Steve_Bamlett_blog

The answer is YES. but neither person nor party can give any guarantee of fulfilling any intentions you had in voting for them, even if you had any intentions. Indirect democratic politics is a blunt tool that is barely even a record of popular opinion and few ruling parties receive a majority of votes in any system of politics that we know in the current world. Hence, any illusion of democracy is always proved as just that. It needn’t have been so in a direct democracy like the Ancient city-state of Athens (though that depended on enslave labour and disenfranchised women),. However, there each move to change had to be agreed by a majority, but even here people vied against the idea that voting actually secured the best result, or even the one most people really wanted.

For Plato, a state governed by a few highly trained minds was best – and some anti-democrat forces have used his politics as a a kind of validation of their right without any evidence that they are the best persons to govern.

In modern indirect democracy, voting is not logically attached to the things the state can do. The current government has a huge majority of representatives in Government, as did the last one, but neither ever secured anything like a majority of citizens votes, or even of those who actually voted. Representative democracy is representative only in the way that it skews voting actoss an between uneven local electorates.

But despite that, I think we have to vote, even if only to represent symbolically that we think expressing a preference might work towards a goal that can’t be achieved immediately. I will vote Green (as a postal voter I have already done so) because that party represents the most urgent area in which there can be future hope – in voting to ensure that environmental and species counts don’t decline so much that not only voting, but even governing at all, will be an irrelevance.

People say some votes are wasted and that only tactical voting works, but where did that ever get us – in getting rid of the tired Tory idea, we seem no nearer to real alternatives or change towards it. wars profliterate, differences of treatment of communities inside individual not only continues but spreads its net of discrimination to the point of oppression and the world looks towards aims that must destroy us – aims labelled ‘growth’, as if anything growing bigger could be a guarantee of good, for it usually grows at the expense of others. I don’t even think the Green Party is itself the thing I am voting for but a green principle: that might remake our sense of priorities without us having to undergo a crisis or disaster first.

Voting may be hopeless but hope never can be hopeless. It can only remain unfulfilled as yet, and no-one surely believes that people should express themselves politically by merely and only casting a vote. The struggle is always everywhere not just in the room, where there is a ballot box – and a vote is not a political ‘end’ in itself but one means (only one and a weak one at that) to an end for which many people using many means must place their head above the parapet of hopelessness. Hopelessness is not neutral It serves their interests of those few who want all the power and hope for continuance and survival to themselves. If the many are hopeless, the fe have already triumphed.

Bye for now

Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx