i'm getting quite excited about voting today, i think i've only ever voted once in my life before. will they have the party's name on the slip or just the candidate?

mind you, not one of the fuckers has knocked on my door in the build-up. i can only assume they all remember what i said to them just prior to the last general election.

refuse collection, hospital closure and a motorway link road appear to be the big issues round my way.

what about you?

No sod's knocked on our door either but when random people do i tend to scurry into Jehoviah's Witness alert and take up my usual postion behind the sofa.
Having spent a good week mailing out 18,000 anti-BNP leaflets i'll be particularly pissed off if they make any sort of headway tho i seriously doubt they will anyway.
Any party willing to tackle the Chav problem wins my vote (apart from our political enemies of course), the Labour candidate lives on our road apparently (the affluent part no doubt) so if he lets me down, i'll tell those little cretins to hang around outside his house and see how he likes it.

Well, I've just spent the day as a Presiding Officer and I can tell you that round our way the voters were obviously overwhelmed by apathy. We had a less than 25% turnout. Voters were telling us that they hadn't seen any canvassers and half of them didn't seem to know who or what they were voting for. They had two votes and lots of them seemed very surprised by this.

I voted by post about a week ago.

Much the same round my way....no political party selling their wares / shite. I too posted my vote on account of working away....not checked the news to see how its all going either...apathy is terrible isn't it....hay ho....

looks like the BNP are losing seats - ha!

Lib Dems too.

BBC coverage is shite - but Sky is worse.

Jeremy Vine is unbelievably crap at being Peter Snow

We've had Labour banging on our door at least once a week, never see 'em any other time. The tories just drop a letter somewhere near the garden and hedgehop down the road.

The 'Vote Labour' chap that came to the door last night was so wishy-washy on local affairs I almost didn't go - but as The Hairy Bikers was taken off for the snooker, I did my bit.

We didn't vote in London - but the coverage of the election was so tedious. I was listening to radio 4 during the night, but had to keep changing the station. 5 Live wasn't much better - but it wasn't entirely their fault as the results were so slow coming in. It must have been a real hardship posting for those reporters that were at the count at 3 am, in some god forsaken place like Bury or Gravesend. Do those people actually doing the count in some town hall or school gym get well paid? They should.

If nobody objects, this is what that a leading man from the (according to barmyrob) dreadful spiked group had to say about the elections: And the losers are...
I think it sounds about right.

But, again, Damon, they offer absolutely nothing - not even the possibility of an alternative 'politics' - instead, do they?
Not so much 'progressive' as nihilist as far as I can see, even if it's well written and in some ways persuasive.

Well, I regret to say that in Markyate they now have a National Front councillor.

And this is down to apathy because there wasn't even an election - just 9 nominations for 10 seats.

The NF had other candidates standing in Hemel but I'm pleased to say that they didn't come anywhere near gaining a seat. And one of the hangers on was barred from the Count for harassing a counting assistant.

Yes JB, they don't offer much. But I wouldn't call it nihilistic. They don't advocate the public ownership of the means of production (or whatever), but would it be any better if they did?

I thought the best bit was when he said (about the reletivly recent focus on local elections): ''The change came when the Labour left, out of power on the national stage, retreated to the councils and authorities, such as 'Red' Kens Gerater London Council, or David Blunkett's 'Republic of South Yorkshire' and set themselves up as bastions of socialism in Thacther's Britain.''

And to what Busy Girl said, it seems that Labour didn't even contest 40% of the council seats in England.
Why I'm not sure, but I heard someone on the radio say that they just didn't have any people in the area willing to do party work (or stand perhaps).

The NF got in in Charnwood, the borough I work for. One seat. Mind you, there was a big debacle this time last year when it emerged that the new mayor who was about to be sworn in had attended and spoken at NF meetings...

Think the BBC uses reporters from it's local TV and Radio stations ... btw constantly hearing about London on the 'national' news is tedious for those of us who don't live there

The people doing the count do get pretty well paid,actually.

