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Controversial.

This isn’t a political column and I’m not about to talk to you about my views or my voting stance on what has become one of the biggest political issues we have seen for a long time in the UK.

I remember though waking up after the BREXIT vote to Grace, my eldest daughter, running into our bedroom to tell us what the result had been.

She was shocked, me not so shocked.

The country decided, by quite a narrow margin, the direction of travel and the timescale was set.

How is it that we end up here? How is it that we end up even more divided than ever before?

We have no voice. We have no ability to shape or mould things despite the fact that we had a referendum for BREXIT.

The information that we were given was insufficient and at times completely and utterly erroneous. It’s hard enough for people who pay attention to politics to make sense of it and impossible for those who drop in and out for the big questions.

It doesn’t matter which way I voted for BREXIT, but I did change my mind afterwards as new information and, what I felt was, new evidence came to light to alter my position.

The machinery we have though does not allow us to change our mind and it does not allow us to see through the lies of an election campaign and alter our stance.

It also doesn’t allow us to engage with 16 year olds, which is a very interesting topic, because they are likely to be the ones who will be affected the most by whichever way the BREXIT situation unfolds.

I was reminded throughout this whole episode of Russell Brand’s book ‘Revolution’ and how he describes (a fanciful) system of balloting the public based around the technology we use for The X Factor. It is not beyond the wit of our society to create an online voting system which is at least as secure as the arcane and archaic paper system that we currently use.

It would be dynamic and fast and would allow us to hold multiple referendums on multiple subjects much more frequently.

You would think that this would be careless and carnage but it wouldn’t.

It would allow the population as a whole to have a say, but more importantly to hold their politicians to account.

If we felt our politicians were held to account we might be more inclined to engage with politics (certainly the young people might)

It’s only a matter of time before electronic voting appears and then there is very little excuse for the infrequency of questioning the public.

Elected representatives were in position because it was the only way to get the view of the public into one place, the world has changed entirely now and seems like the role of elected politicians is being eroded.

I still painfully remember the outcome of the Scottish Independence election when a section of the population were ‘bribed’ in a huge way by multiple political parties in the week leading up to it which swung the vote.

I watched afterwards as promises were broken, one after the other after the other, but it didn’t matter because the vote was already done.

In a different, more dynamic system that wouldn’t be possible.

Perhaps in the carnage of BREXIT, we might learn to govern ourselves just a little bit better.

Blog Post Number: 1834