Minimal

Little bit of politics

People say you shouldn’t talk about your political persuasion on a weblog for fear of alienating the majority of your audience. Screw that.

Throughout my life, I’ve voted Labour at every opportunity. Hell, I was a party member for over 10 years — one of the pre-New Labour bunch. The past few years, however, have seen me growing increasingly uneasy with the choice of where to put my cross on election day. The upcoming council elections are proving to be a tricky proposition. I’m considering breaking the habit of a lifetime.

I don’t think my values have changed that much, perhaps moving more towards pragmatism from my earlier idealist standpoint, but those of the party I support (supported?) seem to have changed beyond recognition. I’m now struggling to spot much difference between Labour and the Lib Dems, the only two parties with candidates in my area. Hell, at local level, I doubt there’s any real difference at all.

Maybe, I thought, a quick look at the respective parties’ websites would clear things up. Here are the results of my search:

Labour

The Labour In Your Area section sounded promising, but turned out to be auto-generated content with a few local stats sprinkled into a generic template. Indeed, the whole thrust of why I should vote Labour in Wansbeck (my local constituency) was an argument against voting Conservative and they’re not even standing!

Lib Dems

Couldn’t find anything locally-oriented in the basic navigation, so did a search for "Wansbeck". Nothing. Not one hit. Back to Google, then.

Wansbeck Lib Dems

It may have changed by the time you read this, but right now I’m getting no response from this site at all.

Overall, I’m possibly even more disenchanted with the whole thing now than I was before. I suspect I’ll end up voting Labour again, if only for the fact they’ve got more experience. I’ll just assume the two parties are otherwise equally incompetent. Politics sucks.