Good old democracy
As mentioned (before the Shuttle I might add again) Jamie Shaw of Labour won a seat back onto the District Council. The Labour post here sums up the voting. The Wyre Forest DC page adds in 9 non-counted results.
So 1425 ballots from an electorate of 4603, of which the winner received 544. So that's 38% of the vote and 12% of the electorate vote. So 61% of those voting didn't want Jamie to win (1% leeway on non-counts) and 69% of the electorate didn't care who represented them at the district level.
Excellent [sigh]
6 comments:
I think, like a lot of people, I don't see the point in voting because all politicians are equally inept and corrupt. You can vote for this lying, cheating hypocrit or that lying, cheating hypocrit. Gee, let me think…
On the other hand, I gather the BNP (A.K.A We Are Violent Racist Vigilanties And Proud Of It) have been doing quite well recently, so maybe I should vote not so much to get good people into office but rather to keep the nutcases and weirdos out.
While I agree you shouldn't vote on some lesser of two evils princple, or for that matter against someone (or again voting by Party) you should still vote and spoil your paper if you don't want to vote for any of the lying, cheating hypocrites.
If everyone who thought that did it at the next general election we may for the first time (maybe I'm not looking) have a vote where the number of uncounted ballots exceeds those counted and believe me that would scare the crap out of the politicians because it would no longer be a case of shrugging off a low-turnout to apathy, but a very British revolt.
It's easy to say all politicians are bad, Jamie's a hardworking honest councillor (he wasn't a very good teacher though). Do you know Gary Talbot? He pretended to shoot a plane down on his first day at the Royal Mail. Gary is 40 something.
As I've said elsewhere, I think it's important to distinguish between national politicians and local politicians. Although most are bad I think the proportions of better ones at the local level are higher.
As for Gary, only from the voting papers.
Looking at the MP expences debacle over 2009 I get the impression that Dr Richard Taylor stood out as amongst those MPs claiming the smallest amount of expences. I wonder if that will influence the way that the Wyre Forest Electorate will vote in the forthcoming General Election?
Hey Don, Happy New Year BTW.
I wouldn't be surprised if that didn't influence things ICHC would be fools not to remind people closer to the time. Also worth considering how many would vote that way as a protest against the main-stream parties.
Trying to look at it impartially has the Wyre Forest benefited from having an MP that isn't tied to any of the main parties? Has it hampered his voice in Parliament? What are everyone's thoughts?
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