After today’s depressing election results in Britain, pretty much everyone who opposes David Cameron’s psychopathic Conservative party wants to leave the country. After five years of bullying the most vulnerable in society, ‘The Tories’ have gained a second term, and those of us who believe in public services, environmental responsibility and (most importantly) – compassion for other human beings- are spending this Friday night in a state of shock, knowing that our beloved NHS (national health service), education system and friendly police force will soon be relics of the past.
A higher voter turnout could have saved this once-great nation from five more years of Tory austerity, but it didn’t. Because Brand is more or less correct when he says the following:
…and unfortunately, that is how most of us feel, on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s easy to feel hopeless, but is it true? Of course the multinational corps and the banks are powerful enough to hijack the political process. But what if one smaller party had the passion and the balls to stand up to the puppeteers, and our entire globalized economic system, on behalf of the people? In Britain, the Green Party was our only chance to stop TTIP (a secret trade deal between Europe and the USA) but (conveniently) TTIP wasn’t even discussed during the election campaign.
Understandable comments from unregistered voters such as, “Why bother? They’re all the same,” or: “Nothing changes anyway”, or: “Whoever you vote for, big business gets in” are true, but there is another side to consider: that ultimately, we, the people, have the power. In this enlightening video, Bernie Sanders explains why the powers that be just love the fact you stayed at home (and this applies to you whether you’re a desparing Brit, American or Australian).
“The truth is that the media, large corporations…do not want you to participate. That’s only bad for them. They want a low turnout of primarily upper-middle class people. Their nightmare is that young people- working people, lower income people- jump into the political process. They do not want that.”
