What, is there an election coming up soon?

I’ve been meaning to write rather more about the upcoming General Election, but don’t seem to have had time. First a few observations about the current government and how they were elected last time …

Labour got 41% of the vote and picked up two-thirds of the seats, LibDems got about 18% of the vote and only got about 50 seats (less than 10% of those available). I guess this is what happens when you have a very polarised electorate. If those seats were won in proportion to the votes cast for each party, then we would have had: Labour 282, Conservative 221, Liberal Democrats 128 and a hung parliament.

I watched the edition of Question Time yesterday evening, where the same studio audience asked questions to the leaders of the three major parties. It was actually quite interesting:

• Charles Kennedy didn’t really get a hard time from the audience and received the only really heartfelt rounds of applause. This may be due in part to the fact that his party have not been in goverment recently and as such no-one really hates them;
• Michael Howard: How anyone trusts this man I don’t know. What is becoming clear is that ‘New’ Labour and Conservative policies are actually converging more than it might seem at first glance. This is not a good thing.
• Tony Blair: Handled the questions, some of which were very aggressive, pretty well. One of the audience pointed out that he is a good politician, but not a good leader, which is an interesting observation. The audience got a lot of mileage out of his general discomfort over Iraq.

So, who to vote for? Well, I’d decided quite a while ago anyway and yesterday’s Question Time really just reinforced my opinions (good and bad) about all the main parties: Labour have broken promises on so many issues (tax, top-up student fees etc.) and the Conservatives don’t really look like much of an alternative. I’ll be voting Liberal Democrat, again, which probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone; interestingly, this seems like the “party of choice” for the huge majority of reasonably well-read, aware, geeky folk. Various (admittedly statistically-unsound) straw polls of similar individuals shows a LibDem rating of over 70%, with a higher proportion of “Others” (particularly Green) than in the wider electorate.

In our constituency, it seems likely that Evan Harris (LibDem for Oxford West and Abingdon) will be re-elected: he was doing his rounds last week and I had another short chat with him. I promised him that I’d do my bit of advocacy on my weblog … so here it is, Evan, if you’re reading it! As for the election as a whole, no-one is expecting anything other than another Labour victory, which is rather depressing. Their majority will likely be reduced somewhat, the main question will be who gains these lost seats.