I’m fascinated by the irony of our country apparently “helping” to ensure fair and democratic elections in other countries when we can’t seem to manage it here in the UK.

The spectacle of people being turned away from polling stations up and down the country was a disgrace to the UK’s supposedly democratic system. Is it just me who finds it unbelievable that there was seemingly no established protocol to deal with a situation where voters are still waiting at closing time? Surely there should have been a guidance sheet, standardised and distributed nationwide to ensure a uniform approach to a fair election (covering most possible scenarios)? Obviously not – and it really did make a laughing stock of the process. So much time and money is spent appealing to people to bother to vote, then when people try to vote they can’t get in!

Until we can run our own elections with a little more credibility, the UK should stop trying to tell other people how to do it.

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