Tag Archives: elections

After the Election

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The Artist – Charlie Uzzel-Edwards

Well, I voted. I then wrote about it several times. My views on compulsory voting (with musings on enfranchisement and the Chartists) tend to take me off message).

So do my thoughts on Police Commissioners and why we don’t need such as elected law enforcement personnel and no win-no fee lawyers. I deleted them.

So, I will treat this as third time lucky and try to stick to the results. The Green party seems to be doing well. Reform is doing even better. To me that means that people are more concerned with illegal immigration than they are with climate change.

OK, fourth time, as the third time was a bit dull.

The local Green candidate won. We also got an extra Green councillor in Peterborough, meaning we now have six. . So far, so good. There are 8 Peterborough First councillors and 9 Independents, plus Conservative, Reform, Labour and LibDem. It is a very fragmented council and nobody has overall control. At one time, according to  newspaper article last year 25% of sitting councillors had been elected for a party that was different to the one they were currently claiming to be in. That often happens where you have Greens, Independents and someone in  a party with a town name and “First” after it.

Nationally the Greens did quite well, despite the fact we are supposedly anti-semitic and Reform did even better because they are riding a wave of populism.

And that is a summary of politics in England today – the big winner is a party led by a man who accepted a £5,000,000 gift from a businessman who wants nothing in return, is a friend of Donald Trump and has, several times,  been caught out for using anti-semitic and racist language.

In Wales Reform is going to be the second biggest party but in Scotland they did not prosper. The Greens won two seats in each country, which is a start.

Counting is still proceeding.

However, despite the shifts in power I don’t expect much will change, because they never do, The political climate will probably become less compassionate towards refugees, and to those with immigrant backgrounds, parties which promise a lot in opposition often fail to life up to the rhetoric when they come into contact with reality.

 

 

Elections

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I’ve been doing some work on a medallion this afternoon, and getting absolutely nowhere. The more research I read, the more interested I became, and the slower the writing. It’s now taken me two days to write 300 words, and a hundred of them are lifted from something else I wrote on a similar subject. They aren’t exactly the same, but they only took ten minutes to adjust.

While I’m doing this, of course, I’m not able to write other things, which is annoying. Of course, I was born angry and have continued that way, so no matter what compromise I have to make, it will always be irksome.

We have elections tomorrow. (Actually, it has gone midnight, so we now have elections today). It has been billed as a fight between Reform and the Greens. These are both quite new parties and it is a surprise that they seem to be the top contenders. Traditionally the party in power does badly so Labour is in a slump and the Tories, after years spent being unable to tell what they want to do have landed at the bottom of the pile with no hope and no direction.

That leaves the Liberal Democrats, the eternal bridesmaids.

In Scotland and Wales there are other parties and elections, which I have no real knowledge of, and in Northern Ireland there are no elections this time round.

The choice for me is easy. I decided to start voting Green some years ago and I will keep voting for them. I’ve never had a great interest in politics and learned years ago that they are all pretty much the same. It’s not the party that I have the most confidence in, but the one which I dread least.

The bottom one is meant to be a mole.