The voting booth is, to borrow a fitting phrase from history, the great leveller. Outside the voting booth, you might be a blinged-up billionaire with more yachts than most people have shoes, but inside you’re the same as everyone else. In that booth the billionaire becomes indistinguishable from the poor woman who shines his silver: both have the exact same power to determine the future of Britain. One cross for the billionaire, one cross for the silver polisher. For a moment, she’s as powerful as her boss.
It’s the most magnificent thing about democracy: it takes no heed of wealth or race or sex and instead treats us as human beings; it levels us. ‘One person, one vote.’ That booth is one of the few places on Earth where you’re a person — not rich or poor, not male or female, not black or white; just human, brilliantly and brutally equal to every other human.
Today, however, this old great levelling ideal is under attack.
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