The Man Who Bought the World

Elon Musk is a brilliant bloke, only has people at heart and definitely isn’t involved in any global conspiracy to undermine democracy.

Now if that opening sentence has come out differently than I wrote it then there really is something to worry about in the media today.

Democracy really is a precious thing but how it works isn’t often appreciated or even understood. People like Elon Musk really do give the impression they might be trying to undermine it. The richest man on the planet he could easily be called ‘the man who bought the world’.

You may think they all look the same

I was at a meeting this week and the subject turned to ‘voting’. This is of course the lifeblood of democracy yet so many people find reasons to decry it. They all came up tonight.

Voting

I never vote, they’re all the same as each other’. ‘They’ really aren’t. Nobody could say the Atlee Government that brought in nationalisation of health and energy is the same as the Thatcher government and its programme of denationalisation.  But the other thing about democracy is if you don’t like what’s on offer then stand yourself or join a party and influence it.

You may think they all ‘sound’ the same..

‘No matter who you vote for the Government gets in’. Of course, works if you’re an anarchist, but in the real world where Governments collapse, and warlords run the show with machetes it’s not so funny.

Guy Fawkes, the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions’. Well, except those intentions were to blow up the democratically elected Parliament. So, the ‘intentions’ were largely terrorist in nature. And of course, sectarian. Admittedly Parliament in 1605 was not a modern variant. There were no women, no working-class MPs and basically only men of property. So, his intent wasn’t to redress those grievances, it was because he wanted to blow up some protestants.

Matters

You may think they all ARE the same…

The best answer was from the lady who said, ‘I always vote because people have fought and sometimes died for that right’. Spot on. Suffragettes fought for women to vote, Chartists fought for the working class to vote and civil rights activists from South Africa to the USA fought for black people to have the vote.

Someone suggested that voting should be made compulsory with fines, so I pointed out that people also fought for your right not to vote if you didn’t want to. It was proposed that there should be a ‘none of the above’ box, but I thought that might be a disaster waiting to happen. There’s a petition going through parliament at the moment calling for it and with the added condition that if the ‘none of the above’ gets more votes than the ‘above’ they have to hold the election again but without any of the candidates named. Now imagine that as a way of bringing about a democratic anarchy….

But there’s always an alternative….

I think the bottom line is that you can’t always get what you want and sometimes you have to choose from whats on offer. If the choice is cake or biscuits, you can’t demand blancmange. This time. Until the Blancmange Party turns up on the ballot paper. Until then the old Alexei Sayle sketch comes to mind ‘This election we had the choice between dipping our head in a bucket of creosote or a bucket of cow manure.!’  Ok, creosote for me then. Am I right Mr Musk?? Oh, it’s the cow manure. My mistake. Here goes.

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