You speak for yourself!
The fact that pie is currently ahead in the poll is representative enough for me.
What do we want? Pie!
When do we want it? Now!

Mark

Thank you for the image I now have of an alternative universe according to 404, where there is indeed a pie sitting in the house of commons. This well dressed pie is treated with great reverence, and has never made a bad decision.

It also smells great.

Incorrect. As you should know, the parties have safe seats, seats they know they will never win, and marginals. They tend not to contest the safe seats, nor do they contest those they know they will never win.

For example, Chelmsford is a Conservative safe seat. At general elections, we barely hear from the Tories (we may get a leaflet), Labour is generally very quiet p, and the Lib Dems (being the empty vessels that they are), make the most noise because they think they are in with a chance. In the safe seats, there happens to be a high proportion of people who vote for a party regardless of their policies. We clearly have a lot of Tory voters who behave this way here. Other places will have a high proportion of Labour voters, and so on.

It's the marginals you need to look at. All the parties will have profiled and researched these. What do people in the marginals want? What a their concerns? How can they be appealed to?

From those questions, political, parties will formulate their policies, their campaign, their strategies. This is why we won't see a Miliband, Cameron or Clegg in Chelmsford. They will be off easing the flesh in the marginals, using the phrases that the PR or marketing people have detained will best communicate with those people.

It is for this reason that the three main parties are so close to each other when it comes to presentation and policies. Remember the general election when JohnRedwood was Tory Leader? All three parties used pretty much the same language to the point where I was trying to play spot the difference. At this point, it's the personality of the leader that people will start judging on. Tony Blair won that one. Brown lost, not because of policy, but because he was just jot media friendly.Cameron, despite all his failings, was just better in front of a camera (and didn't use the word "bigot" with a live mic still on).

So, we'll get a lot of this over the next couple of years because the marginal seat voters want to hear this kind of stuff:
Immigration
EU Referendum
NHS Privatisation
Crime and Punishment

I also predict that they will all say much the same thing.

The system is broken, so much so, that a graffito I saw in St Albans in 1994 said "It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always wins", still applies.

That phrase existed long, long before 1994.

In any case your general point seems valid to me. There has been a 'gravity well' at the centre of UK politics for ages, probably due to the influence of undecided voters in marginal seats who by their nature reject more extreme policies. As a result all the major parties, at least in their election campaigns, have become incredibly homogenous. Of course it's also bred the habit of being incredibly inoffensive in election campaigns then when you get in power doing all the things you actually planned to do all along but were too afraid to put in your manifesto in case the swing voters didn't like it.

Essentially, elections have become largely pointless exercises. The majority of the population is ignored and the politicians don't actually intend to do half the things they say they're going to do anyway. And you know what? It's not their fault, it's our fault. As Paul says, there are hordes of people around who will vote for the same party for their entire adult lives regardless of what they are told, whether the actual candidate they are voting for is any good and regardless of whether they actually believe anything the party says. This is what has devalued the electoral process, even more than the politicians themselves. If tons of us don't actually care what we're voting for, why should they care about us?

And this is also what's driving apathy among the people who do actually care. Because they know they'll be massively outvoted by the 'lazy' voters who would vote for your proverbial shaved chimp if it was wearing the right colour rosette.

The only way to fix the system is to get rid of parties altogether. Change from an electoral system to a referendal system. We could now do that, with the technology we have available. But it's not in the interest of anyone who has any political power, so it's simply not going to happen.

A vote for pie, aside from indicating the perfectly sensible desire to have pie, essentially represents a vote for 'none of the above' which I suspect is indeed a fairly true reflection of the attitude of a large proportion of the population. Shame we don't have that option in real elections really.

Conservatives. As much as I think they'll [LIFTED] up the NHS, they're the only ones that understand we can't (as a country) get deeper and deeper into debt.
Sure we'd all like unlimited public funding, but that would burden the next generation with unmanagable debt. As much as service cuts suck, they are necessery.
Plus I'd like to be out of the EU (not the free trade zone, just the politics).

not allowed to vote at GE.

For what it's worth, I can't vote for any of the main parties that are up for election in England either.
There's only parties local to NI, and they lie just the same as any other party to get in to power then turn their backs on what they said and do just what they want once they get in power.

It's all just a load of old bollocks, really.

Mark

I agree that they will lie to get into power though parties change, though the Tories are reverting to the Nasty Party again. I hope that Labour moves to the left and the Liberals eject Clegg, and return to their long held values.

You know, I really really would like there to be a 'none of the above' option in a GE. Just once, as an experiment. I have a feeling it would massively boost the turnout and they'd fine more people expressed a vote for someone as well as those who voted for no-one.

+1. Oh, and a slice of pie please

In France people have been compaigning for years for "blank vote" to be recognised as a genuine vote instead of just "not voted". It will be the case from the next GE, which is great news.

The further to the left they move, the more they risk losing middle class votes. A risky stratergy for them.

They do not have to move that far. The Tories seem to be lurching ever further to the right. Into loony territory.

True enough. All they had to do was implement spending cuts and (quite rightly) blame Labour's debt mountain and the Eurozone.
Why they went messing with the NHS etc is beyond me. It's going to make it harder for them to win the next election.