I made a couple of posts to Slashdot and decided to reproduce them here:
I wrote to my last MP (free to do online via The Work For You) to complain about the ever increasing internet surveillance. In the letter I pointed out that saving a single life, or even many lives, is not justification for the loss of privacy and rights. If saving a life came before all other considerations we would ban cars and shut down the road network. Given that I asked why she voted for the new laws.
Her response was along the lines of “it saved the life of a woman who was said she was going to commit suicide on Facebook because the police were able to backtrace her IP address”.
She lost her seat at the last election (I won’t say which because it would reveal where I live and I value my privacy). Good riddance.
I also emailed all my MEPs when the EU was debating extending copyright terms. The Greens and Lib Dems were in favour of reducing them, although we now know for certain that the Lib Dems are full of shit. The Tory MEP was in favour of an extension and as in your experience basically parroted the BMI press release.
So what it boils down to is that the Greens are the largest party who offer some prospect of representing my views, but they only have one MP. Protest is pointless as we have seen time and time again, the only exception being when enough people are fucked over badly enough for sustained violence such as the Poll Tax riots. The current lot outside St. Paul’s have just been evicted and will be history by the end of the week, and all the promises to ask the hard questions and have a debate by politicians are worthless. Most of the media hasn’t even bothered to report what they are protesting about, other than some vague hippies-against-capitalism bullshit.
The Government Petitions would be hilarious if they didn’t demonstrate just how far the three major parties are willing to go to shut you up and make sure your voice is never heard, except for at election time where people are guaranteed to vote for whoever will do the most to protect their wallet. The genius of the current system is that with one vote you have to pick both a local MP and who you want to form the government (assuming you are not fucked over by a coalition), so that one X on the voting slip has to cover every single issue you care about. Knowing that economics and taxes are the most important things all parties can afford to screw you on everything else. Labour started a war that 2 million people marched against and still got re-elected with a large majority.
Our democracy is fucked, we are fucked.
2 Comments