Brits - Who are you voting for in the European Elections?

wow this Tory is a supreme cock

And now he's quoting Dr Seuss WTF?!!

i hope people now wake up and realise that is the sort of wanker that IS the tory party and you dont want them in charge

I think he is mental even by the standards of the Tory party.

Farage still butthurt about the ballot fold

Hannan is a fucking twat.

Also, lol at UKIP supporters electing an Argentine-born Spanish accountant.

North West coming up

BNP CUNTS have won another seat, there's been an unofficial announcement and Griffin is grinning .
here's the official result

Griffin got in. And on a pretty small chunk of the vote. Fucking shite turnout.

Greens 5000 short of preventing it. As with Yorkshire fewer votes for BNP than in 2004.

Really hope when he turns up in Brussels they tell him to fuck off home.

Griffins speech live now on Sky News

lots of people have turned their back on him and are leaving with just the journos left

fuck one Griffin

As a Yorkshire resident, I'd like to apologise for having 100,000+ cunts living in my constituency.I'd gladly throw them into the North Sea.

*cough*

When he rolls up in Brussels they should send him back where he came from.

― Scrum of the Earth (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 6 June 2009 19:59 (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

good luck england with your right wing paradise

blah blah had one of those for last 12 years blah blah

Griffin being interviewed there on Today. Incoherent, blustering buffoon: I'm confident he and his scummy pal will make total, total cunts of themselves in Europe as they do elsewhere.

But, as Stet says, another key set of cunts here are the ones who didn't even haul their arses down to the polling station. My next-door neighbour, for instance. Sure, most British politicians aren't exactly an inspiring bunch. But look what happens when you shrug and give up. Not sure what we do about this, but I sincerely hope this is a wake-up call for a whole heap of silly fuckers.

Point being made now on Today that the BNP's share might be up but the actual number of votes has fallen. Which is small comfort, I guess.

(ie "actual number of votes cast for the BNP")

Just typed out that same point having heard it too. I think a lot of those silly fuckers probably won't care that they've just passively elected some comedy Nazis tho.

Problem here is that, having failed to make a counter-case, I'm not sure how productive it is for "mainstream" politicians to get a sanctimonious group-wank going and castigate hundreds of thousands of voters for being evil and racist. However true that might or mightn't be.

on Radio5 this morning, Campbell compared his election record to Oswald Moseley's, to which Griffin replied "I like to see it much more like Keir Hardy winning his first seat for Labour" Radio v v close to going out the window. So fucking angry right now.

Problem here is that, having failed to make a counter-case, I'm not sure how productive it is for "mainstream" politicians to get a sanctimonious group-wank going and castigate hundreds of thousands of voters for being evil and racist. However true that might or mightn't be

Yes, exactly: if non-voters are going to use the "disenfranchised by shit politicians" excuse as opposed to "too fucking stupid and lazy to go to the polling station" then the last people they're going to listen to are those politicians. Hell, it'd annoy me if they started up with that.

It'll be interesting to see how the debate goes over the next few days, though: whether the not-interested-in-politics brigade carry on as if nothing's happened, or whether a couple of them perk up and think: "Shit."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCb2Le3wtIk

^^^Looking forward to the "devastating satirical piece" from Brooker in the Guardian...

Woody Allen otm

Curiously I'm optimistic about the future in that it's the sort of result which will focus minds on both the left and the right in dealing with the fascist threat. Difficulty is knowing just how much of it is a temporary protest vote against the Westminster machine and how much is a genuine swing to the far right. Some comfort in knowing that their actual numbers fell last night despite their share going up.

Where it leaves Brown, I don't know. At the moment leading Labour is such a poisoned chalice that they'll probably stick with him for better or worse. Though anything may happen over the next few weeks from someone crossing the floor to another cabinter minister resigning or even Brown throwing the towel in.

whether the not-interested-in-politics brigade carry on as if nothing's happened, or whether a couple of them perk up and think: "Shit."

It'll be the latter, but it will be precisely two people.

None of this is helped by interviews like Harriet Harman's on Today this morning, continuing to insist this is a protest vote over expenses. It's exactly that sort of attitude, that the Government are as knee-jerk as the would-be voters that would be influenced by those sort of media storms, that turns off voters for two reasons; firstly, those who expect more and better of our politicians and secondly those who, on that basis, are upset because said politicians haven't knee-jerked with them on whatever their particular issue is this week.

I still think, however, the fundamental issue with voter apathy is the almagamation of NuLabConLibDem into one identikit conglomerate - with nothing to choose, essentially, policy-wise between them it's difficult to criticise people for failing to make that choice. (I'd argue also that this is why Cameron is perceived to have no policies: he probably does, but they're not sufficiently different to NuLab to amke an issue of.) It's also the key, arguably, to mobilisation of the minority electorate just because they're saying something different and do represent and actual choice as opposed to a different shade of the same.

Yeah essentially people will snatch at crass, hateful solutions for their problems rather than "everything's going fine the public just don't realise that yet".

Last years of the Major government was also full of ministers incapable of analyzing what was wrong beyond "stupid people just don't get it the policies are fine".

