The General Election

Most times it's pretty easy to vote but this time what to do?
Tory = Cant't vote for them cos they are Tories
Labour= Warmongers, and their leader is a dick.
Liberal= Well how can you vote for Tories dressed in orange.
Green= Leader comes across like a 6th former in a middle class school.
UKIP= nasty nasty nasty.

Any suggestions?

Syriza!

Even if you try to avoid the party, just looking at local candidates it doesn't get any better. At this point I'm struggling to justify voting at all, and yes I know people died for the vote, etc but doubt any women would want to vote for any of the above. The whole thing is fucked up. I predict a sub 20% turnout (and this itself should make the result invalid). Gotta love Will Self on The World Tonight on Radio 4 last night :)

Violent revolution?

I agree with Priority 23's opening remarks, and the comments which followed. For what it's worth, my views are:
Conservatives - this is the party which promised to sort out the economy - they haven't (although it's a bit better than when they started). They also promised to sort out the House of Lords, but haven't. Instead they have messed around with the Pastie Tax, Gay Marriages, a Five Year Parliamentary Term, trying to bomb Syria, bombing Libya. We now have the "Zombie Parliament" with nothing to do for six months. Talk a good fight - at our expense. I look from Cameron to Clegg to Osborne to Milliband and see the same well-suited south eastern rich boys, with no experience of the real world or life in the raw. Their candidate is of Sri Lankan ancestry, not of Cambridge background, probably not aware of the issues. We're definitely "not all in this together"!

The Lib Dems are a spent force as a party, with no credibility left, although their candidate at least puts in an appearance. I wish he would stop peddling the cycling issue as though it would solve all Cambridge's problems - which are not his to solve anyway. Seems to have achieved more funding for schools, and speaks regularly in the Commons on Cambridge issues. I don't agree with his stand on some issues (especially green ones) - but that's nothing new for me! They lost a lot of credibility by promising not to charge student fees (thinking they would never have to do it) and then caved in once they were in an alliance with the Cons and got their ministerial cars!

Labour have blown it - given this election on a plate, they have consistently misjudged the issues - they were coming from behind anyway, with their disgraceful and profligate track record, but then they appointed a wally surrounded by wallies - leaving their most capable stars out of the running. At least their Cambridge candidate is a local, but he doesn't seem to understand the basis of a Living Wage and demonstrates an amazing lack of awareness of the issues.

UKIP is the dark horse - their candidate is local, he seemed quite competent on Question Time. As a party, they seem very able at tripping themselves up - but their recent publication http://www.ukip.org/100_days_till_the_election_100_reasons_to_vote_uki... giving 100 reasons is interesting - I'd vote for at least 90 of the reasons! But they will not be a major seat winner, and what to watch is who they will pair up with and how many of their 100 reasons they will manage to get their alliance partner to agree to in the bargaining talks.

So for my money it's between Huppert and O'Flynn with 95 days to go.

The gay marriages issue, is one of the current Tory's better achievements. They brought it in, so it's unfair to slag them on that one.

..... but it wasn't in the manifesto, wasn't a stated priority, took a lot of parliamentary time and didn't do anything for the economy. I suspect it was an EU issue.

For the first time ever I am genuinely unsure who to vote for. I usually vote green, and then my vote disappears down the drain. This time though, I could vote labour to get the Lib Dems out. I could vote for Huppert because, although I don't really like his party, I think he's a decent MP and does a good job for Cambridge. Or I could vote Green because they are closest (though not ideal) to what I believe in, although this time I think it might be more important to vote tatically to ensure that the Tories / UKIP don't get in.

I'm sure that elections has got worse. Even when I first voted in 1997 I thought that the Tories were evil, New Labour were sellouts and the LDs hopeless. I don't remember all parties being so awful as they are now though.

If Huppert went independent I'd vote for him.
I like the way he pushes for trains and push-bikes.

Wonder if he's thought of it....?

A mate of mine had a Twitter conversation with Huppert and apparently he has no plans to go as an independent because it is much harder to achieve things without the party behind you.

As things go at the moment he seems to be barely in the party, he seems to rebel about many things the whip tells him to vote for. Which is great of him of course.

Not convinced by the "he seems to be barely in the party, he seems to rebel about many things the whip tells him to vote for. Which is great of him of course." They horse-trade. When the government has the numbers, he is allowed to vote against if it is something that i specifically toxic with his electorate (tuition fees etc), but if they are struggling for numbers he is not allowed to do it. Witness his abstaining for the vote on the gagging law.

