General Election 2015

It’s on May 7th.

Everyone vote.

Thank you and farewell.

Wait….

… not sure who to vote for?

Go read party policies.  Go listen to speeches by leaders and your local candidates.  Research; can’t beat it.  The voting patterns of all our MPs, their statements, interests and affiliations are out there to be found.  May as well get nosey.

For my part… I’m in a safe Labour seat.  My local MP isn’t necessarily my favourite human being on the planet, but on a local level she doesn’t do any active harm from what I can see, and on a government level she is no better and no worse really than her party – though her party are fairly useless right now.  I used to be a Labour supporter, apart from when I voted Lib Dem after Tony Blair decided to invade Iraq, but frankly… after everything… the Lib Dems aren’t getting a sneeze from me.  I just don’t believe they will fight for anything that matters any more, even though their politics sound cautiously sane sometimes.  That said, I’m not sure I believe that Labour fight for anything other than getting into government either.  But the Tories continue to enrich the rich and deny the poor, so aren’t getting my vote, and UKIP are so repugnant in both their politics and the lies they spread that I’m amazed the ballot paper doesn’t start to scald whenever their name is printed on it.

So yeah.  I’m sorta left with a toss-up of lesser evils between Labour, Lib Dem, Green and any independent parties that can get satisfactory information through to me in a convincing manner.  As long-term readers of this blog know, I have recently joined the Green Party, but let’s not imagine for a second that means I entirely believe in everything they say.  I absolutely believe in the overall ethics of the party – I share the same core concerns and values, and am relieved to see that social justice and the economy are now factors being considered along with the environment by the party, in its efforts to think about governance as a whole, rather than a single issue.  Having read the manifesto, I harbour some doubts about odd bits in some of the policies, but that’s okay.  That’s kinda why I joined – to make my voice part of a process and to work both from outside through casting my vote, and from within by speaking to that section of politics that I think is most near to my concerns.

Having watched the leader’s debates (there were times when I turned over because of RAGE, but I made it for a large chunk) I am really rather sad that the Scottish National Party aren’t running candidates in London; they’d get my vote.  As an Englishwoman of the ancient and noble borough of Hackney, lemme say right now that I’d be totally fine being governed from Edinburgh for a while, if Edinburgh is serious about its economic and social policies, and capable of implementing them.

But strangely the SNP aren’t running candidates in England, and so here we are, left with shifty-and-faithless (Labour), weak-and-untrustworthy (Lib Dem) and well-meaning-but-possibly-naive (Green) in my very safe Labour seat.  And of course, a few years ago we all voted as a nation against proportional representation, which means if I do vote Green in my constituency, it is kinda in manner of a gesture, since Labour’s gonna take the borough anyway.  That said… if we did have proportional representation, sure, we’d probably get more Greens in hurrah, but is there not a danger that UKIP would also be waltzing more folk into parliament….?  The thought of a Tory-UKIP alliance is enough to make me want to leg it to another country asap.

All of which leads me back to the question of who I’m gonna vote for on election day, and after a great deal of mulling, I think it WILL be Green.  Based on what I’ve seen and read, I admire the Green candidate in my constituency, and at a national level none of the major parties seem willing to say anything or commit to anything of any meaning.  The Tories enrich their wealthy supporters, the Lib Dems flail madly, Labour keeps its mouth shut and says nothing of any meaning about anything, and the only reason now left for me to vote for Labour is to keep people I dislike even more out.  Well… screw that.  Voting tactically means nothing to me, particularly in this coalition-likely age.  I may as well stop voting against people I hate, and start voting for people I like, in the hope that my voice, as represented through my vote, now becomes a thing of actual political self-expression, rather than yet another shrug in the dark.

A front of house manager I know from a theatre I sometimes light is running as a Green candidate (not in my borough, alas) in a seat which is being contested Tory-UKIP.  He knows he doesn’t have a chance in hell of winning, but attends all the debates and hustings and forums anyway.  ‘Why are you bothering?’ demanded his UKIP rival.  To which the answer obviously is: for the debate.  For the ideas.  For the spreading of alternative ways of looking at the world, for the opportunity, which only rolls around once every five years – five very long years – for the nation as a whole to stand up and think about what it wants to be.

All of which brings me back to the beginning.

Go vote.

Go say what you think you want this nation to be.

And if you don’t know who to vote for – or in fact, if you do, if you’re embedded in a habit and know without having to think – stop.  Go look.  Go read.  Go research.  Like me, you may be in a safe seat, and therefore your vote may not feel important.  But safe seats come from habit, from people voting the same way all the time, and habit is usually formed from a lack of being challenged, of questioning the status quo.  Go read the manifesto of a party you think you disagree with.  Go google your MP.  Who knows – if we all start voting, all of us at once, for what we believe rather than what we hate, we may actually force our parliament into thinking about people, rather than about power.