EU citizens living in the UK will not be eligible to vote in any referendum on Britain’s membership of the Union, we learned yesterday. Which is a start, sure. But why are we letting 45.3 million people vote on an issue this important in the first place?
We’re missing a trick. Because it shouldn’t just be Krauts and frogs who are barred from voting in our national elections and referendums. It’s time to start cracking down on some of our own people. Some of them are simply too stupid to be given a say in decisions that affect everyone else. Sorry, no offence, but it’s true.
A survey in July 2013 showed that the British public was wrong about pretty much everything. They have no idea about immigration, crime rates, teenage pregnancy or almost anything else. Even Princess Michael of Kent admits that the British are “the most stupid nation in Europe.” Shouldn’t the rest of us try to protect ourselves from this avalanche of dumb?
I don’t know about you, but I find the idea that my vote is worth as much as Joey Essex’s, or White Dee’s, deeply offensive.
I’m not saying we should apply a blanket rule overnight to exclude anyone incapable of rational thought – animal welfare activists, Guardian columnists, single women over 30 – but shouldn’t we have a system in place that protects wealth-creators from the envy-driven politics of the lower orders and from unscrupulous left-wing politicians with a vested interest in getting everyone hooked on welfare?
An IQ test is the least we can do to ensure, in these perilous economic times, that we don’t allow the inmates to take over the asylum, as so nearly happened at the last election when the rapacious dorks in the Labour Party threatened to tax us all into early graves with new levies on the homes we live in.
Labour’s so-called “mansion tax,” like inheritance tax, can have no moral justification. Not only do such punitive laws represent double taxation – the same money gets taxed twice – but inheritance tax in particular is profoundly immoral. Consider how many dads sacrifice time with their children to provide for their futures, only to have their hard-earned prosperity ripped from them by grasping governments.
Which leads me on to my second and third criteria. Voting should be restricted to people who own property, and who pay tax. If you want to institute progressive tax policies that take low earners out of tax altogether, fine: but with no income tax comes the loss of the franchise. It’s a perfectly fair deal.
By the way, making the electoral franchise “passive,” as we do when we let people vote by post, is a dereliction of democratic duty. Perhaps a Crystal Maze-style TV obstacle course is asking a bit much, but I think there should be more paperwork involved in registering as a voter.
For instance, a literacy test. In America, bogus literacy tests were once used by the Democratic Party to disenfranchise black voters. (Together, of course, with the KKK – another Democrat institution.) But we’ve never really found out what the effect of a fair, universally applied literacy test would be on the voting public.
To my mind, if you expect to have a say in the way your country is governed, you should be able to express yourself fluently in English. And you should be able to answer basic questions about how we run our country. Idiotic reality TV stars who do not know David Cameron’s name, can’t remember which party the Tories are and can’t pronounce the word “conservatives” should not be allowed anywhere near a polling station.
I mean, be honest. Do we really want people who can barely tie their own shoelaces together electing Prime Ministers? The sort of people ruled by fear, emotion and ignorance instead of facts and reason? (I know what you’re thinking: no radical feminist would ever get to vote again. This is merely a happy by-product of the new system, I assure you.)
To those who worry that an education or IQ-based voting system would bias results toward trendy metropolitan liberals with their hang-ups about microaggressions and transgender pronouns, I urge you not to worry. These goofballs are a tiny fraction of the population, as we saw at the last election. I have faith in the good sense of the majority of the (property-owning) British public.
Lefties like to claim that conservative voters are stupid and that mandatory voting would benefit right-wing parties. But, if that’s so, why are they so horrified by the idea of making voting a bit harder? I’ll tell you. Because they’re lying: they know that the inner-city ghettos, black, white or otherwise, who vote for left-wing hand-outs are populated by poorly educated voters who don’t know what the hell they’re doing and probably can’t name a single person in government besides the President or Prime Minister.
So, anyway, I say it’s time to reintroduce some civic responsibility to our great nation and encourage its citizens to learn a bit more about politics before they’re able to voice their opinion at the ballot box. And if they fall short of the equal opportunities criterion of intelligence, scoring “dunderhead” or below on an IQ test, well, so be it. Sorry to break it to you, but not all voters are created equal.
As a Greek, and a student of history, I of course take the view that representation worked better in its original and purest form: direct democracy. Sure, the franchise was restricted to a tiny slice of the population, but they were the richest, best educated and most blue-blooded anyway. Some people are born to rule.
But if you think that’s a reform too far, let’s at least agree on this: voting should be made quite a bit harder, and we should start emphasising responsibilities a bit more often, rather than constantly harping on about rights. Democracy is a luxury few in the world enjoy. We should demand better of our fellow citizens, if we are to preserve it.
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