Wednesday 6 November 2013

None Of The Above

No stranger to controversy, Russell Brand is once again getting it in the neck but this time it is over his comments that he doesn't vote, blaming the the lies, treachery and deceit of politicians. 
I like Russell Brand, he is clever, enthusiastic, witty and articulate and on this subject i agree with him, voting is not compulsory and if you don't like any of the participants, why should you vote for one of them?  
The argument being used against him is that those who don't vote have no right to opine about the political process but if you are not voting because the choice being offered is undesirable, then you have every right to speak out. 
In the UK the main parties were Labour on the Left, Tories on the right and the Lib Dems filling a small space just left of centre but after New Labour and Tony Blair and Nick Clegg and his alliance with the Conservatives, what we have is three interchangeable parties and any votes gained is because they are the least worst option.
After the University Fees debacle and the covering of many Conservative policies, the protest vote for the Lib Dems is a thing of the past, both the Labour and Conservative politicians have been exposed as caring more about claiming expenses than their constituency and both benches are filled with rich kids from Oxford and Cambridge who cannot relate to the overwhelming majority of the electorate.   
Rather than listen to Brand and the 35%-40% of the electorate who regularly refuse to register a vote for any of the parties, far easier to ignore them and carry on as before.
A 'none of the above' vote is just as much an option as voting for a political party and they pay their taxes and National Insurance and have just as much room to criticise how that money is spent as the person who holds their nose and puts a cross on the election form.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

whining is speech. freedom of speech is a right. U.S. constitution doesn't say you have to vote to whine...

q

Cheezy said...

I agree that not voting is always a valid option. However, did you read Robert Webb's response to Brand's vacuous message in the New Statesman? Worth a read.

Anonymous said...

I did read it. Overall I agree about his view of voting. Some of the stuff in between the open and close kinda lost me...

q

Lucy said...

I did read the David Webb response, Nazi death camps and all that but did like the Brand reply and the 'i hope this doesn't go to the other one because i really like David Mitchell' ending.
I did wonder if it would turn into a Piers Morgan v Jeremy Clarkson exchange but it seems to have fizzled out. Don't know if you saw that one on Twitter, hard to know which one to dislike more. Morgan probably.

Cheezy said...

Yes, it's definitely Morgan for me. He's irredeemably awful.

Clarkson may be a guru to twats & idiots, but he himself is not completely without wit and likeability.

I thought Brand's response was a bit of a cop-out to be honest. He didn't address any of the concrete points that Webb raised. He probably thinks he can get away with it though, because of his impish nu-Dickensian persona... "Cor blimey, I'm just a fick working class bloke from Landin, in eye?"

If he wants to lead a revolution (which, just between you and me, I'm not at all sure he does) then he'll have to tackle these issues with a bit more intellectual rigour than we've seen so far.