Roadkill on the information superhighway

The Election Section

So it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted anything here, and during that time there’s been some kind of vote thingie going on, apparently.  Various thoughts:

It’s weird how, as a Christian, I can have an entirely different view on which party actually has the best track record, policies, attitude to social justice etc, to that of another Christian.

The leadership debates were a good idea, but an hour and a half was too long.  And having three of them seemed a lot.  You were never going to discuss all the issues facing the country in that time, but you at least might have kept people’s attention.

In the fallout from the hung parliament, lots of people (particularly those affilliated with the Tories) banged on and on about Brown being “an unelected PM”.  Erm, maybe I’ve missed something here, but unless my ballot paper had a different design to everyone else’s, there was no option to choose who the PM was.  There was a choice of candidates representing various parties, but I don’t actually get a say in who runs those parties unless I join them.  In other words - no PM is ever elected; we elect a party, they choose their leader, they have the right to change their leader at any point but it’s still the party we elected.  You want to vote for which individual runs the country?  Go and live in America.

As for the chaos with people being unable to vote - what on earth?!  It seems in many places that there were either not enough staff, not enough ballot papers, or both, in order to cope with the unexpectedly high turnout of - shock! - 65%.  And no one seemed to know what they were supposed to do about it, so people in Birmingham got locked in while people in Sheffield were sent home.  Absolutely stupid.

One last thing - voting reform.  Is there any chance we could come up with a system that allows everyone’s vote to count, even if they live in an area where their chosen party doesn’t stand a hope of winning, but that also stops the likes of the BNP getting any slight hint of power, without being in the position of always having a hung parliament forever afterwards?  Sadly, I suspect not.  Poo.

And now, from the big three parties, the one I never wanted to see in power again are in power again, led by a man who I find horribly false and creepy and untrustworthy.  You may disagree with my opinion, but there it is.  At least it’s all over now… unless the whole coalition thing doesn’t work and we have to have another election in six months…