Well, THAT was a surprise

[baratron]

Richard and I just did the quiz at http://uk.isidewith.com to find out who we should vote for.


That image is crap though because it only shows the top 5, whereas I think my 53% for the Conservatives, 21% for UKIP and 3% for the BNP (!) are important :) Honestly, I'm amazed that I have as much as 3% in common with the BNP... Apparently I agree with them about nuclear energy and tracking.

Don't forget to vote!

Comments

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

Policy inaccuracies in quizzes like that always fill me with nerdly rage.

It includes in its answers comparing me with the LDs:

"Should the House of Lords be a wholly elected body?
Liberal Democrats have not given a stance on this issue"

Really? Really? After about 100 years of consistently having "it should be wholly elected" as the party position they haven't got a stance on the issue?

And as for the Labour position on finance questions, they have about as much clue as Ed Balls :P

Sassen, frassen, as Mutley would say.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I really don't think I have as much as 84% in common with Labour - but I live in a posh council ward where the battle has always been Liberal/Lib Dem vs Conservative, so a vote for Labour is pretty much throwing your vote away.

Interestingly, we currently have a Green Party MEP - I'm not exactly sure how that came about. I think she might be the result of PR? (I looked it up - apparently the whole of London is one constituency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_%28European_Parliament_constituency%29#2014) now. Nice).

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

For Britain, European elections switched to a form of PR in 1999, apparently because Paddy Ashdown was on a long aeroplane flight with Tony Blair and browbeat him into agreeing to it. We elect regional (or Wales / Scotland) lists by party - so your Euro ballot names all the local Lib Dem candidates but you just vote for the Lib Dems as a whole. We get enough votes for one MEP, the top name (Sarah Ludford) gets in; we get enough votes for two, Jonathan Fryer gets elected too.

Imagine electing 10 people, and one party gets 5% and another 15% - do you give them both one seat, or one two and the other none? The fine print of how the electoral system decides who gets a seat in such cases is the stuff of election nerd delight, but you can read how it works here by looking up "d'Hondt" if you want to know. To confuse matters, in Northern Ireland they use a different voting system for the Euros ("STV") which is different again. We have quite a plethora now: AMS for Scottish and Welsh elections, council elections by FPTP with one person elected in some places and three elected in others, council elections in Scotland by STV, D'Hondt for Europe, SV for the London Mayor...

The Greens have won 2 seats nationwide each time - one for London and one for South East England, but they haven't got in anywhere else. So you've consistently had a Green MEP and a Lib Dem MEP since 1999, and a varying list of others as the tide has ebbed and flowed between Labour, Tories and UKIP.

At the moment I have eight - three Tory, two Labour, one Lib Dem, one UKIP and one BNP. There's an outside chance the UKIP surge may reduce the Tories to just one this time, which would please me in a way as the 2nd placed Tory annoys me more than most...

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

Bit of a ramble there sorry.I've been up a long time.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Feel free to ramble as much as you want, as long as it's interesting :)

[damerell.livejournal.com]

3%, nothing. 34%!

Admittedly, there's a large gap between Green (92%), Labour, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Lib Dems (83%)... then BNP (34%), UKIP (19%), Tories (18%).

I think this is down to their sometimes-accidentally-lefty economic stance (eg they want to tax large multinationals (because they are run by evil foreigners), I want to tax large multinationals because they avoid tax) whereas UKIP and the Tories are persistently right-wing economically. I'm not sure it's so worrying, TBH; I can live with the fact that both Mussolini and I would like the trains to run on time. :-)

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get 20% BNP. As Conrad Russell said, an idea cannot be held responsible for those who share it...