Do you vote in political elections?
The dictionary defines politics as:
the activities of the government, members of law-making organisations, or people who try to influence the way a country is governed.
I increasingly like to focus on the activities of people in trying to influence the way a country is governed. I think if we as people in local communities are active in the life of our community we can have a far bigger impact on what the world we live in looks like. This can be volunteering, helping your neighbour, becoming a governor at a school, fundraising, baking cakes, speaking out about injustice, or whatever influencing your local spaces look like for you.
Jesus said: A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. – John 13:34
I’ve written plenty on this blog, mostly through poetry or music, about my views on the government, and you might be able to guess from that the types of party I would typically vote for. However I’ve become increasingly convinced that judging and fighting each other over which candidate or party is never going to bring about a better world, we have to work together, we have to genuinely find ways to love each other, see things from each other’s perspective, and put aside political ideology. After all it is this political ideology which is driven by an elite and privileged few whose agenda is more power and money for them – the them being the capitalist world we live in and business/lobbying interests, not some shadowy lizard cabal, this conspiracy rhetoric is also hugely damaging and often originally rooted in stereotypes or prejudice that attacks minority groups.
Yet with all that said I think people should vote if they want to, and we should also appreciate the freedoms we do have in the UK to express our opinions without fear of consequences. This includes not voting if you choose, because voting in elections is just one part of politics, for me it’s about the people and the ways we can support each other on a local basis, and with that foundation we can build a stronger community, country and world.
I’ll finish with a quote from Rory Stewart – the politician of choice for every left-leaning hipster Dad – who used to be a conservative member of parliament, and is someone who I would never have voted for in the past based purely on the party he belonged to. Another example of how I have changed my views, and have reflected on how I engage with this conversation. I think Rory speaks so clearly to the issues of party politics, and it is a shame we don’t have more people like him actually leading our country.
When you enter politics, there are strong pressures to demonstrate loyalty to the party and the leader, and equally strong pressures to establish your name in the media and through social media, often through making very provocative comments, creating a very binary black and white vision of the world. The combination of party media and campaigning means that the system selects for somebody who is going to very naturally produce very binary options in very clear colors, who doesn’t admit any form of complexity, doubt, or humility; who’s perpetually confident in their vision of the world. Perhaps this is the sort of mask which they put on in order to get elected. But the problem is, the mask is painted with a poison. And when they take off the mask, the poison is still corroding their face. So when they sit around the cabinet table, they have to demonstrate critical thinking, and critical thinking is the opposite of all those things. Suddenly, they have to think about complexity, they have to be humble, they have to be open to other people’s ideas, they have to be able to change their minds. They have to be interested in nuance and detail. None of those things are the things which enable a Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to flourish in the first place.
The World Outside the Window 