Education For Citizenship

I live in a village called Kenton which is around 10 miles away from the nearest city which is Exeter. Kenton is in a county constituency called Teignbridge and is represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Richard Younger-Ross is the current MP and he is a member of the Liberal Democrat party which dominates Teignbridge District Council, as shown here.

I personally do not have a huge concern with people not voting in the general election. If people do not want to vote then they don't have too, obviously in an ideal world everyone would in the country would vote so there is a majority decision between everyone. However I do feel that if their reasons for not voting are because they don't know what each parties policies are then maybe they could do some research and find out. After all the vote is there for your benefit so you may as well use it as it does not take much effort and it could benefit your life in the long run.

This web-page shows the turnout of each constituency at the 2005 General Election, as you can see the highest percentage was in Dorset West and that was only 76.3%, this shows that there are many people not voting for various reasons. Interestingly my constituency of Teignbridge had a fairly high turnout of 68.7%. However that's still 31.3% of people not voting if all those people voted it could mean there would be a totally different party in charge which could therefore mean different policies come into place.

As a student my main concerns regarding voting are mainly financially based. So therefore if parties have policies regarding cheaper student travel for public transport things like that. In the small village I live in when I'm home from University it does cost a lot of money for me to get the bus into Exeter so revised student fares would definitely be something I would approve of. Also because I live in a village, there is not much congestion or crime so they're things I'm not too fussed with.