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Who'm I going to vote for next election? I know it's erroneous to look at one's vote for a local MP as having lots of effect on who the PM is, but bear with me here, it's not exactly unrelated.
I voted Labour last time. I'm not doing that again, the way things are looking now. If Blair isn't even listening to his own party, let alone the electorate, I'm just not going there (of course, if Blair is ousted befor ht next election,t higns could change, but hmm.)
I'm not green enough to be Green, and anyway the lunacies of local Greens have put me off. I vote Conservative when Lucifer starts a snowball fight. That leaves the Lib Dems. While I know some lovely Liberal Democrats (hi softfruit!) and they are commendably anti-war in stance, I have weird worries about voting for them. Partly my mother votes LD, and subconsciously I spend 99% of my time rebelling against my mother (no, really), not that that should be a factor, but it makes me feel odd. I don't know enough about their policies, and Charles Kennedy, besides sharing my surname (an undeniable point in his favour) seems so, well, ignorable. Yu can just forget he exists. Sorry, who was discussing again?
Anyway, you see my dilemma. I was a fairly convinced Labour voter, but I'm becoming unimpressed with their record on public services, and bemused by things like all these PFI deals (isn't that, like, nearly privatisation? And isn't that what Labour doesn't do?). Tube privatisation makes me worry. Anyway.
More for me than anything else - just a little pondering of political thingummies.
I voted Labour last time. I'm not doing that again, the way things are looking now. If Blair isn't even listening to his own party, let alone the electorate, I'm just not going there (of course, if Blair is ousted befor ht next election,t higns could change, but hmm.)
I'm not green enough to be Green, and anyway the lunacies of local Greens have put me off. I vote Conservative when Lucifer starts a snowball fight. That leaves the Lib Dems. While I know some lovely Liberal Democrats (hi softfruit!) and they are commendably anti-war in stance, I have weird worries about voting for them. Partly my mother votes LD, and subconsciously I spend 99% of my time rebelling against my mother (no, really), not that that should be a factor, but it makes me feel odd. I don't know enough about their policies, and Charles Kennedy, besides sharing my surname (an undeniable point in his favour) seems so, well, ignorable. Yu can just forget he exists. Sorry, who was discussing again?
Anyway, you see my dilemma. I was a fairly convinced Labour voter, but I'm becoming unimpressed with their record on public services, and bemused by things like all these PFI deals (isn't that, like, nearly privatisation? And isn't that what Labour doesn't do?). Tube privatisation makes me worry. Anyway.
More for me than anything else - just a little pondering of political thingummies.
Re: 1906, 2003, spot the difference...
Yes, that's me, the right-wing one. Are the Lib Dems officially saying they're left of Labour now then, or is that just when they want left-wing votes?
> However, you will find coalitions of every
> conceivable hue running councils all over
> the country
I know. Here, however, it happens that the Liberal Democrats of Oxfordshire have made the decision that the party they would most like to run the Council with are the Tories. It seems fair to imply, therefore, that a vote for the Lib Dems in the local elections is, ex post facto, an endorsement of that decision.
> I'm not sure of the geography of Oxford and which
> bit you live in
Lucy and I both live in working class bits.
> the West side of the city
(the middle class bit)
> has a Lib Dem MP
Yeah, met him. Smug, oily and ineffectual.
> IIRC in the east
(the working class bit)
> it's a Labour MP
Hurrah! A fine one, at that.
> with Lib Dems as the most likely people
> to displace them
If by 'most likely' you mean 'need to more than double their vote', then yes.
> Council wise it has wobbled between Lib
> Dem and Labour as the largest party in the
> last few years, with quite a few Greens at
> one point though they seem to have fallen
> back lately.
You're quite right. We lost it in 2000, the Lib Dems and Greens went into coalition, it was unutterably awful while they did dreadful stuff like tell old people that the Council helping keep the gardens of council houses tidy was 'creating a dependency culture', and as soon as they had a chance, the people of Oxford elected Labour again, in 2002.
We won in some quite surprising places, given that a certain Lib Dem Councillor said we 'only care about people who live on Council estates'.
The Greens fell from 8 to 3, because they prey on disaffected left-wing Labour voters, and that got lots harder to do when they had to face up to running a Council. Some might say 'impossible'.