I don't know where you live Jon, as you don't say on your profile page. But it would still be an ordeal if you were a budding BBC reporter that was sent to a count just around the corner from where you lived. But if as joaniecrumpet says, you get paid well enough - then that's fair enough - (I work nights too).
I might have some concern about who runs my local council, but I couldn't care less about who empties the bins in Manchester or Norwich.
And you wouldn't have heard much about London in this election coverage, as it was the only place not to be having an election.
I lived in Glasgow for a while once, and the number of times a day you'd hear: ''Scotland this'' or ''the people of Scotland that'' used to drive me to distraction.

Christ, a Londoner moaning about having to listen to media coverage concerning other parts of the country!

"I couldn't care less about who empties the bins in Manchester or Norwich."

Two words for you, love: Congestion charge. Couldn't give two shites whether or how much you lot have to pay to drive and park in that hellhole you laughingly call a city, but it doesn't stop us having to listen to you all bitching and moaning about it in the media. And before you come out with "I don't drive", there are dozens of your little parish pump issues that get shoved down our throats ad nauseam. As most of London's problems have been caused by too many people living in London, I reckon you've brought it all on yourselves and couldn't give a rat's arse.

I do, however, care about the BNP getting elected, even in Bishop's Fart, Somerset or some other "god forsaken" place. Who's emptying the bins matters if they happen to be fascists.

I was referring to the people who do the counting getting paid reasonably well. Now THAT's a tedious job. But you expect me to feel sorry for some BBC presenter having to stay up all night? It's their fucking JOB! I mean, it's hardly going down the flipping mines, is it?

Fair points - I wasn't being entirely serious. And yes London can be a bit of a hellhole in some respects, but that makes it interesting at the same time.
And it's true, we don't hear much about places like Rutland in the media, (though I do remember watching Rutland Weekend Television.)

So a bit of a distraction there by me.
But I found the whole election a bit uninspiring, that's all.

I saw a funny (ish) thing on the way to the polling station...

Click to view attachment

I too would be horrified to see sucesses for the BNP.
How much of a threat they actually are is open for debate. In this article, Nathalie Rothschild asks how a tiny party of far-right has-beens and cranks has been transformed into the bogeymen of British politics?
It's a fair question I think.
(Dogmatic and libertarian? )

Because they are fascists. Nathalie Rothschild needs to understand that simple truth, especially with the background she obviously has.

Nathalie Rothschild can make her own mind up on what she thinks of the BNP, or anything else, (I would say).

I just found this article of hers from last year that I hadn't read before. She says what she thinks about the new Holocaust museam in Jerusalem that she visited.

''Can you feel a Holocaust victim's pain? The emphasis on empathy at the New Holocaust History Museam in Jerusalem makes a visit emotionaly draining, but intellectually vacuous''

I get what she's saying, does anyone else?
People have their own opinions.

Yes, but I think that she's missed the point: museums nowadays invariably seek to create a multisensory experience that tries to put the visitor "into" whatever is being displayed. The Kobe earthquake exhibit at the Natural History museum and the Jorvik centre do exactly the same thing. No museum can explain in any detail the historical causes of an event. You have to go away and read to understand the how and why.

The Haus der Wannsee Konferenz in Berlin is by far the most moving Holocaust memorial I have ever seen.

http://www.ghwk.de/2006-neu/exhibit.htm

I only posted that article ''Can you feel a Holocaust victim's pain'' because of what Andy said. That she should see it his way, not as she wrote about the BNP.
There are probably people who would tell her she shouldn't write like that about the museum ''especially with the background she obviously has''

Bamyrob said the spiked people had nothing progressive to say, but compared to the way the forum talks about the BNP (in a rather dogmatic way I'm afraid to say) they sound very open minded.
So the BNP are fascists - how many divisions do they have?

'One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic' - J Stalin

Though not specifically talking about the Nazi's holocaust Joe had a point about human nature there dontcha think?