Which is made more ironic by the real possiblity that if the disaffected voter could specify what policies he'd like the gov to pursue he mightn't actually want them to be different. Perhaps a big chunk of the electorate is like a fractious child who's gonna keep throwing his tantrum until he falls asleep, no matter what solutions mom and dad offer him.

But still surprising that career politicians haven't worked out that it's not good to show contempt for the voters, no matter how justified that contempt might be.

I think I'm in sympathy with the sentiments of Tom Ewing today. People don't like being told what not to do, stop investing the BNP with such a "horrible mystique" and just treat them like any other fringe party.

I'm certainly not sure about the general worth of the "shock people into facing up to the enormity of what they have done (directly or otherwise)" line.

This is part of what I'm getting at I think. The BNP didn't poll all those votes from people who think of themselves as racist, calling the voters idiots after the fact = DOES NOT HELP

I'm afraid I shall be showing contempt for people who think that voting BNP is any kind of solution to anything. Sorry. 30 years of arguing the toss with these people has worn me out. I used to think I could win them over with reasoned argument but fuck it. Let them see how effective their BNP councillors are.

xpost

The situation for Brown is even worse than it was for Major, though. Throughout Major's tenure, he had to contend with a razor-thin majority which made it almost impossible to govern. Brown has a significant majority and yet he still can't manage any semblance of authority. I predict Brown will survive for the moment, because no one wants to risk a general election now, but that he will ultimately get pushed out in the autumn, when election fears become moot.

As for the BNP, all major European countries have managed to deal with situations where racist parties got double what the BNP got.

All key points by NV, but the reason the disaffected voter can't express what he would like to see is because he doesn't know. Worse still, he doesn't care. And I think the saddest part of it all is I can't think of a way in which politics can actually recapture that ground and involve people or excite them any more.

Completely agree with that but...I suspect most people don't want things to be very different. They'd like to be a bit better off, a bit more secure at work and in their homes and mostly in their heads. A political system that requires the unrealistic, like say an electorate full of philosopher-kings who read a broadsheet cover to cover every day, has got problems as a system. And I think it ought to be easier to adjust the system than adjust the electorate.

Great failures in politics begin with this: "if only people thought and acted differently to how they do". The horrible totalitarian successes of the 20th Century were based on a much more acute understanding of how people actually behave.

someone's probably said it already, but the lack of lib dem bounce is in a way the "bigger story" in terms of the next election.

quite chilling what ewing says re. flow of funds to the bnp from brussels. i don't get how we treat them as a fringe party when they have just won two seats in the european parliament. it'll probably make it just that much more 'acceptable' to vote bnp -- sure, not for nice chaps like us, but still.

i'm usually blase about the bnp, especially when they're used by labour as a bogeyman, like "if you don't vote for us it'll be 1933 all over again" bs. obviously it isn't 1933, and there's not that much you can do about the hard core of racists who will always be with us, but there's a danger they will gather momentum, and it... "diminishes us in the eyes of the world." rly tho.

There's been a massive element of complacency among all three parties that has allowed the BNP a way in. Mostly Labour's fault, they took their core support for granted, they assumed there would always be a working class power base in the North of England and that appears to have collapsed. It's difficult to see what Labour can do to fill that void.

But the other main parties haven't really been able to fill that vacuum, the Tories haven't quite got there, partly because they've been sitting there waiting for Labour to lose. The LibDems have been the de facto party of protest votes for so long they don't seem to know what to do now they aren't.

Who should people vote for, in ILX's opinion?

Geese

I had kind of braced myself over the days since polling for a BNP MEP, though it's still grim reading, and two is worse. I hadn't braced myself for UKIP being the second biggest party. UKIP + BNP + Conservatives = possibly most of the MEPs we're sending to Europe don't believe (we should be) in Europe. Which seems a bit sad and point-missing, somehow.

Greens were robbed with their twice as many votes gained as BNP and no new seats thing. Well, obviously not, that's just how it works, but interesting to be reminded that these things happen even under PR.

ah, here we have a bad use of the bnp's successes to score political points:

"A mess of stuff explains that insane drop, from the expenses imbroglio to Brown's failure to explain what he's in government to do. But make no mistake: if Labour were to follow the path favoured by his current opponents [i.e. Purnell et al], that disconnection would either remain, or get even worse (and elsewhere, needless to say, the BNP would continue to prosper)."

the article gets considerably more complicated after that, but still, not very helpful.

xpost

my region was: 3 con, 2 ukip (ffs), 1 lib dem, 1 lab.

i voted lib dem, out of no conviction whatsoever, but because it's a PR system, and better them than the tories. i have a lot more sympathy with labour in the abstract, but you know, but like indiana jones at the end of temple of doom, they need to be burnt in order not to be evil.

UKIP are going to be a massive pain in the arse for Prime Minister Cameron, aren't they? Assuming they don't disintegrate between now and then of course.

Tories bringing the mad lolz:

In an interview with Nick Griffin, BNP leader, the Today programme's John Humphrys called the BNP a "far right" party. It is not. It is "Labour With Racism", as Lord Tebbit memorably said recently. I fear the BNP may be here for a few years now. The BBC needs to find a more accurate way of describing them.

UKIP do nothing between European Parliament elections, really, and as an MEP you basically have to do a David Carradine if you want to get your name on the TV news.