Thread by @EmporersNewC

This is a message to the people who have been side-lined in this debate, and by that I mean the 28% of you who didn’t vote.

Or, as some people consider you: The 0%.

Speaking personally, there was a time in my life when I had not voted more times than I had voted, and I still don’t dismiss the idea that there will be elections where I choose not to vote again.

The tribalism in party politics often puts me off, and I've often just wanted to get on with my life and let the people who like to get involved with politics get on with it.

I also knew that running the country was complex, and governments were going to make mistakes. I've tried to judge their actions fairly in the knowledge they are trying to act in my best interest.

And that the people who were squabbling amongst themselves were putting forward what they honestly believed was the best way to run our country. Even if they didn't always put it forward honestly.

I also always believed that if a party adopted a policy and it turned out to be damaging they wouldn’t implement it, or parliament would prevent it, or at worst, it would not be long before it was overturned.

I did vote in the referendum, but if anything, history tells us that many people who thought they weren’t qualified to vote on the question of Europe did not.

There was a ‘Don’t know’ campaign run in 1975 urging people not to vote, or to spoil their ballot, in an attempt to send the decision back to parliament where they thought the decision ultimately belonged.

But for whatever reason you didn’t vote, the fact remains that three years ago the result of the referendum allowed our politicians to pull the trigger on Brexit.

It is really not going well, with the final result of this project bearing no similarity to the information the public were given on by any side of the argument. We can rake over the reasons of our reality, but it won't change it.

Having pulled the trigger, a barbed Brexit has lodged deep into the Eurosceptic’s white whale and it is pulling us all into the water.

Their justification for clinging tightly to the rope is that the decision has been made, and if you didn’t speak out at the time, then your opinion no longer matters.

Your opinion still matters.

The absence of your vote may mean it wasn’t counted in 2016, but you didn’t lose it.

If politicians think that 37% of the electorate is the majority, simply because of a majority on a day, then they are selling you, and a lot of other people like you, short.

At the times I haven’t voted, I’ve always said to myself that I can’t really complain because I didn’t vote, but I was never put in position where politicians were pursuing a policy "at any cost".

A policy in which they clearly intend to suggest the electorate has abrogated any responsibility they had.

If you didn’t vote, and you support Brexit, don’t feel like you need to be silent. Feel free to join the debate and take an active part in deciding on what form that would take.

Equally, if you are unhappy with the way this is going, don’t feel like you are powerless.

Democracy didn’t end in 2016. You still have free speech, the right to protest, and fundamentally, the decisions made from here on in will affect you, so how you think and feel about this is important.

If you sign the petition today it won’t of itself stop Brexit, but it will remind politicians of the inconvenient truth that, if we are to have self-determination in this country, the vote of today is just as important as the vote of yesterday.

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/2415…

And don’t let anybody tell you that you don’t matter because you didn’t vote on a particular issue on a particular day. Your opinion on the future direction of this country remains as important as anybody else's.

/End