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| Pic from www.libertarianism.com |
It is voting time
Well, today is D-Day, the day when Great Britain will decide its destiny in relations to remaining or exiting the European Union.
The love-hate-in-out relationship has been a longstanding debate which is coming to its natural conclusion: a referendum for British citizens to finally decide one way or another.
I will not try to persuade anyone how to vote, I strongly believe in personal freedom of choice. I do understand that I might wake up tomorrow morning and not like the result, but that is democracy, the majority of people eligible to vote deciding.
I would though mind if such important decision was made by the majority of people that bothered to turn up.
We sometime forget how important voting is and how many struggles people have gone through for centuries, and in some countries still do now, for this basic fundamental right.
Universal vote has not really been in place that long in the UK.
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| Pic from www.cotyofenglewood.org |
In early-19th-century
Britain very few people had the right to vote.
Three parliamentary reform Acts
introduced in 1832, 1867 and 1884 respectively helped move things forward with the electorate
increasing substantially in size from approximately 366,000 in England and Wales
in 1831 to slightly fewer than 8 million in 1885.
Parliamentary seats were also redistributed to give greater weight to larger towns and cities and the Ballot
Act of 1872, which introduced secret ballots, made it far more difficult for
voters to be bribed or intimidated.
Universal suffrage,
including voting rights for women (though not for those under 30), did not
arrive in Britain until February 1918. Whatever your views, IN or OUT, if you are eligible, do not forget to vote. If you don't like the result tomorrow morning, think:
your vote could have made a difference.
GO AND VOTE.
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