Just as the Righteous did when Labour voters threatened to vote BNP. They never learn. They are quick to change sides when they sense a shift but they can't change tactics. Soon they'll be doing the same as they ever did, but with blue rosettes instead of red.
Iain Dale himself falls into this trap.
Frankly, those who start spitting about voting UKIP can bugger off and do just that if it makes them feel better. They may get a momentary warm glow of satisfaction, but what they could end up with is another five years of Gordon Brown.
Or they might get five years of UKIP. You never know. It depends on how many vote for each party. Just because parliament has been a Tory/Labour seat-swap for many years does not mean it has to continue that way forever.
I meet people locally who tell me there's no point voting anything but SNP because they're sure to get in. I've felt that defeatist attitude myself. But then I think - why are they sure to get in? Because everyone thinks there's no point voting for anyone else. All 'safe seats' are like that. They are only safe because the voters make them safe. Before Alex Salmond, this was a Lib Dem constituency. A safe one. That changed. It can change again. Seats are not made safe by parties, they are made safe by voters and if the voters don't like that then they can change it. They are the only ones who can change it. All you have to do is put your X in a different box next time.
You will hear 'Oh, but it's a wasted vote' but consider who you are hearing that from. You hear it from the big parties who are actually scared to death that this time they might not get the votes after all. The whole 'wasted vote' is a psychological trick, as is 'if you don't vote for us, THEY will get in'. As if the 'other' main party gets it by default. They do not.
Look at those ballot papers. The last one I did was longer than A4 and had two columns of names. It was definitely not a two horse race. Oh, there were duds, for sure. I have no idea what the Pensioners for Jesus party or whatever they are called were all about. I dismissed the Green vote because I don't want that level of lunacy and doublethink (eat no meat / eat your dog is the latest one) but they did get a couple of seats at Holyrood so someone voted for them. I have a suspicion the Pensioners for Jesus managed a seat too. Okay, they are all oddities but they prove an important point.
Voting for someone other than the Big Boys is not necessarily a wasted vote. It depends how many do it. Consider those seats held by the Greens. Not by Labour, Tory, Lib Dem or SNP. Greens. They won those seats on the back of an awful lot of 'wasted votes' (well, okay, they voted Green but anyway the point stands). The main parties are not invincible. It does not have to be Tory or Labour. It can be something else.
That is what scares candidates for the main parties and that is why they say things like 'Vote for me or the other lot will get in' and 'If you vote for a small party, it's a wasted vote'.
The fact is, if the electorate put their minds to it, the guy who turned up dressed as a carrot because his mates put up his deposit for a laugh on his stag night, could actually win that election. All he needs are votes and the ones with votes are you and me.
The only wasted vote is for more of the same.
I know I've argued this before and I'll continue to argue it as election day approaches. The triumph of Labour, Tory, SNP, Lib Dem is not guaranteed by them, It's guaranteed by those who vote for them. Don't like it? Vote against them. The party you vote for might not win but at least you have the satisfaction of decreasing their majority by one, and you can moan about the winner because you didn't vote for them.
If you feel yourself swayed by that sovereignty stuff from the Tory camp, take a quick look at this. And this.
The only option left to us with the EU is in or out. There are no longer any other options at all. Labour won't give us a referendum. The Tories won't give us a referendum. Let's take one.
Make the next election the referendum on Europe. It's the only chance we'll ever get.
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Comments
I usually vote SNP but will now stop since realising that they are even more committed to the EU and mass imigration than the Tories or Labour. Plus their aid to the Scottish Islamic Foundation to the detriment of Scottish churches is against my religious principles.
So I will vote UKIP from now on.
Immigration - yes, they want masses of bought voters too. In Scotland, which is sparsely populated with big areas nobody wants to live in because they are dreadful places to live. The immigrants will crowd out the cities. That is a far better line for the Jury Team candidate to take in Glasgow than Labour's babbling about 'oh, the SNP guy keeps making verbal gaffes'.
The most imporant thing for all small parties to realise is that the big parties have already written them off. They are busy fighting each other. If I was running a small party in that election I'd have people visiting every door and practically nothing on TV or radio. Sneak up on the big boys. Say nothing to deliberately denigrate opponents. Concentrate on what people want done, not what the 'other lot' will do.
The main parties won't even believe it's happening.
The electorate has been screwed by decades of Lib/Lab/Con behind-the-scenes consensus and EU cosiness all dressed up in lies.
Now, the general public has finally woken up to the duplicity, mendacity and self-serving nature of our politicos. We've see the way they have exempted themselves from the laws and taxes they've imposed on the rest of us and we've effectively had no opposition.
