Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

politics

I suppose I'm going to miss the bye-election, my poll card arrived too late for me to register for a postal vote and I'm not planning to drive down from Aberdeen to exercise my franchise!

This has become a very silly election, the parties are all throwing everything they've got at it, with the cons and the libs being particularly desperate and annoying. I think I've had most of a small tree shoved through the door in the past few days. Ealing/Southall being a mainly asian constituency, politics has a different tone. The one certainty is that whatever party wins, the MP will only be interested in representing the interests of his constituents (the only female candidate is a Green, Labour was going to select from an all-woman shortlist, but bottled out when they realised they would lose). Our recently deceased MP was not one of the more assiduous attenders at Westminster and certainly did little in the way of voting.

The con candidate (party member for less than ten days) was at a labour party fundraising dinner a month ago (and made a donation), five labour councillors have defected to the cons in a fit of pique because the party didn't select a Sikh candidate (it was their turn apparently), the cons are suing the libs for plagiarising their election literature. It's all a farce, in less than two years the boundaries will change, and a whole lot of tories will discover that their vote might mean something again!

This makes scottish politics appear to be relatively straightforward by comparison, no doubt I'll be disabused at some point, but for now I'll stick with that naiive view.

posted by Lampy @ 7/15/2007 12:18:00 pm