Season's Greetings my tired friends!
If you follow my social media pages, you'll know that I recently spent a few days writing a blog post and then accidentally deleted it. The sensible people among us would have had some sort of back up, but I am not one of those people and despite the last four years of Christmas wishes, I still do not have a photographic memory. Instead of half-heartedly rewriting the same blog post again, I will instead direct you to my social media pages where you can find out all the exciting things I have done in the lead up to Christmas. (That sentence makes it sound as though I've done lots of exciting things, but the truth is it's mostly studying and sleeping with a couple of Christmas parties thrown in).
Last week, in the UK, we had the first December general election since the 1920s. I wasn't going to write about this because there is a lot of controversy surrounding this topic and from what I have witnessed in the weeks leading up to the election, I think politics tends to bring out the worst in people. However, this blog is a platform to share opinions and I want to be able to discuss important topics as well as easy reads like "my top 10 favourite movies".
Before I begin, I think it's extremely important to reiterate that all of the opinions expressed are my own and that in no way means that I do not respect the opinions of others. I am always open and willing to have conversations with people who have differing opinions. When it comes to politics, it's not like sport where you support one team and one team only for the duration of your life. Time moves on and opinions can move on with it. Around important issues such as the future of a country, it is important to stay open-minded.
A final disclaimer: I am not a politician. I do not study politics. I am not an expert. I am just an ordinary girl with a right to vote.
For my international readers among you, you may be aware that in 2016 the UK had a referendum to decide whether or not we wanted to remain in the European Union - a group of countries that governs under the same economic and political laws. At the time, I was only 16 years old and still two years off being old enough to vote. The 2015 general election had peeked my interest in politics so by the time the EU referendum rolled around, I was pretty fascinated by the topic. I have said openly in the past that had I been old enough to vote in this referendum, I would have voted to remain in the European Union, as I felt at the time that we were stronger as one unit. However, in a phenomenally close result, the British public voted to leave the EU with a 51% majority, and so began the era of Brexit. This, I believe, is where things started to go downhill. Suddenly all the things that would normally be important within a country’s government seemed to be side-tracked by the need to find a Brexit deal that wouldn't bankrupt the country and would allow us to leave with some stability.
Here is where it starts to get a bit controversial.
When the UK government failed to get a Brexit deal through parliament (twice), some MPs started to call for a second referendum. They called this idea a "People's vote", which would allow everyone int he country with the right to vote to have a second chance to answer the question of whether or not they believed the country should leave the European Union. Many citizens were on board with this idea, seemingly the people who had voted to remain in the EU the first time. As previously stated, I too would have voted to remain in the EU had I been old enough to vote in 2016. However, my issue with a "People's vote" is that the people already had a vote. 17 million people in Britain exercised their right to vote and won. So why should someone like me, who didn't have the right to vote back then, take the edge over someone who did? If the government were to call a second referendum for this, what's to say they can't do the same in future with other things? Where does it end?
My fear is that the whole basis of democracy would fall apart if we just kept voting until we got a result that the government agreed with. In the end, what would be the point in asking the people, if they were only going to ask again in a couple of years to avoid having to do something they didn't want to do?
I can almost hear some people screaming at their screens that people have the right to change their minds. And yes, of course, you are correct. Some people have changed their minds and they are within their right to do so. But they have not changed their minds because the reasons that they originally voted to leave the EU have been resolved. They have changed their minds because the government have made such a mess of the whole thing and the people are so bored with the "will they, won't they" stories in the UK that they just want it to be over. Having a second referendum would not solve the issues they were trying to escape by voting for Brexit in the first place, it would only reiterate the issues within our own government. If I was one of those people who had voted to leave, I'm not sure I would vote a second time, simply because my vote seemingly didn't matter the first time. If people stop voting we lose our power as a democratic society and that, to me, is scarier than the prospect of leaving the European Union.
Brexit was one of the main factors discussed and advertised by all parties in the general election, and it is clear why as it has created a huge divide in the country.
When the general election was first announced, from what little I knew of both parties, I didn't want to vote for a Labour or a Conservative government. Therefore, I started looking into the alternative parties, the biggest of whom was the Liberal Democrats. Their (now former) leader, Jo Swinson, seemed okay, if not a bit cocky, but I think that's in the job description. Before I had read very much into their party manifesto, I noticed she was being interviewed after the ITV leader's debate. I watched the first 10 minutes before I'd decided I would not be voting Lib Dem, which sounds hasty but let me tell you why...
