WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll ·
10/12/2019 10:59
A young woman said this on the Question Time special last night. She was in an audience consisting only of people aged under 30, so I don't know how much under 30 she was, but I've heard other people saying this too.
Yes, it's frustrating - I live in a constituency which is held by a very senior Tory and it is very much considered a safe seat.
However, some people don't seem to understand that a seat isn't arbitrarily decided and officially reserved as a guaranteed win for one party - it's like that because every person's vote does count, exactly the same as in the diciest of marginals, but if a large majority of voters in the same constituency invariably choose to vote the same way, leaving you in the minority, then what they choose will win. Your vote did count - to reduce the majority by one vote - it's just that, in a first-past-the-post system, there can only be one winner.
By contrast from a constituency-based election, the man from the SNP also seemed unable to grasp the basics of a referendum, when he complained that Scotland had voted to remain in the EU but was being denied this and thus it was not democracy. As Scotland had already previously voted to stay in the UK, each adult in Scotland, like in the rest of the UK, had exactly one vote. As a city/region, London voted to remain, but didn't get the majority wish, because the referendum was held across the UK as a single whole.
It seems to be a widely-held conspiracy that we do whatever England wants, but whenever UK-wide issues are voted on, whether on a constituency or an individual basis, of course 85% of the say is going to come from where 85% of the people happen to live. Yes, we have four home nations, but how would it possibly have been fair if every Scottish/Welsh/NI vote in the referendum had counted for 6 times as much as every English vote? Even if we had done it on a home nation basis, it was still two either way.
Meanwhile, somebody in the audience complained at not having had ONE vote in the Brexit referendum (as an under-18 at the time) and yet their grandparents (plural and obviously both over 18) had been allowed TWO votes, so how could this possibly be democracy?!
If you don't like the system or if you want national independence, then great - campaign and vote whenever able to change it. But democracy, for good or bad, hasn't been denied to you just because more people in your constituency or country wanted something different from you - this is exactly what democracy is, in fact.
Am I missing something here? Do a lot of people think that democracy = what they as an individual want - or do they have a valid point?