Vote or Die, Motherfucker!
This statement above was the main slogan of a song released in 2000 right before the U.S Presidential Elections. The sixth day of May of 2010 will be the most exciting to date after the remaining two live television candidate debates – well I suppose the result of the election may be more exciting but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Last week we saw United Kingdom’s first television debate between the three main party leaders. Evidently, by inspection and by all opinion polls proceeding it, Nick Clegg swept the nation of their feet with his maturity in politics, his transparency in his manifesto and well, his honesty. David Cameron, an unpolished Tony Blair, focused his camera time on attacking the labour party and with punches being thrown back and forth between him and Mr Brown, Nick Clegg looked like a leader we wanted and held his dignity firm against his counterparts.
This was a shock to the nation and the two parties, as they have now declared to scrutinize the Liberal Democrats in the coming two weeks under their political microscopes. As the remainder two debates approach, excitement builds for journalists, as like The Premier League, it’s going down to the wire. This, if you needed one, is all the more reason to vote in 2010. Not only are we at risk of having a hung parliament and I honestly don’t see these leaders forming an amicable coalition party, but politics is finally a three horse race. For once, it’s not one party and then an anti-party but we have a third to allow the public to give true comparisons in manifestos of all three.
I am not going to dwell into each party and their respective policies and who stole what from whom and when because partly it will take far too long and more importantly, I don’t care who stole what from whom – the best policy should always be in use and should not be allowed to be patented. However, this all does have a point, regardless of which box you may tick on the 6th of May.
Whilst I would not encourage you to buy the “Vote or Die MotherFucker” soundtrack, I think YouTube is sufficient to see the efforts America put in to urge the people to vote. Unfortunately, Britain has taken a slightly different approach in encouraging people of all backgrounds to vote and that’s no approach to all. So this is my effort, on the sixth day of the fifth month of this year – Vote – or the IRA will put fireworks through your letter box.
Actually, there is a push to getting people to vote. There’s been numerous TV adverts, and the whole campaign http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/
There’s also http://youelect.org.uk/about.php which is specifically aimed at getting Muslims to vote.
So, please don’t assume that there is no campaign to encourage voting, just because Dizzee Rascal hasn’t made a song about it!
And last week’s election debate was incredibly bland! It was nothing compared to the usual banter seen at PMQs; Cameron seemed a mere shadow of himself, Gordon Brown tried to get some sparks flying but shot himself in the foot with a ‘Britains Got Talent’ reference at the end, and Nick Clegg just kept repeating the same points over and over again!
I think the televised debate has shown just how the people of our nation think. If someones likeable on television they must be good and I’ll vote for them. We have all heard the idea of ‘Jeremy Clarkson for PM’.
The rise of facebook and the new wave of political groups show how younger voters are making themselves heard and making a choice. But at the end of the day I doubt many of these new voters actually know what they are voting for. They have been taken in by the new found popularity and ‘in’ status of the general election. How many people in the Liberal Democrats Facebook group (Over 100,000 people joined) actually know the policies they stand for? How many even know what the Trident program is about? I am sure a lot of them are just voting because they were impressed by ‘the man on the telly’.
Don’t pompously reference Dizzy Rascal implying that listeners to him are inferior to you!
The website specifically aimed at Muslims to vote is a contradiction in itself. The majority of the internet users are not over the age of 35 and immediately people are marginalised. So whatever minority it is targeted to, it’s the laziest effort of all.
America have thousands of volunteers of each party in each county knocking on doors, having live debates at the Town Hall regularly. Politics over this side is unambitious, our colourless leader inspire no-one.
Nobody thought Nick Clegg won the television debate for his character, he showed no character at all. They all seem very dull and invoke self-harm, but that’s what politicians have to be, unlike the childish, undignified, animalistic PMQs which consist of useless back-benchers that brown nose and follow the tide like petty sheep.
I wasn’t implying that Dizzee Rascal is inferior to me, I have all his albums. I mentioned him because in the South Park episode that you reference in your article, Puff Daddy records the song ‘Vote or Die’. I was merely drawing a parallel between the US and UK.
And the Muslim voting website does have leaflets in many mosques. A lot of the mosques actually organise talks for the whole community to encourage voting. There are hustings too, they should be advertised at local community centres on the noticeboards.
Sure, we don’t have that many local debates here, but that’s because America has a crowd mentality. They gather in masses for all sorts of events; political, sporting, charity drives. Here, people don’t like being grabbed by the hand and told what to do, we like to determine what we do on our own terms.
Americans have a patriotic spirit that we can truly envy; how America progresses is close to their heart. We only think about politics when it affects us personally, so we look at individual tax changes, benefits, education/training.
I spoke to an American the other day, and they told me that they didn’t like Obama because he was trying to instil a socialist system, as America was built on free enterprise. But I think that the flexibility of the UK throughout history permeates through to our political allegiance. We don’t show passion for one particular party, because we are open-minded and like to think things over before deciding and voting.
PMQs are a lot more focussed than the TV debate. Fair enough, most of the MPs react in the same way as their front-benchers, but the questions actually get answered. Hardly any of the questions in the TV debate were properly answered, because the politicians were concentrating on linking the question to their other policies and trying to sway voters their way.
Our politicians should be far from dull! If all they seem to care about is politics, then they just come across as fragmented individuals. They are supposed to represent us on an international level, and wouldn’t we all like someone that actually inspires us to do more for our country?
@ Kenny McCormick
Does it not indicate something about our society if to get people to do more for their country you have to vote someone in that rather than represent the electorate as democratically as possible is a very engaging speaker that uses tools like mass suggestion.
We have some 60% of the electorate voting in falling numbers and you suggest to increase political participation we should not focus on achieving a democracy and electorally egalitarian society but instead vote in an inspiring leader whose priority lies not in successfully governing and encouraging their state to prosper but to keep up international appearances?
@ T-Money
I didn’t mean they have to appear on an international level just for the sake of popularity, but for the fact that we live in a globalised world, where cross-country interaction across all levels is as important as ever. If we can have someone at the top who can communicate the British vision across effectively, then I hope that can filter down to the public.
I’m surprised that you talk about a successful governer and a popular politician as if they were two separate poles. Why can’t we have someone that is both?
One of the reasons that I’m a supporter of Nick Clegg, is not only does he know how to interact with everyday people, but he has the ability to rise above partisan politics. In the debates, he’s stressed that on some policies, we need to have cross-party discussions after the election, regardless of the result.
Perhaps we need an inspiring speaker to draw in some of the electorate, but I’d like to give credit to the British public in assuming that they can look beyond the charisma and are able to scrutinise the policies thoroughly.