The Give Your Vote scheme – how a big tree with
highly destructive roots could grow from a tiny acorn
The story is simple: quite legally, 1,419 UK voters in the General Election (who would otherwise have abstained) were put in touch with Third World voters who did want to vote in the election. The foreign voters then told the self-styled conduits which way to vote. And the born-again abstainers duly voted on that basis. As there is no illegal transference of the vote and no falsification of the voting card, there is nothing to stop anyone doing this….other than an ounce of commonsense, and a scintilla of foresight.
When first told about this, I thought it was a hoax. Trust me, it isn’t: via a regular Slog source, I picked up an Agence France Press article about it in Gulf News. I then traced Guardian and Liberal Conspiracy pieces about the scheme – and eventually got back to the Give Your Vote site itself.
Give Your Vote spokesperson May Abdalla told The Slog this afternoon:
“The issue we’re trying to raise here is how little say people in the Third World have in global decisions. It’s our way of letting them have a say in our election, because so many of our policies affect them adversely”.
This is how the LibDem-linked site Liberal Conspiracy’s Laurie Penny gushed about the idea on March 15th:
‘….you can sign up to recieve (sic) notification of how one real person in Ghana, Bangladesh or Afghanistan would vote in your place, if they could. And then you get off your arse and you cast that vote. Due to launch today, this drive to combat voter apathy and build international solidarity has already gained several hundred Facebook followers…’
Being of a liberal mindset, Laurie also added,
‘I can absolutely understand why many people around my age don’t want to vote in the upcoming elections, as long as they can understand why they deserve a smack….if you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard.’
Somewhere, Rousseau must be laughing his head off. But as with most things to be found at Liberal Conspiracy, the thought doesn’t occur to them that people disgusted by the whole system should be allowed to abstain. In fact at Liberal Conspiracy – and across most of the ‘progressive’ rainbow of tolerance – there is rarely any thought about where anything might lead. Hence affirmative action, criticism of Islam to be illegal, criticising Gay lifestyles to be a criminal offence….and so on ad infinitum.
A few thoughts are, however, offered for those who have their heads screwed on using the correct right-hand thread:
* 1,419 isn’t a lot of people, so why get all Daily Mail about it? Well, the simple answer is that fully 34% of UK voters didn’t vote this time. Suppose by 2015 the scheme has really taken off, and the number is then five million votes being cast? And suppose the Bangladeshi result – 84% voting for the LibDems – sweeps a Party to power purely on the basis of surrogate foreign votes?
* If you are not a UK citizen, you have no right whatsoever to directly influence the outcome of an internal democratic election. By what right -apart from flakey economic and climate data – do people living 7000 miles away award themselves a say in what we want? How would we all feel if the country doing this was Belgium?
* Can you imagine how Liberal Conspiracy and The Guardian would’ve reacted had 1.5 million people over 80 cast their votes on behalf of American Republicans?
* One of the countries targeted to vote ‘on our behalf’ was Afghanistan. The Give Your Vote site comments from that region make it abundantly clear that there is an anti-UK troops agenda throughout. This must be perilously close to treason.
As the loony Left showed in 1970s local Government, as Harman’s feminism showed throughout New Labour’s reign, and as Charlie Whelan and his mates have been demonstrating in recent weeks, there is no idea too explosive, or incoherent enough, to escape their enthusiasm.
Much as I’m not sure about the cut of Theresa May’s gib, she is now the Home Secretary. I think all the people with brains operating normally should let the dear lady know how we feel about this. Who else out there would be up for this?
The Slog 