I daresay he does his best within the framework he is in, but you are kidding yourself if you think he really rocks the boat and kicks up shit on a point of principle when the chips are down.

Anyone with any intergrity should have crossed the floor when the Lib Dems backed the government on the Health and Social Care bill.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/labour-scraping-barrel-as-ed-b...
More news on what a cluster of fuck labour are....

a spectacular balls up, one could say

See I'd like to see more of that kind of thing.

We could sorely do with a government that many of the businesses in this country are afraid of. Governments shouldn't be afraid of businesses, businesses should be afriad of governments.

"Simon Woodroffe, the founder of restaurant chain Yo! Sushi and a former Labour supporter, said he was “scared” by the way Mr Miliband was branding business leaders as “fat cats”.

“I was a Labour Party supporter during the Blair-Brown thing... But I want somebody who really appreciates that business has got to succeed first before we can share out the money.”

He said he was annoyed at the label fat cat, adding: “They pay their taxes, you know.”"

I think it speaks well of the current Labour party that the business who backed them during the "Blair-Brown thing" are now not such big fans.

As for “They pay their taxes, you know.”, far too many of them don't and that's more than half the fucking problem. If you do, and you pay a fair wage, allow workers to join unions, don't hire workers abroad, pay them minimum wage and then take a cut off them for the "accommodation" you put them up in, don't enforce zero-hours contracts or otherwise encourage your employees to feel that their jobs are insecure in order to work them into the ground, then the problem isn't with you.

The problem is with pieces of shit like this guy:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/whats-that-a-monacobased-b...

"Since he took the high street chain into private ownership six years ago, Boots has avoided some £1.1bn in corporation tax by such elegant (and, yes, entirely legal) measures as rerouting cash through subsidiaries in tax havens and loading debt repayment to slash declared profits. Nothing new there. What is slightly unusual about the Boots case is that the 40 per cent of its revenue that stems from selling prescription drugs and giving flu jabs emanates from the NHS budget."

So you load the company up with debt to allow you to buy it and then to cut the company's declared profits, you move their "headquarters" to Switzerland in order to dodge tax and you streamline the business and then try and claim that you are a wealth creator and are responsible for creating the jobs that have survived your restructuring.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/guddi-singh/boots-loots-what-has-...

Cambridge Socialist.

I am a local service user, it is true.

Are the two supposed to be mutually exclusive, then? if it helps, I am not from round here originally. If I had to choose, I'd probably go with the latter. The former is just where I happen to be. It's not where you're from, man, it's where you're at.

Care to explain what you meant by that comment?

What's a service user.
What service are you using?

We're All Neighbours. Bigmal likes to get on his high horse about how it is a local forum for local people and not for people who now live in Brighton etc etc.

Damned right

Cambridge Socialists is who I vote for stoooooooooopid.

Oh I see! Sorry, I thought it was an accusation! Ha. Fair enough. They sound right up my alley, it's true.

At least Huppert voted against fracking, unlike Clegg. But that just makes me uncomfortable voting for the Lib Dems. I know its the number of seats, not the number of votes that wins the election, and seems likely Huppert will win for Cambridge unless so many people are so pissed off at Clegg and co that they abandon their party

http://blog.38degrees.org.uk/2015/01/27/how-mps-voted-on-a-fracking-mo...

Lib Dems support the new bridge over the Cam between Chesterton and Ditton Meadow (near the train bridge)
Labour don't.
To oppose the Bridge is evil.
To support it is wonderful.
BUILD IT NOW.
They may need to demolish a Bungalow, but I'm sure the residents will be given warning.

https://philrodgers.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/icms-poll-findings-about-...
The headline finding for our city is that Julian Huppert is set to lose his seat to Labour’s Daniel Zeichner if Nick Clegg remains Lib Dem leader, but might do better if Vince Cable or Danny Alexander were to take over.

Much as I want to vote Green I can see in Cambridge that would be fruitless, it's all about number of seats so will probably go with Labour. It's not like there aren't other countries with wishy washy leaders

Vote for policies, not personalities

Compare what each party is promising to do, and make an informed decision about who to vote for at the 2015 general election.

https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/

I suspect that a large number of people (especially in Cambridge) like the Green Party but don't vote for them because they think that they won't win and therefore it is more important to vote Labour to keep the Tories out, even though they don't really like Labour. That annoys me and always has done.

Vote for policies, not personalities

The Labour party can make all the policies they want but I'm still pessimistic that their personalities have the ability to actually implement them. And the evidence would suggest that the Tory personalities are quite inclined to implement completely different policies from what was in their manifesto.

