Voting systems

Due to the hung Parliament the question of how we vote has been cropping up with each Party offering a new system that in no way favours their own Party over the others. What's on offer or what could be offered? I'll give a run-down of the types and their pros and cons. What I won't be dealing with is the process of voting, the boundaries, or getting people out to vote. This is about how the people vote, how clear it is to them and how clear the result is. These are the main choices on offer.

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God of War Collection and God of War III review

Yes Game were doing both the collection and GoWIII at a reduced price which was cheaper than the 'trilogy' offering of exactly the same games in a cardboard sleeve; so I bought them both.

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Anarchy in the UK

Four days since the General Election and we still don't have a government, there are riots on the streets of the major cities and mass looting... yeah course not no-one's really noticed yet.

The Queen is still in charge and the Prime Minister is still the Prime Minister. The councils are still doing what they do, the police are still working, the hospitals, the fire service all still functioning.

So the big story is oooo what will the markets think, will the pound drop in value, blah blah. Yep once again it's the financiers who decide things and there's nothing we can do about it.

Our Wyre Forest MP

So yes we've reverted to the blue and now have a Conservative MP in charge, which will certainly play well with our Conservative County and Conservative District councils, but might not be much use if we end up with a Lab/LibDem shared government.

As is sadly the norm our new MP came in with only 63.1% of the voters not wanting him and is thus the least disliked of all those who stood and therefore the winner.

The General Election result

So an hour this morning of both the BBC and ITV drumming their fingers and going um. As of this minute 622 of 655 seats have declared, the current leading Party being the Conservatives with 292 seats. As they need another 34 seats for an overall majority and there are only 33 left baring any recounts we've a hung Parliament.

If the Conservatives go cap in hand to the Liberal Democrats (currently 52) they can have their majority, but that's unlikely. Trouble is that as it stands even if Labour (251) and the LibDems join forces they still need another 23 seats between them to form a majority.

So if the the Lab/LibDem can't gain those 23 seats it's the rise of the minority parties. If the Conservatives manage to pull in all 33 undeclared they only need to get one of the "others" on board to tip them over into a majority.

Gosh isn't this exciting?

Non-inheriting CSS?

Something I must have come across in the past but it's just hit me again is the way CSS class sometimes seems to suddenly stop applying to an entire block of text for no apparent reason. To take a simple code snippet imagine two classes .bold{font-weight:bold;} and .red{color:red;} and the code as:

<p class="bold">Some text and <span class="red">some red text</span> and some more text</p>

When displayed it should appear as:

Some text and some red text and some more text

and it does, note that all the text is bold including that in part in red. Now instead of using a span element turn it into a block element such as another p


<p class="bold">Some text and <p class="red">some red text</p> and some more text</p>

and it returns the following:

Some text and

some red text

and some more text

Sadly the Google editor keeps reinterpreting my code into div elements but the principle remains. I found this out using an ul element in a p element. Now if I used a div element it seems to work correctly except I don't want a division I want a paragraph of text with a list and I want the whole paragraph in bold.

So far that means closing the paragraph before the list and reopening it after and applying the class style to both paragraphs and the list, which is a tad annoying.

The new government

I try not to be biased here and I'll try to stick to that as I discuss what the outcome of the General Election could be. First off I really do hope we have a hung Parliament. Despite the fear-mongering from both the Parties and media I think that a shared Parliament would be closer to the democratic decision of the people via the vote.

Trying to plump for one party over another is difficult, to be blunt I don't like any of them. At their higher reaches all of them seem only to pay lip-service to the ideals of serving the public and concentrate more on retention of their own power and furthering their own agenda.

So if the Conservatives get in will we return to the 'halcyon' days of Thatcher with private interests trumping public ones? If Labour retain power will it be the status quo a steady erosion of personal liberties performed ironically to protect us. If the Liberal Democrats get in what will they do? Will it be the same as the early days of the Labour regime when they couldn't shake off the feeling that they were still the opposition party and acted as such?


I don't know however the one thing I do hope for and having shared this with others to peals of laughter and applause and much "God that would be so good" would be for whichever Party comes out on top to do so without their leader having failed to win over their own constituency.

As my friends said it'll never happen, but it would be so good.