The Goldfish Chronicles

Conversation about the US voting system made me ponder again how I vote from overseas in the UK election. Here’s the FAQ on the subject from Her Majesty’s etc.
There are two major items here from my view.

1. After 15 years out of the country, I’ll be outside democracy. I’ll no longer have a voice, unused as it’s been these last 6 years. That’ll be an interesting situation. I was barely used to a voice anyway as my age meant I only voted in one election before leaving the country.
2. I appear to vote in the last place where I was registered. That will be in Kent, where my parents live. The dumbness of it is that I couldn’t give a crap about Kent, I lived in Hertfordshire and London much more - I probably spent more time in Buckinghamshire as a child than I did later in Kent, so I would probably prefer to vote in Wycbome if not in Herts or London.

The ideal solution would be to have an overseas MP who gets voted for. An MP who would be responsible for making sure that when a US junta take power, that the troops and embassy will be doing their best to get us out; or more realistically, that someone would feel more responsible for the people in Guantanamo. That would have been superb: “UK electoral civil servants yesterday entered Guantanamo to collect the vote from the British citizens incarcerated there. The right honourable member of parliament from the Falklands for British Overseas was there to provide oversight as she leaves office. “.
As it is - I’m just not impacted by the local issues of some tiny part of the UK, and my vote would not be right as I’d be voting for the party I want in power, not the MP.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.