I quite enjoy the ceremony, in fact so much so I did a dry run to the polling station on Tuesday; it seems it's 30m from my local pub so it became a wet run, which I'm hoping to repeat tonight.
Did the thing at 7:05am. My polling station is on a one-way street that's easy to get to on my way to work, but a bugger on the way home.
Electoral muscle exercised, now the wait to see if our area changes colour for the first time in a long while.
Same. In fact, I've voted (or at least returned a ballot) in every election since I was old enough to be eligible... and yet never once set foot in a polling station.
I *still* don't know who I'm going to vote for. Tactical voting would suggest Labour if I want to help getting rid of the Tories but I'm not convinced by Starmer's lot either.
Fair enough, but reducing the likelihood of a Conservative winning increases the likelihood of the Cons not even being the opposition. For me it's less about a Labour government (which already looks likely), it's about getting a Lib Dem oppositon, which would mark a gigantic shift in the UK's politics since Conservative mouthpieces won't be invited automatically to comment on everything, whilst as the opposition it will be required by law to ask the Lib Dems. It's a long shot, but tactical voting makes it possible.
And for those thinking about a protest vote for a party they ostensibly don't like, or who think that there's no point voting for a party that won't win: have a look into Short Money. TL;DR: Every seat won nets opposition parties £21,438.33 of public funds, while every 200 votes gets them an additional £42.82. The Leader of the Opposition also receives nearly a million quid towards the running cost of their office, and a salary, and salaries for the Chief Whip and Assistant Whip of the Opposition too. That's money you can allocate by voting, even when the party for which you're voting doesn't win. (Disclaimer: the funding is only available to eligible opposition parties, which means it has to have won at least two seats or have won at least one seat and received more than 150,000 party votes total. Which, yes, means that Reform protest votes have probably handed Farridge a nice slice of taxpayers' money.)
FFS. The longer I leave it as the day goes on, the less likely I am to even bother with all the confusion. Plopsies. EDIT: I don't like the incumbent fraudsters, I don't like the hypocrites in Labour at all, I don't like the idea of a National Front-led military state, I like the Greens environmentally but have no idea what their wider tax policies are going to do to me and I know nothing about the Lib Dems. Which makes me both daft as a brush politically and more likely to do the opposite of what some people on here have stated, on the basis of their militant leftist views. But that said, I'm no closer to an answer. Might just get the kids to tick a box.
Taxes will likely go up, regardless of who wins. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you, and/or themselves. but FWIW Greens and LD's tax plans were forecast by Sky [whether you believe their conclusion or on is another matter] to require a larger tax take than that of the Labour or Conservative plans. Fiscal Drag has been the kick of late [thresholds not increasing in line with inflation] rather than the actual tax rates. Write '**** the lot of them' on the ballot if you so desire. That seems to be your political stance anyway.
Ha! This might have actually been the most useful statement of the whole debate... ... Particularly this bit. I did put my religion as Jedi in the census once because everyone else thought it would be funny, so this wouldn't be unreasonable were it not for the fact that something real and taxy might happen as a result of my in(appropriate)action.
****ing hell, this sort of **** always makes me crack up I don't think I've seen anyone even remotely approaching the description "militant leftist" talking about this election on these forums!
Yeah, didn't do that, did I Couldn't do it in the end. I couldn't, in good conscience, put my 'X' against a Shadow Welsh Secretary that doesn't seem to give the merest smidgen of a toss about the voice or concerns of the Welsh parliament. They've been in power in Cardiff Bay for 25 years, ever since devolution in Wales has been formally instituted, and it's effectively been the national party's puppet ever since. Mark Drakeford certainly helped re-establish some 'clear red water' between Labour and Welsh Labour in recent years, but that's not entirely surprising given that he was the one who coined the term in the first place. But Vaughan Gething is First Minister now, and Gething is an unpopular figure shrouded in controversy over donations from a convicted criminal, lying to the Covid enquiry about the deletion of WhatsApp messages during the pandemic, and strong-arming the unions to stitch up Jeremy Miles in the leadership contest. But Starmer and the national party want their apparatchik in place, so in place he stays. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very ****ing glad indeed that the next national government will be a Labour one, but I damn well hope they won't be the next Welsh government. I'm a recovering militant leftist if that helps - even joined the Labour party when Corbyn was leader, what a stunningly far-sighted decision that proved to be I mean... I still think the greed-driven oligarchy that masquerades as "capitalism" is still at the root of many societal issues both here and in the US, and I do still think that "because Thatcher and Reagan" is a valid answer to the question of "where did things go wrong?" because it was those two who laid the first steps on the road to the individualist greed-obsessed hypercapitalist society we now have... But at least I never went round waving copies of Das Kapital in people's faces...
