Politalk
May 2nd, 2007 at 13:55
I’m looking forward to voting on Thursday, as it’ll be the first time I get to vote – I missed out on the 2005 General Election by being 18 approximately 20 days too late.
I’m going to vote tactically: for the Liberal Democrats, on the basis that they’re the lesser of three evils. The revolutionary inside me would like to spoil my ballot and take a stand against the electoral system and imply the concerns I have about the democratic system, but I’m not going to do that because it’s a lot of hassle to go all the way to a polling station to make a protest that no one will see, and what the person counting the votes will simply put on the “too stupid to even fill in a ballot correctly” pile.
Elections scare me a bit though. Right now, we’re living in under an evil Labour government who start illegal wars and in all probability tie fireworks to animals and set them alight. But what about the next general election? If we want to teach Labour a lesson, we’ll be letting the Tories in. Who will be twice as evil and several magnitudes more ideologically wrong.
So scarily, I suppose we’re at the moment living in a sort of “golden-era” of centre-left government, keeping the evil Tories at bay.
We don’t really have democracy: look at relatively recent history. One party gets in, stays for a few years until everyone hates them, gets kicked out whilst the other party do the same, then get back in again. This suggests that in all likelihood, as much as I hate to say it, we’ll have another Conservative government at some point in the future. Which is a prospect bleaker than going through a school career with a hilarious facial disfigurement and “please bully me” being the name on your birth certificate.
BBC Parliament are showing another election on Bank Holiday Monday – the ‘97 one, so I’m planning to watch and celebrate Tories losing their seats, whilst desperately trying to forget some of the things that have happened in the ten years since. It’ll be like how Paul Ross reminisces back to those heady days of presenting daytime quiz No Win, No Fee but stopping before he reaches the Price Drop TV era.
I’d stay up all night to watch Thursday’s coverage, but if the pre-voting day activity is anything to go by its merely going to be all “rubbish collection this” and “recycling that”, as if it’s the only issue we’re voting on. Which, er, I suppose it is, but I’d at least like to live under the illusion that our votes will affect other more important issues too.
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