British Election
 

May the.... I've forgotten.

Three distinct parties from the right, left and... right.

Clear policies focusing on key issues of.... pensions?

Important global issues such as the environment being tackled by.... the Liberal Democrats.

Who's Gordon Brown again?

Why are we voting? Why is Jeremy Paxman on coke?

Um, yeah.

In Italy too. Must be contagious. I wish we had some here.

Berlusconi going is wonderful news for democracy in general, the man was a throughly corrupt quasi-dictator who should have has ass thrown in jail for a decade or two, might get that smarmy look off his ugly mug.

All i'm hoping is the lib dems gain real ground, they're the party of difference and innovation, the tories are running a crappy scare campaign and labour mostly seem to be arguing that they're not as bad as the tories. Don't remind me about the coverage, total circle jerk disconnected from reality.

Cheers from across the pond. We feel your pain.

Well, it's election day. I hope all you Brits are going to utilise your freedom of speech. I voted for the Liberal Democrats. Twice.

ditto on that, pratically everyone I know here voted libdem, fingers crossed they make some serious gains.

If all you hang out with are Liberal Democrats, then of course practically everyone you know voted for liberal democrats.

This is the same mistake the American Media made when they got blindsided by the Bush Victory.

Which partisan faction is Tony Blair with again?

Labor

Well that's the thing, many of them are ex labour, some would've been green or socialist but decided libdem would be more useful. There is that factor involved but not all that much, a lot of labour's traditional supporters are pretty pissed, the real factor here is that labour is now seen as centre-right leaving the lib dems as the only credible left-wing party.
We'll see soon enough.

Election
 

It's an election free household in my house tonite.Have had my fill of all these Fuckwit politicians..Beer in hand,Headphones clamped on and Led Zepp giving it all they have got.Fuck em all

So the brits are holding their noses and voting for the lesser of three evils. Welcome to the club.

Blair won, but apparently with a loss of seats in parliament.

A hell of a loss, over 100 seats wolf. Well not really richlevy, we have real 3rd parties here, lib dems garnered about 23% of the vote overall and 59 seats, that is partly due to disaffected voters who didn't want to vote blair.

My town, Libdem for eight years, was taken back by tories last night. Young tories (english speaking hitler youth) trashed the town centre in 'celebration'... 'youthful high spirits' the local tory media described it. Here we go again.

I give Blair six months. Any advance on that...?

The Daily Show had a great segment on the British elections last night, comparing video clips of a question-and-answer session given by Blair before the election--in which he was yelled at, called a liar, and even the moderator gave him some flak--compared to our American "town hall meetings," where only approved questions get asked and half weren't even questions, they were just statements of how great Bush is.

Okay, so what's a Tory? I presume the meaning has changed somewhat since my last use of the term referred to American Colonists who supported the crown and were often borderline traitors ...

In modern political terms Wolf, a Tory is a Conservative Party supporter/member , traditionally the right wing of English party politics. So Tory=Conservative.

Historically the word defined politicians against change in a variety of settings, and I believe they were royalists, but that is now linguistically redundant. In fact its now difficult to identify a serious political difference between Labour and Tory since New Labour has moved to the centre-right and Conservatives are already there. To paraphrase Princess Diana, the middle ground is rather crowded at the moment.

It leaves the Liberal Democrats, an (amalgam of disenchanted old Labour and and even older Liberals) to occupy the now vacant left wing position. They were for instance the only party anti the current war/conflict/whatever you want to call it. Many formerly Old Labour supporters (myself included) have changed allegiance from Labour to LibDem but its more complicated than that. General loathing of Blair has also caused many Labour voters to temporarily switch allegiance as a protest vote. Some will return, many won't. In today's press his membership is calling for the swift removal of Blair as the albatross around the neck of the party, so this will prove interesting.

This might be an interesting term, labour is weak enough now that all the shit-stirring oldskool left-wing MPs that Blair could safely tell to go fuck themselves are now needed and the LibDems as well, we might even see electoral reform that would make the LibDems a very serious contender in the next election.