EU and local council elections

It’s been a while, and I’m still alive. Uni is done, just awaiting results out next Wednesday.

For those wanting to look in on how little I’m doing, you can go to indenti.ca: http://identi.ca/samwwwblack

But on to the boring bit of this post; the local council elections and the EU elections, specifically about the BNP.

No, I didn’t vote for them. Even if it were illegal to vote against the BNP and they were the only party running, I would add a box with “RON” and vote for him.

That aside, I think in the long run it will do our democracy a massive service that the BNP have a county council seat and 2 MEPs now, and I hope they adhere to their policies and apply them in the course of their work.

This will mean that these actions, policy decisions, voting record and comments whilst in office will be on record, accessible to the public, for years to come. So when the next vote comes around and the BNP are expecting to make gains, the records of their officials can be held up to demonstrate what a vote for the BNP really means; not a protest vote, not a joke vote, but a vote for a racist and immoral organisation that can’t even get people to pose for their promotional material or check what squadron a spitfire belongs to.

I think our democracy can handle this low if we learn from it and don’t repeat it in the future.

Moving away from the BNP and to a general election basis, I honestly think that the next parliament will be a hung one, and that the Conservative and Lib Dems would form a coalition government, based on the slightly softer way the Tories and Lib Dems are talking about each other lately. Whilst I would prefer an all out Lib Dem government, having some cabinet positions would vastly improve the percentage of the vote in the elections afterwards.

At the moment unfortunately the Lib Dems have enough mass to be noticed but haven’t achieved critical mass to erode the other two main parties’ proportions significantly. 5 years ago the Lib Dems were seen as the protest vote party, and since then although the vote is predicted to have fallen (from 22.1% in 2005 to ~19% now) its still up on the 2001 and 1997 elections.

Like I said, big enough to be noticed, not enough to generate the momentum to take them into office.

I live in hope ;-)