General election murblings

[kaberett]

I have been saying for some time that I really need to look at voting statistics for my borough in order to determine whether I need to vote for my (mostly competent, keeps trying to pick twitter fights with Julian Huppert) Labour MP Andrew Slaughter in order to avoid a Tory, or whether Andy's sufficiently safe that I can vote LD or Green instead depending on policies and candidates.

As it turns out, there isn't enough record to make a good call because the borough's only bloody existed since like 2010 (in its most recent incarnation; it previously existed 1885-1918 and 1983-1997, but I'm not poking at boundary maps hard enough to work out whether that's meaningful for my purposes). Anyway, it looks like Andy's sufficiently safe that I can vote according to my politics + desire for candidates without risking getting a bloody Conservative in; which means I will wait for Green & LD candidates to be announced and then make my mind up. (For all Andy annoys me he does mostly respond plausibly to letters and I approve of his interactions with the NHS, so.)

Comments

[swaldman]

I am in a similar position, with a similar lack of information for a different reason: This has historically been one of the safest LD seats in the country, but I don't know whether any LD seats are safe seats now.

*looks up stats* eeeeek.
Turns out that in the last election Labour, SNP and Tory were all within 60 votes of one another here, in joint second place with about 10% each, behind a 62% LD behemoth.
OK, this is probably still a safe seat...

In that case I can.... er, try to find a party that I can stomach voting for... (that may be a lost cause. Depends how much the Greens have dropped their anti-science loony stuff since last time around. Maybe SNP if not.).

[liv]

I think to some extent Greens have got less anti-science, and to some extent, well, I'd rather vote for a party that's anti-science than a party that's anti-human. Need to stop killing disabled people and stoking up racism, then we can worry about science funding. And that feels a strange thing to say, as a scientist myself, but honestly, if I'm out of a job because the Greens are luddite about genetic manipulation, I'll cope.

[kaberett]

I know enough people I trust who've been working on Green science policy that I'm pretty confident it's now in a state where it at least wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me, but I really should have another look...

[stephdairy]

One rather wonderful thing about the Greeen Party of England and Wales (and there aren't many if you're me) is that all their policies are itemised at http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/.

(Note the Scottish Greens are a different party, and they don't seem to have their policies as clearly enumerated.)

(S)