Having seen just a few clips of the queues outside Iraqi polling booths this week, I've started casting my mind out to May and the forthcoming general election here. I'll be out in Canada, so it'll be a postal vote for me. Which means deciding even sooner. Grand.
Also on my viewing schedule recently was BBC 3's attempt at Question Time aimed at first-time voters. The panel started off looking respectable enough- Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Higher Education Minister David Lammy (who held his own very, very well), Lib Dem Communities Spokesman Julia Goldsworthy, Tim Campbell, first ever winner of reality hiring agency The Apprentice (um...), satirist Rory Bremner (um..? but ok, he knows his stuff), and Jamelia, (what?) singer and Prince's Trust Ambassador (what??), and all hosted by that well-known political commentator Dermot O'Leary (WHAT??).
So kudos to the BBC for trying to talk down to, sorry, relate to, the younger population filling up their audience. What ticked me off most was Jamelia's appearance in a token role on one of the BBC's trademark politics discussion shows. It's great that she's a representative of a charity which helps first-time entrepeneurs with their businesses, really it is, it just would have been even better if she'd attempted to mention it when the discussion turned to the economic downturn, unemployment rates, graduate prospects... Instead, the 29-year-old admitted she'd never voted because politics had just never spoken to her, and whined about the government not turning around a fool-proof economic recovery plan in the week it took the Lehman Brothers crash to affect our stock market.
My point is, that as an 18-year-old first-time voter, I'm in the new demographic politicians are supposedly aching to win over, despite 56% of us not being registered to vote. So who is going to win this little cross in a box? Voting tactically, a vote for the Lib Dems and their gradual scrapping of tuition fees and government-funded care for the elderly is a vote taken away from Labour, and another vote's worth of wriggle-room for the Tories' cuts on public spending, healthcare, schools...
Hence my scout around the three parties' websites before watching FTVQT (catchy, eh?) and giving them each ten minutes to try to win me over. But real, distinguishable policies were as hard to find there as they were between Dermot O'Leary and Jamelia. Emotive language enough to reach our hearts and minds, brief outlines of the current situation things, and rhetorical questions? But of course!
We all know we have to vote because we can, and because we can do so without having to skirt around bombs or seeing 24 people killed on their way to cast their votes, like in Iraq. Hearing Jamelia, a successful black woman, say she'd never voted set my mother's teeth on edge.
There will be a cross in a box. It's just which box it will be that's the problem.
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