It's all very well saying "vote for policies" - however, the Coalition - comprising Conservative and Lib-Dem - implemented policies which were in neither manifesto (and so couldn't have been voted for). Eg - the Pastie Tax, Increasing Student Fees, the Five Year Fixed Parliament Term, Bombing Libya (and Syria if they could have got away with it), Supplying Arms to rebels in Syria (soon to become ISIL), Same Sex Marriages (except for relatives), the Bedroom Tax, the Scottish Referendum fiasco, the Somerset Floods fiasco, the Romanian/Bulgarian freedom of travel quandary, the continuing subsidy of Wind Farms and Solar Fields. And some policies were never even started eg Reform of the House of Lords.

I think the only hope is voting for the candidate that you agree most with. If everybody did that, democracy would stand a chance.

All of the above and the worst example of all, the Health & Social Care Act.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/24/natalie-bennetts-car-crash-...
Any one planning on the Green option should read this.
Natalie Bennett sounds like a dimbo

And with Jack Straw and Malcolm shooting themselves (and their parties) in the foot, it makes the voting even more difficult. However I suspect the corruption, incompetence and greed of MPs is not a party issue - - they're all at it!

Who are Jack ans Malcolm, sorry I just had a 'brain fade'

http://may2015.com/category/seat-calculator/

cons 238
lab 212
lib 9
ukip 2
snp 55

Looks like nicola's posse have the sway

It would be truly hilarious if the SNP refused to enter into a Coalition with the Tories and denied Cameron a second term, after all the fuss Cameron made to try and keep Scotland in the UK.

Those Zero hours contracts sound great.
Getting paid for zero hours of work, sounds pretty good to me.
How do you get one?

Seriously, is the zero hours thing really that much of a vote winner?

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/labours-biggest-union-donor-used...
More on the Zero hour controversy.

This is depressing. Just done one of those online surveys which suggested my preferred party is the Green Party, which is not really surprising, but they have zero chance in Cambridge, even my second choice has very little chance locally, though more nationally (and the local GP candidate is a douche).

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/-/html/votematch.html

The current predicted chance of Liberal Democrats winning in Cambridge is 96%
The current predicted chance of Labour winning in Cambridge is 4%
The current predicted chance of Conservatives winning in Cambridge is less than 1%
The current predicted chance of Greens winning in Cambridge is less than 1%

Damn you foolscap

http://38degrees.votematch.org/

I had hoped that the slide away from the LDs would have spread to Cambridge, perhaps we'd have slid towards the greens like in Brighton. This hope was quickly killed this week when I saw that most of those boards in people's front gardens were all still almost exclusively yellow.

Natalie Bennett did good on that rather staged leaders debate on ITV the other day, she made up for her brain fade on LBC.
What was made abundantly clear was that c**t Farage really is pure poison.

I didn't watch the debate. I watched the ten minute highlights the day after and from that you would have thought that Bennett didn't say a word all evening, so the bias is continuing exactly as before.

I thought Farage made his points quite well. However, as usual he was long on identifying the problems, but short on proposing solutions - to be fair none of the others addressed the deficit problem, or could answer how to reduce the number of EU immigrants whilst remaining in the EU.
The presence of Plaid Cymru and SNP was annoying - they only field candidates in Scotland and Wales (only 10% of the electorate) and when they say 2vote for me" most of the audience and viewers can't.
You would have thought the Greens could have come up with a home-grown candidate rather than an Aussie import. I think Cameron, Clegg and Milliband have lost all credibility in the last five years.

It's concerning when you speak to people about voting and they say things like "i'm voting for **** because I fancied a change" or "because my friends are...."

Maybe you should have to write a 500 word explanation under your vote, if the reasons are deemed ridiculous their vote is deleted.

Conservative 34% +0
Labour 33% -1
UKIP 13% +0
Liberal Democrats 8% +0
Green 5% +0

BBC Poll of Polls

I've always found it curious that most people decide which party or candidate they support and stick with them. This means that the balance of power generally remains with the few who aren't sure, the ones who waver, or even the ones who just vote for their favourite colour.

Anyway, I'm sick to death of the election already. I decided which one was marginally least worst long ago so I'm fed up of the lying hypocritical swines putting junk through my door or making self serving point proving speeches on the news. I wish they'd all go away and leave everyone alone.

I'm making a paper mache scale model of Ed Milliband's lips out of all the political flyers put through my door.
Because the ones from City Kebab speak more sense than most of the political ones I'm using those too.

Nice. http://www.itv.com/news/update/2015-04-09/silent-wit-and-wisdom-of-nig...