Common Decency and our Pie Charts – http://tinyurl.com/myyubol
So, you’re telling me there’s no point in voting, that it can’t possibly make a difference, unless maybe you’re in a marginal seat.
Well, let’s look at a seat, which isn’t marginal. Let’s look at this one.
This happens to be the seat of George Osborne, strangely enough, we’ve chosen it at random, but you can see here what happened last time. This is what we call a Pie Chart, and the blue section represents all the people that voted for George Osborne. The yellow section represents the Lib Dems and the red is the Labour Party, so you can see that he’s way out ahead, is George Osborne. He’s got 37% of the vote.
Now people are saying, “Okay, how can we possibly change it? If I vote for the red or the yellow here, or an Independent, it’s not going to make any difference.” But what didn’t we see? What’s the bit on the right. The bit on the right is the people who didn’t bother to vote. They amount to 32%.
Now very simple arithmetic tells you that 32%, plus all the people in the red sector, or all the people in the yellow sector, would amount to more than George Osborne got, so this seat actually, if everybody voted in the constituency, is not safe. This could be turned upside down, and just supposing somebody in the red sector – I mean we don’t know who the candidates are and I’m not going to even get into that – but supposing in our studies in Common Decency, in which you will help us, but supposing we find like, say, the yellow guy or the red guy is actually very decent and is against the badger cull and is against breaking up the National Health, is against MPs lying in the Commons, is against all the corruption which is holding US out of having a say in democracy. Suppose we find a candidate that is really very decent, we can all get behind him, and we can perhaps dislodge this person who happens to be George Osborne.
So, to sum up, I would tell you no seat is safe, no vote is wasted.
Supposing you get up – you get up off your ass and vote – it makes a difference. Supposing you tell all your friends to get off their asses and vote, that makes a very big difference. Supposing you tell all your friends to get up off their asses and get all their friends up off their asses, then you get a kind of snowball effect, and this is what social media is so good at doing. We can tweet this, we can Facebook it and whatever. It can spread like wildfire and throughout the country we can have people saying, “Okay, this is not a safe seat. We can change this.” We can unseat people who are in the House of Commons obeying party lines, obeying the whip, not voting according to their conscience, not voting according to the will of the constituent – YOU, the people who put them there.
We can turn Britain upside down and we can get a ‘decent’ Parliament. We can bring back democracy. We can reclaim our right to have a voice in this country.
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