Choosing who to vote for

There’s an election this week. And like with all elections, I think it is vital that everyone who has the right to vote should vote. But I will concede that who to vote for is a tough call.

My party (by which I mean the party I’m a member of – I’m no Silvio Berlusconi, I don't have my own party) is only standing in these elections in a very limited way*. I look forward to there being an LPUK candidate in Nottingham in the future who I can vote for and potentially actively support in other ways. However, in these elections, that isn’t going to happen. So I’m left with the other parties.

We can dismiss some parties outright. The nasty, racist little nationalist socialists in the BNP can kiss by hairy arse – they won’t get my vote. Not now, not ever. Similarly, the socialist anti-humans of the Green party – people with less of grip on economic reality that Gordon “end to boom and bust” Brown - aren’t worth considering. The only thing they have going for them is that they are less racist than the BNP. Well done guys – you’re less pig ignorant than the knuckle draggers.

Then we have the main parties. Normally I wouldn’t lump them together. The flaccid Social Democracy of the Liberal Democrats is different to the broken, tone-deaf would-be populism of the Labour Party. Which in turn is different to the cock-sure arrogance of the Cameron Conservative Party – a group of people so sure that power is going to fall into their laps that they haven’t bothered to work out why they want it. They are different, and there are very different reasons as to why you might or might not vote for them. But fuck it – for the purposes of this election, they can be classed as the same. For all their claims of being different – for all their supposedly different aims – after weeks of reading what they have been buying on their own behalf with my money, I think we can class the elected representatives of those parties as the same. Leeches. And we need to punish those parties to show such behaviour isn’t acceptable. Even if it is just in this election, show just how you cannot accept such egregious troughing on the part of our MPs.

So then we have UKIP. I think UKIP are going to well in these elections. They will be the natural party for so many people if they want to register a protest vote. Yet I find myself questioning whether UKIP have actually earned the support they will get this week. The answer has to be no. Given the vicious infighting and the constant attempts to undermine their leader, UKIP have shown all the forward thinking of a suicidal man on a bridge. Had we not had the steady drip of the expenses outrages over the past few weeks, UKIP would be staring at electoral oblivion. Sure, luck is undoubtedly a factor in politics. But UKIP have been luckier than most. And there is always the nagging feeling with UKIP that the extremists in their membership – the petty Little Englanders who are members purely because they are too anti-social to stay in the Tories – may actually succeed in one of their coup d’états, and replace Farage.

Then we have Libertas. Who are like UKIP but slightly different. In name, if nothing else. They don’t seem to really be offering anything that other parties aren’t already offering – other than being newer. The Euro-sceptic side of British Politics already has a party struggling to make a breakthrough – adding another one to the mix probably won’t help anyone.

And there we have the problem. I want to vote – I will vote – but none of the parties represent me or, as arrogant as it may sound, deserve my vote. I’d be intrigued to hear how the readers of this blog are going to vote and why, but at this point I’m guessing that I won’t be alone in going to vote this Thursday and only really making up my mind when I am in the voting booth, preparing to put my “x” in one of the boxes.

*Good luck to those who are standing, btw.