Anarchy

[bozo]

I don't really buy your answer on low voter turnout. Are you implying that the 70% that don't vote are contented with the status quo, having been made that way by Thatcherism )?

I'm saying that many of middle people (the silent majority they often refer to I suppose) have had their heads turned by a culture that now embraces transient share ownership as a means of gaining personal wealth. You see outside of what my pension company might do (over which I have little control) I genuinely believe that share ownership is something you do for the long term ... I WOULD invest in a company but only if I believed in their product, if I thought it was genuinely good and worthwhile and that the designers and company backing it were worth backing. Maybe it was happening anyway but it seems to me that Thatcher was instrumental in turning our entire culture to one of greed, where people buy and sell shares rapidly, where no one commits for the long haul to an idea or product. It's one of the reasons I refuse to own shares or if I am given them sell as quickly as possible.

Everything in society seems to be about money ... companies are cutting back on everything that involves money (outsourcing, offshoring, no training, CBT's rather than classroom when it is, no "play" kit in IT), tax is constantly going down and those things I value (the health service, education and armed forces) are starved of resources, even the Space Shuttles failed because of money as far as I can tell. This isn't a society I really want to be part of in some ways ... it just seems to be greed everywhere!

Do let me in on your friend's new strategy...sounds fascinating.

OK ... I suppose in a small way it's about no longer having a party to support (like you it seems I am old school Labour, I didn't necessarily like them all that much but I understood where they were coming from and realised that they were the party that at least gave a decent nod towards those values I held to be important. I now live in a Tory held ward and, obviously I could vote tactically (which essentially means voting LibDem) or I could protest vote ... I started off doing the first but lately, until recently, have doing the second choosing to vote for the Green party.

Then my friend (who is traditionally a LibDem voter but talks more like a Left Winger) said that, come next election, he would write to all the candidates of all the parties on the one (maybe two) issues he felt were important and he would then vote for the party he felt actually gave the answer he best liked almost regardless of other political factors. I like that idea and for me the two most important issues are the environment and education ... without the first we're broadly speaking fucked and from the second all good things come so it must be kept pure (which is why I am all so fired up on keeping those ID tossers out of science education and believe that all public schooling should be utterly secular).

So, if the Tories, actually had a better education policy that Labour I would (though it would pain me to do so) vote for them ... to me, in political terms, those are the only things that truly matter.

Kyu

Ok I won't flog the voter turnout any more, save to say you haven't altered my view.
Re. how to vote in your own constituency, I haven't voted for a long time, a conscious decision because I never get a socialist candidate, so I have refused to vote for the " best of the rest ".
However, at the next general election, as things are right now,if Labour persists in roling out id cards, I will vote for the party that will not. Civil liberties are being eroded at an alarming rate under the so-called international war on terror.