There was an election this week in Bridgwater. The Conservatives won it. Fair and square. Well done them.
British democracy works. More people voted for one candidate than the others and everybody now has the winning candidate as their councillor. That’s all 3500 voters in the Fairfax East ward. Even the 3,000 that didn’t vote.
That’s right 13% of the people who could vote decided who everybody else wanted to represent them.
And this is a new trend. Voter turnout has been declining. Actually, since the 1960s
Mainly because people probably don’t feel it makes a difference.
But of course, we don’t know why people vote how they do. Unless they tell us on the ballot paper. And that usually means their vote is disqualified as a ‘spoilt vote’. One of my favourite moments in any count is being called to the front by the returning officer and along with the other candidates or agents to be shown a ballot paper which says something like “They’m all a bunch of gert tossers!” scrawled across it in election pencil. ‘No vote?’ ‘No vote’ we agreed. What about this one? “Hang Bill Smedley!” Well, unfortunately we can’t take instructions from the ballot paper otherwise we’d have big problems with this next one which tells us exactly where we can ‘stick this ballot box’.
Just a bundle of numbers
And again, you can’t argue with a ballot paper. They’re just a bundle of numbers which represent whatever thought process people have gone through to come up with whatever decision they’ve made. There’s no right or wrong, there’s just maths.
In 2016 There was a referendum. 52% of the people thought Brexit would be a good thing. The 48% of us who thought it was a bad idea lost. So we had Brexit. Today 75% of people think it wasn’t a good idea. But that’s democracy.
You can tell people the facts. But you’ve got to convince them. Otherwise, they’ll believe someone else’s version of the facts and then vote for them.
Let’s not bring ‘Hitler’ into this..oh no, too late…
Winston Churchill said ‘Democracy is the worse form of government. Apart from all the others.’ Mind you he did say that after losing the 1945 general election despite winning World War 2. So, he might have been a bit bitter.
The point about low turnouts, not bothering, letting someone else think for you, means the triumph of ignorance and apathy. I’d say…..and it’s a long shot…that’s a bad thing.
The Nazis used to rule by referendum. They’d launch a major referendum with a loaded question ‘ Do you trust that nice Mr Hitler or would you like the communists to come round and saw your feet off?’. Big vote for the former.
And just to make sure, that lovely Mr Goebbels at the department of Propaganda and Flowers ,would churn out 1930’s social media meme equivalents of Hitler patting a kitten on the head, Stalin eating a kitten and a senior member of the ‘Party for Reasonable Progress Within the Bounds of the Law’ being locked up before he got the chance to get near the kitten….
There’s an old Chinese proverb which says, ‘you can never mention Hitler too much to make a point’.
‘One day…….’
The thing that got me thinking today was the fact that people don’t always know the ‘actual facts’ from ‘what they’re told are facts’ in an ever more confusing world where people are not sure who to trust anymore. So I recalled the Czech motto ‘Pravda Vitezi’ ‘Truth will prevail’. ‘At the moment you might not get it, but one day the truth will come out and you will’.
Rudolf Slansky was the 2nd most powerful communist in Communist Czechoslovakia. His best friend was Klement Gottwald. The President. Stalin decided to have one of his purges. Fearing that meant him, Gottwald immediately sacrificed his old friend Slansky. He ran a media campaign blaming literally everything on Slansky. The public, whipped up by the frenzy even organised a petition to request Slansky be hanged. Even Slansky, in prison ( and admittedly after being tortured) started to believe it and agreed to his own hanging.
In the 1960s when Communism liberalised, they found the papers and of course Slansky was innocent. Gottwald, however, upon hearing of the death of Stalin, drunk himself to death overnight in solidarity.
Ignorance? Apathy? Mass hysteria? Populism?
One day the truth comes out. In Slansky’s case when Communism finally collapsed, Vaclav Havel the new democratic President’s first appointment was making the son of Slansky the new Czech Ambassador to the Soviet Union. What goes around comes around.