Often time in the US, we tell people that it's important to go out and vote - that you should exercise your civic duty, or repay society, or it's important to exercise it since so many have fought and died for your right to vote.
Sometimes these people who otherwise wouldn't vote say something like "Well, I don't really know anything; I don't know about the candidates, or the issues, or their policies." And sometimes despite this people say, "Well it doesn't matter that you don't know anything; you should go vote anyway."
I've always felt like that was a mistake, and so I'm happy to see Norm also (implicitly) advocating that stance. You shouldn't vote if you're not at least somewhat informed. Because what if you vote for something awful? By yourself, you're not likely to do anything like that, but if many people ignorantly vote that same way, then it's certainly possible. Perhaps someone in the UK might argue that's what happened with Brexit this year.
So, I wanted to share it.
This might be pretty complicated to explain. In the UK, our class system has been very divided for hundreds of years. In the US, the attitude has been geared towards thinking that anybody can pull themselves up to a higher class. I think it's an important difference because it does change the way people view the government.
Take our Conservative party and the US Republican party for example. Both of them are right wing parties with policies that are not too dissimilar from each other. But their voters are different. In the UK, Conservative voters are basically all members of the middle and upper class. Working class voters have generally voted for Labour, a slightly left leaning party, for decades. In the US, this is not so black and white. There are a lot of poor and rich Republican voters, and there are a lot of poor and rich Democrats.
The anger at the government in the UK is mostly directed at the executive government (the PM and their cabinet) rather than Parliament. I think people in the UK generally feel that MP's are trying to represent our interests most of the time. This is probably due to the way our elections work, and the fact that there is so much transparency in Parliament.
Everything that happens in Parliament is televised. All debates between members of the ruling party and the opposition are televised. This happens every day. So when something is going wrong, we know exactly why it is going wrong and who is to blame.
Having said this, Parliament sometimes goes and does something that really pisses everyone off, such as approving an invasion of Iraq whilst hundreds of thousands of people are protesting outside in the street.
The current feeling amongst the working class in this country is they have nobody that represents them. The Labour party is more left leaning than ever, and is fracturing because their current leader (who I actually like a lot) is a socialist. The Conservatives are doing things to the NHS and are not listening to what people want regarding immigration, which has prompted a campaign by the Conservatives based around the Brexit vote to "Make Britain work for everyone", and is completely see through.
As a result, parties like UKIP are slowly gaining traction, not because anyone thinks they will represent their best interests, but because nobody else is.
tl;dr shit is fucked mate