Tally Kerr explains the importance of participating in our democracy and being an informed voter.
“I thought politics was boring and complicated and for, like, old white men.” That was the sentiment 18-year-old Tally Kerr took to her first local election. Despite her mother lecturing her about the importance of voting, at the time Tally didn’t much care for anything to do with politics.
However, a few years later, Tally is a changed woman. In her video Democracy is cool, she has taken up her mother’s old position as an advocate of democracy in front of her burgeoning YouTube audience. She tackles two major areas: why participating in politics should concern everybody, and the importance of being an informed voter.
Tally’s central motive is to spread interest in politics to people who otherwise wouldn’t care, as she reveals being annoyed at those who remark, “oh, politics doesn’t matter”. She connects with these people by explaining how intertwined politics is with the world we live in.
“We can’t avoid politics. It decides how schools are run, how the healthcare system works, how the buses run, how much your train ticket costs,” Tally says passionately. “Politics is literally everything!”
Tally recalls reading recent blog posts which champion the notion that women shouldn’t vote. Visibly angry, she explains that “politics is all around us and affects every single one of us, including women, so it makes sense that every person who lives in the society that’s going to be affected by this decision should have the right to vote”.
Warning against voting on a gut feeling or on a whim, Tally’s second point is advocating for more people to become politically informed. Referring to the ill-informed voting that resulted in Brexit, she admits that she didn’t even “know the arguments for and against Brexit” before voting, and she suggests that there was a lack of information provided on both sides during the campaigns.
We applaud Tally for encouraging her viewers to be informed about politics. Participating in democracy is hugely important and affects everyone in our country. We personally can’t wait to see what’s next for her!
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