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]

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 :)