Never having learned to drive, means I use the bus a lot which means I get a bit of extra time to devour more of a newspaper - that way giving me a few extra new thoughts on a wider range of subjects. Being in TCC also means I like looking at how other people get their message across and also how we can Make Democracy Work!
When you combine this together you get blog postings like this!
As I got off the bus stop I always look at the bus stop advertising. This is not because I am an avid consumer - indeed I am probably quite a non-materialist really. It is because social marketing campaigns - an area which TCC works in - are often advertised at bus stops.
This time I saw an advert for registering to vote for the London Mayoral election. I didn't think it was a good poster - it wasn't a great design and didn't really encourage you to register, though I suppose it was helpful as an information item. There is clearly a need to advertise registration as up to 1 million Londoners might not be registered to vote in May in the GLA elections. As I walked on to the library I then mentally challenged myself as to what I would do instead!
It struck me that what real incentive was there to make young people want to register? Having your say is hardly tangible in a mature consumer democracy like the UK. It is not as if a young person is going to struggle like many South African voting for the first time after a lot of queueing in 1994.
Many young people may also make the ostensibly rational consumerist calculation, that "will my single vote make any difference"? Until we teach more about the science of change at an earlier age and that small acts really do make a difference either by making a big change on its own or being part of an amplification of a change this rationalisation will continue to exist. As Bobby Kennedy said in South Africa in 1966:
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
In addition for some sort of Tipping Point to occur, such as the collapse of a pile of sand, it needed a single grain of sand to move.
Collapsing sand and Bobby Kennedy's soaring rhetoric might be an interesting explanation to me, but are not a great incentive for others leading busy lives in a reasonably secure democracy where voting and politics in general are lower down their priority list.
The insight I had at the bus stop and on the way to the library - where I am now typing this blog posting - was that it was the act of registering itself that was the problem. For all the centuries of developing democracy, is a vote every few years a great return on filling in a form?
Unlike the past when the registration form was one of the more important things you filled in every year, we all now fill in hundreds of forms a year, many online and many much more exciting or important than the humble electoral registration form. In other words, in an era of mortgage applications, bank loans and overseas holidays, the poor old electoral registration form had fallen down the hierarchy of important acts that you do.
What we need is to make registering to vote a lot more of a key thing, not just for young people but for citizens of all ages.
In recent years the main debate on registration has been on security and voting fraud and whether there should be individual registration or household registration. As one can imagine, this has not been a great encouragement to either registering or voting.
I think this is a false choice as with all the digital databases we now have we can actually have both types of registration, with one acting as a check on the other. Where an individual registration conflicts with a household return, the local authority electoral registration unit should check the issue out. This might require greater resources to operate, but my other suggestions below also recommend more resources being spent on this key entrance point to democratic participation.
Below are a few of my ideas for reforming the electoral registration process for all voters that not only assists with registration itself but also encourages voting:
- Should first registering to vote be done at schools like an internal Citizenship ceremony. With the school leaving age soon to be 18, this could be a key role for them and the culmination of years of PHSE lessons.
- The registration form should come with a standard booklet explaining all your opportunities to participate. Some would be things that already exist. Some extra forms of participation are suggested below.
- The registration form should offer you text message and email notice of public debates hosted by your local authority where Councillors are available to answer questions a few times a year.
- Many people say they want to have their say. The registration form should offer you an online local authority level discussion area where the local strategic partnership and your MP will hold online sessions so they can be questioned, with online votes on issues etc.
- It should offer you an opportunity to register for annual free draws to meet the Prime Minster and the cabinet and opposition party leaders perhaps with a few days holiday in a London hotel thrown in to make it more of a holiday.
- For young people how about a free draw to enable some to have their child trust fund topped up or your university tuition fees written off. Over the next few years we will see people realise how valuable the child trust fund is and that adding to that will become an increasing incentive to many families.
- You could request to join a political party and specify which one you wanted to join. This would have to be a party registered with the Electoral Commission, but the local authority would then pass your name on to the relevant national party to follow up if they wished.
- You could request to become a school governor or to sit on a local government outside body or a local community group or charity. The local authority could then add you to a list that the Councillors could use to draw from a wider range of experience. This approach might even help with improving political party recruitment and making them more representative of their communities.
Some might disagree with some of these ideas or might have other, even better, suggestions. My fundamental point is that filling a form for a single democratic purpose that has been unchanged for many years, is not enough in these more complex times. The form should be transformed into a gateway into a whole range of participatory democratic activity. That way we all should have more opportunities to make democracy work!
Its interesting (non-parents) distressing (parents) that schools have almost no vocational element. Now I am not suggesting that kids should be taught how to be a plumber before the age of 14 - or even after, but the reality seems to be that children leave school without many of the key life skills they soon realise they need.
In terms of one of my interests - computers and computing in general, both my daughters left school with qualifications in something the school called "Information and Communication Technology" In fact they both seemed to have passed the exam without recourse to a PC. They had only the faintest idea of how to use common packages like MS Office and no idea how to lay out a business letter, find information on the net or customise a browser to help them with their work.
Encouraging pupils to be comfortable with technology equips them for both the office place and university/higher education and really sort be one of the things that school and colleges are about. In addition to ICT in some flavour things like setting up direct debits and managing money are useful abilities.
I applaud FaceBook and Myspace as useful communication tools which may take the user to other place where skills can be found. But we could be doing so much more.
RC
Posted by: Ron | 28 January 2008 at 12:05 PM