In the first 10 minutes of this particular interview, the interviewers first questions surrounded the topic of Brexit, which seemed to be the way with all interviews during this election. Jo Swinson, without missing a beat, promised that, if they won, the Liberal Democrats would "cancel" Brexit. What she meant by this is that she would revoke article 50 immediately (which, she stated, could be done by email) and completely halt the UK's departure from the EU. Immediately alarm bells were ringing for me. Did I want someone running the country who was willing to blatantly disregard 17 million people's right to vote? I didn't agree with a second referendum, but to not have one at all seemed preposterous! Where is the democratic value in that? Whilst I appreciate a politician who can tell the truth, this seemed too radical to me. I decided, to stick with her just in case she said something about another topic that rang true with me. With that, the interviewer asked Jo Swinson whether she'd be willing to use nuclear weapons and without hesitation, she replied "yes". This was enough for me to know I would not be playing any part in moving this woman closer to power. Evidently, I was not the only one who felt this way, as during the election, not only did the Liberal Democrats lose seats, but the part leader Jo Swinson herself lost her own seat to the SNP candidate in her constituency in Scotland. Since then she has stepped down as leader of the Liberal Democrats.
So, having decided not to vote Lib Dem, I went back to the drawing board. I toyed with the idea of voting for the Green Party, who I think would probably do an okay job if they were ever elected, but realistically that isn't going to happen. I hate the term "wasted vote" because I think that every vote counts, especially when throughout history people have fought for that right and given their lives to the cause. However, in this case, it did feel slightly like a vote that wouldn't count for anything. I also had the issue that the Greens were campaigning for a "People's vote", which, as I have already explained, was not in my interest. I ruled them out after around a week of deciding whether or not I was willing to sacrifice my stance on the importance of democracy and came to the conclusion that I was not.
That left the Brexit party, Labour party and the Conservatives.
I knew I would not vote for the Brexit party as I feared what they might do after Brexit was done. The general election counts for more than just the EU referendum and we would still have to live through another 4 years of the party in power after we had left the European Union. Which brought me down the Labour vs. Conservative, which is the dilemma most people try to avoid but ultimately come to in the end.
I am a 19-year-old university student, in a whole lot of debt, who is looking at a career within the NHS. On December 12, 2019 in the general election I cast my vote for the Conservative party. I know this will anger a lot of people and I know this because I have seen first-hand the hate on social media from Labour supporters who believe that to vote for a Conservative government is to support child poverty and NHS privatisation. I do not wish for these things and that should go without saying, however I have seen Conservative supporters vilified so much that I feel as though I need to defend my own right to vote. That is, of course, not the case and why a person chooses to vote the way they do is a private matter and does not need to be explained. There is a reason voting is anonymous and why individuals are not required to state how or why they voted.
I am going to share with you my reasons in spite of the fact that I know I don't have to. These are just my opinions and they cannot be right or wrong, just as yours cannot be right or wrong.
Every day, I read the news on my phone. This is something I started doing a couple of years ago and now it is second nature to me. It is very rare that I go a day without catching up on the latest news stories. During the election, I purposefully avoided reading any political articles relating to the UK government. This is because, whilst I recognise that the news is a good source of information in the majority of cases, I also recognise that it can be biased, or twisted or (in some cases) completely fabricated. I was very conscious that I did not want my opinion to be swayed by these stories and the best way to do this was to avoid them altogether. Instead, I watched interviews with the candidates themselves (what's that saying about straight from the horse's mouth?) and read the party manifestos.
I discovered very quickly that we weren't blessed with a very good candidate in either party (in my opinion). On the one hand, we had a man who had pretty much made his career by making an absolute idiot of himself and on the other hand we had a man who couldn't decide what he wanted to do with the country and instead decided to try and sympathise with everyone. Neither were men that I wanted to put my trust into and yet, here I was trying to decide who I thought was the better man for the job.
If I had listened to the majority of my friends, or the people spewing hate on social media I would have had an easy decision, but I have never been one to make a decision based on someone else's views. So, I started looking at statistics.
