As one of 380 million people in Europe entitled to vote I went into my local polling station: the Guildhall in Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England, and received a voting paper. The voting paper for our region, South East England, was very long and included 15 parties – most with ten candidates.
The elections are for membership to the European Parliament – the only directly elected EU institution, and one with great powers, but not easy to understand.
At a normal national or local election I would come home after voting, and watch with interest for the result. This time there will be no result until Sunday – when all nations have voted. Even then – given the complex political groupings in Europe – I won’t know who has won. The media here in the UK will concentrate on how well the UK parties have done – something we do understand.
Longest ballot paper i’ve seen – very strange process where you cant really vote for an individual
The polling station in Caldecott Road had been open for over five hours when I voted at 12.20. By this time, of the 2500 eligible voters, only 124 had cast their vote. I hope that many more turned out later on.
Er, define “great powers”. I would be beg fundamentally to disagree!
isn’t it illegal to take a photo in the polling station?
there was definitely an article posted on the bbc news website warning people against taking selfies in polling booths, I wonder if this extends to taking a picture of the ballot paper.
This year I became a first time voter and truth be told I have no idea what I am doing! I don’t get how all the policies work, who’s the best to vote for etc… its very confusing so if anyone could offer some help for the next voting season it would be muchly appreciated!
Well done for voting Chloe – far too few people do.
Trust your own judgement and make up your own mind, nobody understands everything. Next year there will be parliamentary elections and the leaders of the main parties will debate with each other which is a quite good way to get a feel for what each of them stand for.
Thank you for the advice Iain in my opinion I cant complain about the way that the country is run if I don’t vote, I’m not going to say who I voted for but I’m still not sure if I made the right decision, personally I think this sort of stuff should be taught in school so that when we do get to vote we have some bloomin idea on what’s going on!
Chloe, and others, might like to visit this site: http://www.votematch.org.uk
You answer a set of questions-agree, disagree, not sure and it will tell you which of a whole bunch of parties best reflect your views.
Hadn’t seen that one before – really interesting
Chloe made the first correct decision – to vote. Nobody we vote for is perfect and all political parties (even the single issue types) are compromises – so nobody pleases everybody all of the time. Most councillors and MPs are very hard-working – and often are roundly abused!
Good for Chloe! She’s quite right, if you can’t be bothered to vote, you needn’t bother to complain…
Depressing to hear that they don’t cover this sort of thing in school nowadays – how do we expect young people to grow up to be active citizens if we don’t give them the context…..?
Can you imagine the hue and cry if politics became part of the curriculum (outside the academic study for A level)? Teachers would be too left wing, too right wing, too European, not European enough. How do you explain what any political party stands for? As soon as you try, you get it wrong! Are you describing Old Labour, New Labour (Brown or Blair?), Continuing Labour? Is Conservatism Thatcherite, post-Thatcherite, pre-Thatcherite? One Nation? No such thing as Society? Big Society? Is Liberalism to defined as pre- or post- SDLP? Is it Gladstone or David Steel? Or neither?
And we have not yet got to UKIP, the Communist Party, the BNP and so on. Just trying to describe the recent European election ballot paper would be a nightmare.
Some hope of getting an agreed syllabus together!
My son is just completing a Level 3 BTEC in Public Services. One of the units is called ‘Government, policies and the public services’. While they don’t cover political parties, they do cover –
– the different levels of government in the UK
– understanding the democratic election process for each level of government
– the impact of government policies on public services
– how government policies are developed
If everyone came out of education understanding these areas they would be in a better position to decide how to vote.
HelenP – ….or even to be voted FOR!
“everyone” ! if only our politicians had an understanding of this, we might just be a whole lot better off?
I would like to think that the parents/teachers of students these days are more open in allowing their children to understand politics, at the end of the day we are the next set of voters so I do question why it is not part of the curriculum. Its not teaching them about set parties its about giving an over all view on how the whole system works. Myself and my friends all said that we had so much difficulty deciding on who to vote for because we simply did not understand how the policy etc work. I am not saying that they should be teaching children around the ages of 12-14 but I think it should at least go to those in year 11 and above. At the end of the day less people will vote because they don’t understand how it works therefore leaving some fool in power because your children were not educated properly.