The only way to get them out is to vote them out. If we all voted UKIP, LPUK, EngDem, Jury Team or independent, we'd get rid of the lot of them and could start again from scratch, on our terms.
UKIP for me, to.
Queen Victoria reincarnated.
There's no MP now with her determination. All they want is a duckhouse and a moat to float it in. They don't want to pay for it either. They all have to go.
http://bloggers4ukip.blogspot.com/
If there is anything here you think you can use, feel free to copy it anywhere you like. Remember though, I have no party links or inside information so perfect accuracy is not guaranteed!
I don't think I could deal with editorial control. There's also the matter of criticisms like 'Yeah, well, you write what you're paid to write' and whether that's true or not for any newspapaer writer, that's how it can be seen.
This blog costs nothing but a little time. I don't get paid, nobody censors me and I don't moderate comments. Free speech shouldn't be billed and it can't be bought.
I do put a lot of this out through the medium of the pub but so far I haven't found a better way to get into the wider world without touching money. In the old days, it was pamphleteers. That might work again.
It'll take a bit of thinking about. I could always stand for election but I might win, and I couldn't be in Westminster more than ten minutes without whacking one or more of the morons in there! It's just too risky.
I wouldn't blame them for flooding over. If there was a country willing to give me benefits at a rate higher than I could ever earn here, I'd be on the first boat over. Who wouldn't?
If Turkey are in before the next election I'd be down the bookies putting money on a BNP government. I'd win enough to move to Mars. It's not that much colder than Scotland.
It has always been so with the Tories. First Heath lied about the true nature of the " Common Market " and his handing over of our fishing grounds.
Then Maggie signed away more rights at Masstricht dressing it up as a victory. By the way the Falklands War was the result of poor planning by the Tories. Running down the garrison and welcoming the conscripts from Argentina to invade. At least Lord Carrington had the grace to resign for his incompetence. Hundreds of British troops killed and ships sunk.
For real change we need a totally new Government, not one made up of old party whips who begin the process anew. That Obama crap about change, same what Blair did before him, is to entice the voters. I doubt many will fall for it with Cameron after his U-turns, shit, Dave must be dizzy to hell with the amount his done in the last month.
The Czech President knows what this EU is and has been bullied into signing it, that should tell everyone to vote someone else, better to have a hung parliament than an European Council dictating our lives.
Oh well, I agree with you on this one. There shouldn't be such a thing as a "safe seat".
The thing that concerns me is that Labour do have a core of voters who will blindly vote for them regardless of Labour policy because that is what "they have always done"
Labour have a guaranteed sheep vote no matter how awful they are..
Labour out, that is what matters now as the country is stuffed whoever gets in next election
It was a close run thing and was only won by the skill of our troops. The fact that Thatcher won the following election on the triumph of "winning" just rubbed salt into the wounds.
As a newspaper at the time said..
" The Government last night rounded off a day of spectacular military and diplomatic humiliation with the public admission by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, and the Defence Secretary, Mr John Nott, that Argentina had indeed captured Port Stanley while the British Navy lay too far away to prevent it.
At a defensive and unhappy press conference in the Foreign Office - itself a rare event - Mr Nott denied as "ridiculous and quite untrue" rumours at Westminster that he had offered his resignation to Mrs Thatcher, and Lord Carrington rejected with a shake of his head any suggestion that he might resign.
But the irony of a government elected to strengthen Britain's defence posture of finding itself in this position will not be lost on MPs and some were saying last night that the debacle in the Falkland Islands was the Government's most dramatic single humiliation."
Exactly !
What you are describing here is known as the prisoners dilemma as outlined elegantly here (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bella+gerens+prisoner&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari) by Mrs Devils Kitchen; essentially with all the horse trading and compromise voting with a conscience is surpassed by tactical voting for someone you hate slightly less than the alternative.
This isn't such a bad thing; what makes it worse is that our elected officials are responsible for so many important areas of out lives as to increase the impact of bad decisions, e.g. The last 12 years; additionally Hayek put forward the theory that socialist measures when shown to have failed are met with the irrational response of ratcheting up the plan, further exacerbated by the above "dilemma".
We have reached a period in history and tehnology where we have the power to alter things without the need for violent revolution/war; there is no longer any real restraint on ideas through the Internet and a compliant media no longer framesbthe agenda; these are precarious times though as the arguement could quickly degenerate into mob rule.