Every election each party promises more money for such and such and publishes a (sort of) plan as to how they are going to do this. I don't know about you, but I don't know of a single party who has ever achieved all the things they promised during a campaign, whether that be Labour or Conservative or otherwise. Unfortunately, that is the way with politics. Both parties were promising millions (or billions) of pounds to each underfunded service and I have to say, Labour seemed to out-promise the Conservatives at almost every point. Which on paper, looks amazing and would give me many reasons to vote for them. The thing holding me back was where on earth they were going to get this money from? If that money existed in the country and it was possible to use it, why weren't the Conservatives promising the same thing? Surely that would have levelled the playing field?
It wasn't until I watched Jeremy Corbyn's interview with Andrew Neil that I began to paint a picture of where the money would come from, and it wasn't pretty. Corbyn preached that he would tax corporate businesses and people earning £80k+ annually, which for those of us who are not earning anywhere near that, sounds great. This, he said, would be enough to fund the NHS, education system, re-nationalise services that were denationalised by Conservatives in the 70s and be rid of student tuition fees and debt (woohoo). Andrew Neil very helpfully laid out this plan and put his findings to Corbyn. The first being that under his new tax plans, it would not just be people earning over £80k annually that would be affected. In fact, some citizens earning £14k currently (who at present pay only £9 in tax per annum) would see an increase of £400 in tax. In true political fashion, Mr. Corbyn tried to move back onto the subject of taxing large companies, which to me suggested that what Andrew Neil was saying was in fact exactly right. £14k per annum, I think we can agree, is not a lot of money and it is certainly nowhere near the £80k mark that had been advertised in Labour campaigns.
Andrew Neil also addressed an issue that I hadn't considered, as I imagine many people also had not. He claimed that the top 5% of earners in the country currently pay a share of 50% of income tax. Even more surprising, the 0.1% of earners pay a total of 12% of all income tax. That means that 30,000 people in the country are contributing to 12% of the wealth the country has as a direct result of income tax. Which isn't an issue in itself, and actually in terms of proportion is a lot more than the media would have you believe. The issue lies in what happens if those people decided to leave the country as a result of increasing tax. Andrew Neil explains that it would only take a small number of these people deciding to emigrate for the overall wealth of the country to drastically deteriorate and given the increase in spending that would occur under the Labour government, there simply isn't enough money to sustain the country. I am not an economist and I do not pretend to understand such issues, but from basic viewpoint, as far as I could tell, under a Labour government we would be worse off economically than we currently are. If this was the case, there would be no way to fund the services promised these figures in the long run, and the situation would not improve - children would still be living in poverty and the NHS would still be underfunded.
I am not saying that these issues will all be magically fixed under a Conservative government. I am simply saying that both parties have promised the same things and from what I saw, only one of those parties would have a chance of delivery those things without bankrupting the country.
Not forgetting the Brexit issue. Under a Labour government we were looking at a guaranteed second referendum. Under a Conservative government we would be leaving the EU. For me, that gave them the edge.
The result of the general election came as a shock to a lot of people, particularly those of my age. I saw people making claims that the election must be fixed because of the overwhelming support for Labour in the weeks leading up to the election. The truth is, there was overwhelming "support" for Labour because the way that a large majority of people chose to support Labour was to disrespect, be volatile towards and name-call Conservative voters. An atmosphere was created that if you were not voting for a Labour government, you were racist, homophobic, selfish, heartless... the list goes on. As you can see from the above, the reasons I voted for a Conservative government were not to ensure we had a white England or to keep children on the streets and ensure only rich people would have access to healthcare. In fact, I voted for the opposite, based on the likelihood of who I thought could deliver the best prospects for the whole country. I was afraid to share my opinion and avoided conversations about who I would be voting for in fear of being targeted by people who thought that it was okay to verbally abuse people who did not agree with their political opinion. They presumed to know why we were voting the way we were without once asking. That is why it seemed so strange to those same people when the Conservatives won a majority, because they had created the toxic environment where a true picture of varying opinions could not be shared.
Now that it is over, I know a lot of people are still angry and I understand why. I understand what you were voting for and I don't disagree with your principles. All I would ask is that you extend myself (and the other people who voted Conservative) the same courtesy. Without differing opinions, there is no democracy. Without democracy, we have nothing.
Peace and love,
Charlotte x
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