the state when it comes to paying taxes in order to watch a television set.
Nick Clegg obviously agrees with his deputy in what is being proposed, if not, why did he allow Mark Harper to write his letter?
No one should be forced by the state to either register or be made to vote as in Australia. To propose such a measure would only be seen as normal , if proposed by an illiberal conservative: but to have it prospered by a Liberal Party, is frankly wacky .
Before our so-called politicians demand that we should be made to register to vote; they should first of all retrieve those ideological boundaries that once separated them and allowed a choice to be made, from which the people would have a genuine alternative to make. At the moment the public are treated to the same bland menu. To find any kind of difference between our parties you have to chose from the likes of the Greens, UKIP, Respect, and the BNP. Even voting for the once Raving Loony Party would have been of significantly more value than choosing between, the three main parties in their modern garb.
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