Phillip Frazer
Last Thursday 29 per cent of Brits voted Conservative, 22 per cent Labour, 8 per cent Liberal-Democrats, 2.6 per cent Scottish National, 1.8 per cent Greens, and 1.3 Brexit – and 33 per cent of didn’t vote for anyone.
So the Brit elections were not as close as ours was six months ago (Labor plus Greens got 340,000 more votes than the Coalition), and not as close as America’s last presidential election, in which Clinton got three million more votes than Trump, but lost due to weird historical rules.
Clinton and Trump each won the votes of only 30 per cent of American adults, because the remaining 40 per cent didn’t vote, half of them because they weren’t allowed and half because they didn’t show up. In the UK about a third or 33 per cent didn’t vote and in Australia, where we’re fined between $20 and $78 for not voting, 10 per cent still didn’t.
Why are so many of us voting for the bosses’ party?
Because the mass media and the politicians are biased toward the bosses, because that’s who owns and operates them.
And why are even more of us protest voting or not voting at all?
Because we’re pissed off that we’re barely able to rent a home let alone buy one, that a good job is nigh impossible to find, that prospects for a better life look worse by the day, and now we’re all peering through the fires and floods at an environmental catastrophe destroying the planet in our kids’ lifetimes.
FuckYou votes
Which is why the single biggest block of voters these days, all over the globe, is composed of people essentially voting none-of-the-above – aka the FuckYou vote. Trump’s numbers were swollen by his claim to being an outsider (which he continues to claim) deflecting pissed-off voters from seeing that his policies are even worse than those of the Washington insiders. Boris and Brexit harvested a lot of FU votes by promising a program that amounts to ‘we’ll say FU to Europe, and to the London wogs, and girly men who’ve ruined our country.’
Similarly, a majority of Australian undecideds voted for the coalition as a lesser evil, also a less expensive evil than not voting at all. I don’t think many of them really thought ‘Gee the coalition has such excellent policies, and ScoMo is a really inspiring bloke.’
And why has it come to this?
Because not one of the big-time parties – Liberal/Labor here, Conservative/Labour in the UK, or Democratic/Republican in the USA – dares to admit what’s really happened since the 1980s: that the bosses sent the majority of jobs to lower-wage countries, smashed the leftover jobs into gigs and temps so we, the workers, are all alone and day-to-day, and they’re giving all the future jobs to robots or Artificial Intelligences.
And yes the world is cooking and choking on shit because the powerful people never look at the common good or the long-term game, because, frankly, they don’t give a damn.
Is there a better option than the FU? How about Greta’s How Dare U? But turn that into a plan of action, as in Let’s Dare To!
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
