A look at elections
All my life, elections, never mind what elections, have been times of vibrancy. Those were the times when you would see people on the streets and outside the polling station. People that you might not have seen since the last election. You would chat, enquire after other people, give condolences regarding those no longer with us and tell of new additions to the clans. The Hatch, Match and Dispatch brigades would be out. This was a time when stories would be swopped of the intervening politics of your area. Politicians would be out wearing their rosettes with their supporters, offering cars to those who had difficulty getting to the polling station or who just wanted an easy ride to mark their cross on a slip of paper.
Everywhere came alive for elections.
So what are we seeing with these European elections? Is the election being run by the media, decided by the media? Are our politicians now so distanced from the people that they no longer walk among them?
Derek Vaughan who was the leader of NPT CBC and was then the chosen one of the Labour Party, that powerhouse, to become a EU candidate and who lives in Ogmore by Sea is once again on the voting form. What a voting form. How many people know what that voting slip will look like? Where are the advertisements on the TV, which it appears, is running this election, explaining to people what they are voting for, who they are voting for and what the form will look like. Nothing; no one knows. Is this deliberate? Keep the people in the dark like mushrooms and then they will not have a clue and so manipulation will win the day, not democracy.
I have been waiting for a knock on my door to explain all this. I have been waiting for a knock on my door so I can get some answers to the questions I have been saving up for the politicians at this election. I have been waiting for years for this opportunity and I feel it has been snatched from me.
Are EU politicians to big and mighty to walk amongst the people they manage? Or is it their affairs they manage? They sit in huge auditoriums, built and heated with the people’s money, while I worry about my heating bills. They drive around in chauffer driven cars while I catch the bus. They do not pay for their lunch while I check the supermarket prices weekly so I can survive and get a near healthy diet. Then they ask me to vote for them, without knocking my door, without explaining to me why I should vote for them.
EU politicians would like us all to have postal or internet votes, no doubt, because do they really want to mix with the great unwashed or do they prefer to visit up market restaurants and hand us the bill.
Isn’t it time that the EU got closer to the people who support it, willingly or unwillingly. Is the EU so distanced from the people that they no longer know what they want, only know how to manage them?
Is this democracy? Is this why I have been led to believe I vote, to make sure that my voice is heard. Well my voice does not know if it is being heard in Strasbourg or Brussels as they hop from one to the other, all at our expense of course. My voice is not being heard through the channels we once had, such as internet forums attached to newspapers. My voice is no longer being heard by the masses of workers who stood and listened to their union reps thump the tables and swear to fight for right. My voice has been muffled. No voice comes out of Europe, only a voting slip on which we are expected to put our mark. The great EU will then translate that mark into thousands of different languages and somewhere in between I will have lost my identity. I will have lost the ability once every four or five years to get hold of someone who carries my voice to higher places. Yet I am told this is a brave new world, I just wish I could understand it.
