Thursday 7 May 2015

Polling Day: Spoiling The Ballot Paper

We arrive at polling day after what has to be one of the most lacklustre and uneventful election campaigns in recent memory despite that the result is too close to call. Here we agree with Scribblings From Seaham that it has "felt to be an interminable farce of a general election".

With a deep reluctance to deal with issues which matter to voters, a lack of policies of any substance and a largely staged television campaign with a reliance on pointless stupid gimmicks is it any wonder that 1 in 4 voters have yet to make up their minds by polling day.

I'm one of those 1 in 4 and when I began to write this blog piece on why, I realised I was repeating many of the points I had made 5 months ago. Here I wrote:
Voting for the Tories - a party that has consistently betrayed its country, its members and its voters - is somewhat nauseating and is something I've never done before. This blog has never really forgiven the Tories for Maastricht and particularly the membership of the ERM. To vote for them would take a Herculean effort and the intake of industrial quantities of intoxicating substances.
And
Then there's UKIP. Yet it has been increasingly this blog's view that under its current leadership UKIP is detrimental to Eurosceptic cause - a party which has also performed copious u-turns within a very short space of time on the whim of its leader.
More damaging is UKIP remains largely a single issue party but instead of being anti-EU it is now anti-immigrant and is being described as such. By reducing EU membership solely down to an aggressive stance on immigration, toxifies the debate, limits itself to dismissing an exit strategy which could actually win us a referendum and leaves itself very exposed to being outflanked by Cameron on Article 48.  
Perhaps if I lived in a marginal Tory seat then I would have to grit my teeth and vote Tory for the first time to ensure a referendum. But I don't. I live in a seat where Tory PPC/MP "Lazy Vaizey" has his votes weighed not counted. How I vote won't make any difference to the outcome, a situation common among many voters.

With UKIP, despite that my local candidate is very good, I cannot endorse a party which is helping us to lose the eurosceptic argument with YouGov now reporting a 12-point lead for the "inners", up two points since April.

So unable to vote for any of the options available it's for the first time in a General Election that I have spoiled my ballot paper (see above) and I'm not the only one.

I simply can't wait for the whole charade to be out of the way to see if the Tories will win an overall majority. If so we get an EU referendum and then the real work starts.

4 comments:

  1. With UKIP, despite that my local candidate is very good, I cannot endorse a party which is helping us to lose the eurosceptic argument

    Is it really doing that TBF or is it just that the party needs help in achieving it's goals?

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  2. Boo Hoo , . Poor you . Our collective heart bleeds for you . Meanwhile others are out doing something , trying to get rid of the libLabCon (EU) shit .

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  3. The people of Fylde voted for the blue rosette and returned the man who was all over the papers fourteen months ago and whose behaviour at the declaration this morning showed him to be a very ugly little man. The average voter is brain dead.

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    1. PS: This is the first time for a while that I haven't spoiled my ballot paper.

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