With Rachel Mathews of Council Watch, and Mark Rendell.
Trailer: https://x.com/SuccessfulGardn/status/1801706717828333653
Boxing Clever at the Polling Station?
Mark Rendell, 12 June 2024
Our Parliamentary democracy no longer works. It seems as though the major systems of governance, our Executive and Parliament have gone rogue, forgetting who is truly sovereign and who they actually work for. A significant number of people have disengaged from politics at any level and far too many of our elected representatives operate from a sense of entitlement and unassailability. This is a dangerous situation that leaves the populace’s voice neutered and ineffectual, and, in the absence of robust checks and measures, we effectively have a State apparatus that is increasingly beholden to outside interests. A malaise has set in, neither side inclined to do anything about this Status Woe.
How can we reverse this situation and bring back accountability and moral leadership? More importantly, how can we re-engage people when many sense the system is rigged against the change that is truly needed? Is it even possible to reform Parliament and our other national institutions to serve the people fairly, justly and democratically? The task is seemingly insurmountable.
There is a loophole that could be exploited…
The place to start though, surprisingly, is in my opinion at the voting booth. One way we can attempt to correct matters with minimal outlay and organisation is to exploit a simple legal loophole in the electoral voting systems in the UK: they have to count a spoilt ballot (1). This means that this type of vote matters, if enough of us do it across each constituency.
Currently, elected representatives want disillusioned people to stay at home and not vote at all. They don’t care about an ever-reducing percentage of votes for their candidates. It simply doesn’t matter to them any more about the erosion of legitimacy that this creates. They have factored in the disengagement and are depending on people remaining glued to their sofas, desks or beds on election day. Sophisticated polling and computer programmes compiling past voting intentions create surprisingly detailed insights in each constituency allowing the mainstream, well funded parties to deploy their resources efficiently and their messaging to best effect locally.
But this modelling makes many assumptions too. And one of these is that there will be no change in the voting habits of the roughly one-third of registered voters who do not vote. Here is the weakness we can exploit. If we can mobilise even a small fraction of these voters then we can wreck the carefully laid plans of the establishment parties and, as I will explain in a moment, steal a march by harnessing this anti-vote into a positive force for change at the constituency level, after the election.
In many constituencies, the number of voters who have registered to vote but did not go to a polling station is significant. They could make the difference between a genuine political upset and the momentum necessary to bring some unpredictability back to the electoral process. In Halifax, for example, in 2019, more than 25,000 registered voters (more than a third of the total) did not cast their vote (despite being registered to do so) and yet the majority won by the MP was just over 2,500, one-tenth of the size of the number who stayed at home. (2) This is illustrative of just how finely balanced many elections are across the UK. It does not take much to really upset the apple cart……
Article continues here:
https://the-great-rising.org/boxing-clever-at-the-polls
Six minute shortened version
https://www.the-great-rising.org/council-watch
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