Notes From A Weird Little Island
Also Known As The UK
I’ve lived in the United Kingdom all my life and right about now if I could leave I would. What keeps me here is family. I find life in the UK so difficult sometimes I seriously consider maybe I could cut ties with loved ones just to escape. I mean, realistically I couldn’t without being pretty selfish, I have children, and parents who are getting older. But it’s hard to be here and witness the decline of what was, at least once in my lifetime, a reasonable enough place to be (essentially the five minutes between the first Labour-led government in decades until the Iraq War).
So what’s my problem then?
Failing Democracy
Our system of government is ineffective. Not enough people vote because they feel that their votes don’t count, which is sort of correct and sort of incorrect. Correct because we don’t have proportional representation, instead we have first past the post in funny little local areas called constituencies. So if your vote was for *not the winner* in your constituency, you can reasonably say that your vote doesn’t count.
Democrats would say that every vote counts in a democracy, even if your guy doesn’t win. If we had proportional representation, every vote would count a bit more than it does. But democracy isn’t just about voting, it’s also…
