Consider Tashpolat Tiyip.
And, if you haven’t got the faintest clue what I am talking about, or rather who, check out the attached link, which will explain.
Tashpolat Tiyip
Tashpolat Tiyip may or may not be alive or dead right now and, whether you think what is happening to the Uighurs matters or not, I find that there is a simple connection between what has happened to him, and me dragging myself off my backside and getting down to the polling station to vote. You could use a similar example from Russia, from Saudi Arabia, from Iran and from a dozen other authoritarian regimes, if you wanted. You could look at what Myanmar has done to its Rohinga people, what Mugabe did to the Matabele- and the white farmers, for that matter, and you could go on finding examples more or less wherever you looked.
These are fundamentally dictatorships with a chilling disregard for human rights, whereas Britain, with all its hilariously apparent faults and imperfections, is not. We can elect who we like and then dispose of them. Our media are free to report more or less what they like about them, and the rest of us are free to go down to the pub- eventually- and confirm to our friends the happy notion that we are run by idiots. (Having said that, they are idiots who were at least smart enough to keep the Covid vaccine project away from Matt Hancock, so they can’t be that stupid.)
Today, I am not exactly being asked to cast my vote for a stellar choice, and I’ll bet that I dislike things about all the main parties just as much as you do, or more, but I don’t care. I know and like at least five local councillors from three different parties, and continue to believe that they all went into politics to make the world a better place. I happen to believe that all, well nearly all, MPs did exactly the same, and that their misfortune is to end up banging their heads against a press that just wants a story, and a party machine that holds the threat of wilderness, or deselection, if they step out of line too much.
So, with the pride and enthusiasm that comes from the knowledge that thousands of people, including some in my own family, died to allow me this extraordinary privilege, I have just come back from casting my vote in the village hall.
The fact that I voted for someone who hasn’t got a cat in hell’s chance of getting in is of no importance at all.
The fact that, in all probability, nothing from yesterday will change by tomorrow, doesn’t matter at all, either.
But the fact that I was allowed to do it is priceless, today more than ever.
I am unbelievably grateful to have been allowed to do it.
However hacked off you are, just join in.
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