subtitle

...a blog by Richard Flowers

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Day 3622: It's Time to Say YES

Wednesday:


It's not every day you get invited to join a REVOLUTION. But this Saturday, you can!

It's time to OVERTHROW the old way of doing things, and give people some real CHOICE at election time.

Say "YES" to fairer votes; it's a small effort for a BIG change.

Maybe you saw the "No" Campaign launch with a herd of political "big beasts", aka DINOSAURS: old-school hacks with an average age of sixty-five million years (ish), urging you to keep the STATUS QUO that got them where they are today (wearing ermine, mostly).

The "Yes" campaign ISN'T LIKE THAT.

Remember all those purple placards petitioning Captain Clegg? That was GENUINE people power in action on the streets. More than a hundred and forty thousand ORDINARY PEOPLE have already signed up to help the "YES" campaign. This isn't the great and the good telling you what to do; this is a Barack Obama style people's movement. And as a GENUINE grassroots campaign, team "Yes" are going to have to rely on lets and lots of EVERYDAY FOLKS to do their part.

And that means YOU!

They want to do something EXTRAORDINARY: they want to talk to people. LOTS of people! In fact, they intend to speak to more people than all the Political Parties COMBINED managed at the 2010 General Election.

That's where they want YOU to help.

The first wave begins this Saturday, with over fifty phonebanks opening in cities all over the country, and then from January they will be opening "VIRTUAL phonebanks" giving people the chance to take part from the comfort of their own homes.

Follow THIS linky to sign up to the campaign, and your nearest organiser will soon be in touch to arrange a time that is suitable for you to come and see the phonebank operation for yourself.


This ISN'T just about the Liberal Democrats. It sometimes seems we'd be hardly ANYBODY's first, second or even third choice these days anyway!

I got interested in POLITICS when my Daddies explained that it was all about giving people OPPORTUNITIES.

And what Fairer Votes REALLY does is open up the OPPORTUNITY for PEOPLE, the opportunity to make their own voice heard more clearly by letting them choose to put a DIFFERENT Party FIRST, one that, at the moment, they might not think will get in, but one that has their specific concerns most in mind – one like the Greens for some people or like UKIP for others or a SOCIALIST Party or a LOCAL campaigner.

With more CHOICE in elections, politics can be more HONEST and even if your candidate doesn't get in, everyone gets a better picture of what people REALLY want, not what they have to say they want when they have to pick from best of at most three.

So the REAL beneficiaries will be the VOTERS. And that means YOU (again).


The British political system was designed for an age of steam trains, Brontë novels, Dickensian squalor and almost exactly TWO political parties: the reactionary one and the progressive one.

But things have MOVED ON. In the last fifty years, the number of people NOT voting for one of other of Hard Labour or the Conservatories has gone from under 2% to more than a THIRD. You wouldn't expect your TESCOs to offer you just two kinds of VEGETABLE; so, why should you just get two kinds of VEGETABLE from your political system?

So if you want to make a real difference, you want to make a real change: vote positive; get involved; say "Yes"!
.

No comments: