Conference season

[alexsarll]

I find it disgusting enough when Labour use the 'wasted vote' argument against anyone planning to do other than support the Red Tories/Blue Tories Punch & Judy show, what with Labour having themselves been a fringe party not so very long ago. But for the Lib Dems to start parroting it against voting for anyone smaller than themselves is just staggering. Between this and Nick Klegg, sorry, Clegg buying into the public sector cuts bidding war rather than asking the questions so many people now want asked about when the bankers will be giving our bloody money back, I'm increasingly wondering whether to bother voting Lib Dem next General Election after all. Except under Wee Charlie Kennedy (please come back, Charlie) it's seldom been so much that I actually like their policies as a case of "when faced with a choice of evils, I pick the one I've not tried yet" (good old Mae West). The more indistinguishable they become from the other two (still this obsession with chasing the centre ground, rather than offering voters anything like a real choice), the less that justification holds. Obviously at national level the Green manifesto normally has more holes than a fair-trade organic basket, but I'm still tempted to vote for them now out of sheer spite.

Comments

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

*chomp*

Typical anti-Lib Dem BBC spin and misrepresentation; that lot just love the Greens, despite that party's ideology being so wildly out of step from what most people think it is. Any goodwill towards the Greens from me went out the window with their manifesto on science, which appeared to have been written by Ned Ludd, and the toys-out-of-the-pram episode by their Norwich candidate Rupert Read over on Liberal Conspiracy.

Agreed though re Kennedy. Come back soon, Chucky Bumface!

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure when I finally lost it with them. Was it their eve-of-poll claiming I planned to privatise the NHS (easy to do from a seat on a provincial District Council I'm sure, even if I wanted to) or was it when they claimed the police were investigating me for issuing a fake leaflet (that I had never even seen, and was never asked about, so funny old investigation, that). The policies are way down the list, I should have responded that they planned to abolish the NHS and spend it all on homeopathy, but in Oxford that might have won them votes... as it was they mostly ran their elections as a single-issue campaign against mobile phone masts.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Is this Lib Dems or Greens?

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Greens. Lib Dems I only hate when they're doing their usual passive-aggressive act of being the dirtiest political fighters then trying to polish their halo when anyone does it back to them - the "wasted vote" is a classic, they employ the best (read worst) barchart geeks in the business. "How to Lie With Statistics" must be required reading for the disciples of Rennard. Otherwise I take them as I find them, because they're so different as individuals - indeed the concept of them being a party at all is a bit odd, it's like having a church for agnostics.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know the Lib Dems have been involved with some really nasty leaflets in various local elections - between which and their uselessness as stewards of Islington, this is why I don't vote for them in locals. But I like that looseness as a party, gets things a little further away from the party centralisation which has gradually wrecked British politics since Parliament's heyday.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

By heyday, you do of course mean when it was elected by property-owning males?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Not really, given it runs at least to the point where Chamberlain was forced out by Leo Amery et al.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Everyone with a firm party allegiance is convinced that the BBC is biased against their party - it's one of the reasons I trust the Beeb, or at least trust them more than any other major news source. Have you got any alternate reports of what Klegg said handy? Are there any errors in the direct quotation (well, except the 'affect' for 'effect' which could as easily be his speechwriter as their reporter)? If not, he's still guilty as charged.

And yeah, the Greens have always had an anti-science problem, I knew that from back when I was a FoE member in the mid-nineties. But hey, after all those times I've voted Lib Dem in spite of them being the most thoroughly wrong party on Europe, voting for the party most clueless on science won't be that much harder a bone to swallow. And again, Luddite as they are, it's not as if they're that much worse than the current mob (http://amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com/376286.html), (see also all the cosying up to creationists on Labour's watch). The main reason I had more faith in the Lib Dems on science was Lembit Opik's asteroid defence plans, but I can't see that getting very far under the current leadership.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Clegg's full text is on his site here. The exact words he used were "a vote for a party that probably won’t win a single MP is a wasted vote", which is rather different to saying that a vote for Labour/Lib Dem/Conservative/delete to suit in x constituency is a wasted vote (and under FPTP he'd be right everywhere except Brighton and possibly Lewisham).

FWIW I'm not a huge Euro-enthusiast myself, as beingjdc knows, though I have no time for Little Englanders. As for asteroid defence plans, I'd cheerfully send Lembit on a fact-finding mission to the asteroid belt in order to stop him from embarrassing the party further.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Where by 'embarrassing' we mean 'being the only party member other than Cable capable of getting a headline, even with the state of the other two parties right now'?

If he used the words "wasted vote" then he's guilty, simple as that. It's the politics of inertia, discouraging anyone who believes that things can change in a big way, even as the history of democracies shows repeatedly that they can.