My suggestion? UKIP won't be any different to the Bory's, being filled to the rafters with the old guard looking for the return of our old inherently faulty empire. Jury team are political agnostics, intent on putting mob rule into every. little. decision which misses the point entirely- to me LPUK with it's commitment to a new constitutional framework based on rights that can be guaranteed, rather than meaningless platitudes that can't.
http://bellagerens.com/2009/09/27/libert
No government can change anything in this country now, unless its first act is to wave goodbye to the EU. Until that is done, there's nothing for the MPs to do other than claim expenses and rubber-stamp directives. Nothing in the EU can now be amended or changed. the only options are in or out.
So, for me, the priority now is to vote for someone who'll get us out. Whether they prove to be any use as a national government, well, we can sort that out later (we'll never find out anyway while we're in the EU) and let's face it, could any party really be worse than Labour now?
LPUK policies, overall, would be my preference but until those policies are available where I vote, I'll go with the best available 'get us out' vote. There's not much point voting on any other policy at the next election, because no party can implement any policy without EU approval. A vote for any party that wants to stay in the EU is just a vote for the EU. I'm not voting for that.
At least the Gorgon got into power before reneging on his promise of a referendum. Dave reneged even before then.
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories but if you or your readers have time to spare please watch this video on the swine flu vaccine. It will scare you. It has sub titles but still worth watching.
http://www.mrausa.net/showthread.php?t=1
Cameron is a eurofederalist, he has said many times that a Conservative government will never take the UK out of the EU. Even traditional eurosceptics have stopped talking about leaving the EU and started repeating the "in Europe but not ruled by Europe" mantra. It's rubbish, it can never happen. It takes an unelected eurocrat in a back room in Brussels to grab a whole wedge of sovereignty, it takes a unanimous vote of all 27 member states to give back just one tiny bit of power.
Cameron knows that he will never get agreement from the EU for his "renegotiation" of our relationship and "repatriation" of powers. He knows that the EU courts will never agree to the British Sovereignty Bill and that the UK "Supreme" Court is an inferior court to those on the continent. He knows that Lisbon is self-amending so there will never be another EU treaty to say no to. He knows that his new policy on the EU is a fantasy and that's why he's not even going to ask for his "manifesto mandate" until the 2015 election (if we still have elections or a government by then). By then he and his masters in the EU will have engineered some new reason for breaking his promises.
I've quite liked some parts of the European project. Belonging to a trading bloc (as seemed to be the fashion not so long ago) is perfectly sensible and being able to skip merrily across the borders to live, work or play has its attractions too. Damn, even going metric and learning a bit of French isn't that much of a hardship really.
But not now.
Three things have changed my mind. My very own EU epiphany if you will. You see I've just returned from a most enjoyable trip to the Far East, specifically Malaysia with little bit of Bali time thrown in for purely educational purposes you understand. What struck me in these credit crunched times was how well everything was out there. The immaculate airport (Malaysia's - Bali's was a dump), the fact that the buses and trains were working as sweetly as ever... as was the populace. That the tills were ringing and the tower cranes continued to erect another fistful of skyscrapers (I counted 10 from my hotel window in downtown Kuala Lumpur). Sure, their Government is plagued by cronyism, nepotism and lucrative contracts for special friends but then our illustrious politicians aren't above that sort of thing these days either. What struck me though was their national confidence. They don't seem to feel the need to be wedded to a political juggernaut dictating their every move, they just get on with stuff. Whether its the hugely successful AirAisa (Easyjet but much much better) or bringing (the now Malaysian owned) Lotus back to Formula One. This relatively small country (compared to us) isn't afraid to make its own way in the world. And to be honest, I wouldn't say Malaysia is currently the most dynamic of the Asian countries either, their neighbours are every bit as industrious and they're all freely trading with the world. So why aren't we?
Next, flying home via Amsterdam, came the second dent to my EU enthusiasm. After a long long flight being forced to share (squeeze into) a 6 by 10 foot glass-sided box to smoke a cigarette during my 4 hour stop-over at Schipol Airport. My numerous co-smokers incidentally were mostly Americans flying from places like India with yet another 10 hours flying time to go (long time since I felt sorry for a Yank). What really irked us, was that said box (the only one provided) was placed in such a way as to humiliate those using it... they might as well have put up a "Sin Bin" sign above its ridiculous glass sliding doors. Well done EU and Schipol; what a brilliant way to showcase to the world how enlightened we are in Euroland.
And finally. Well, we've all seen the final humiliation in our newspapers, on our screens and here in the Blogs. No one wanted the Constitution or the Lisbon Treaty but we got one anyway. Tough shit.
I want us out. There's a perfectly good commonwealth (+ USA and China) out there who we could, should, be trading with and it wouldn't cost us the billions we're pissing up the wall on the continent... or incontinent (hehehehe).
Okay rant over.