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250 thoughts on “Voting Tree

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  • Abe Rene

    But I thought the BNP liked white Aryans. Well, perhaps not liberal-minded ones.

    Surely UKIP liked Maurice Chevalier, so long as he sang in English.

    And don’t bankers who vote Tory go for fox furs in a big way? Not to mention minks, Rolexes, Rolls Royces ..

    Surely New Labour loves Iraqi government ministers. Think of those statements in favour of the Iraq war.

    For the Green party to hate Jeremy Clarkson when he put ‘Al Gore is right’ stickers on his car would be downright ungrateful.

    The Lib Dems, apparently, don’t hate anybody – but wait, Craig Murray is a Lib Dem, and some people might suspect him of having an aversion towards Jack Straw, George Bush, and a few other potentates.

    Not an easy one.

  • Abe Rene

    Here’s a serious question for Lib Dem party members. If we get a hung parliament, which looks possible, will the Lib Dems do a deal with Nulab, or with the Tories?

  • Craig

    Abe Rene

    I suspect we might see a Blairite/Tory alliance. They have much more in common.

  • Anonymous

    LOL.

    Simplicity acknowledged, it’s a pretty good summation of what ones vote will actually mean.

  • Abe Rene

    Craig

    If I read you correctly, will the Blairites in the parliamentary Labour party defect to the Tories en masse, or form their own party and do a deal with them?

  • Arsalan

    The next one should be, “Do you hate Afghans” with a yes leading to liberal democrates and a no leading to “vote spoil”

  • V ronsky

    You missed a box:

    Do you secretly only value democracy

    where the vote is likely to support

    your own position (for example you ——- YES—-> Lib Dem

    would not support a referendum

    on Scottish independence)?

    |

    |

    NO

    |

    SNP

  • Anonymous

    Abe Rene

    The BNP hate whites too. They sant to use them to gain power then subjegate them.

    And they also hate each all other members of the BNP, each and everyone of them are waiting for a chance become the leader by deposing the one above them.

  • Clark

    Yes, I’ve been speculating about a Labour / Tory alliance, too. No mention in the mainstream, and it’s often what the mainstream leaves out that proves the most significant.

    But maybe the fox hunting issue will keep them forever divided. And of course that’s far more important than war, economy, etc…

  • Clark

    Arsalan,

    your 12:39 PM comment isn’t fair, there are plenty of LibDems opposed to the war in Afghanistan, Craig included. And hasn’t Clegg suggested an early end to that war?

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    DO YOU HATE REFUGEE CHILDREN IN DETENTION CENTRES?

    |

    DO YOU HATE FEES FOR FINAL YEAR STUDENTS?

    |

    DO YOU HATE CONTROVERSY OVER FAITH SCHOOLS?

    |

    DO YOU HATE GOVERNMENT LEANING ON SCIENTIFIC ADVISORS?

    |

    THINK ABOUT VOTING LIBDEM

  • ingo

    merely proof that the ineptness of the public when it comes to politics has reached all parties and their supporters.

    Viva Independents.

  • Vronsky

    Reading the Herald, Suhayl? Naughty. Did you smuggle it out of the shop hidden inside a copy of Playboy?

  • Jen

    I think the Jeremy Clarkson question is the logical slip-up. It should be more along the lines of, “Do you hate car owners”

  • Vronsky

    “DO YOU HATE FEES FOR FINAL YEAR STUDENTS?”

    In Scotland the LibDims, in power with Labour, had the opportunity to remove university fees. Instead they moved them from the start of the course to the end and gave them a different name. The fees were eventually abolished by the SNP. Since then, the Herald ‘newspaper’ has run a daily headline about the ‘crisis in higher education funding’ but the policy has stayed in place. If the Lib Dems are again co-opted by Labour to form a government in Edinburgh, you can be quite sure that fees will be re-introduced.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Yes, I know, Vronsky. I was really referring to the UK parliament. Some people in England seem to think that minority govt/ coalition govt spells the end of the world as we know it. I’m merely attempting to illustrate that across Europe, it has been the norm rather than the exception.

    Btw, it occurred to me, re. the ‘Special Branch (allegedly) attempt to recruit Muslim spies at Scottish Airports story, that instead of introducing themselves as,

    “Hello. My name is Bond, James Bond,”

    it perhaps would be more like:

    “Salaam alaikum. My name is Plod, PC Plod.”

  • Vronsky

    “And although one may not agree with everything in this piece”

    Sure, but Kenneth Roy has been writing with great gusto for people like Newsnet Scotland, Caledonian Mercury, Scottish Review, Scottish Left Review – the internet MacSamizdat that is springing up as a reaction against the Herald/Scotsman (= Pravda/Isvestia) block. He sounds like a man who has just had both hands untied from behind his back. Not for nothing are they worried about the CyberNats.

  • George Dutton

    “In Scotland the LibDims, in power with Labour, had the opportunity to remove university fees.”

    The lib dems also voted to keep prescription charges in Scotland.

  • mike cobley

    Suhayl – I gotta say, I felt a flicker of sympathy for El Gordo in his open-mic plight. But I also feel that the honesty he displayed inside the car should have been expressed to Mrs Duffy with the cams rolling. I think it would have been entirely possible for him to politely but firmly disagree with her position and to explain why, without it getting ugly. Brown was too accustomed to the ‘dont-ruffle-voter-feathers’ dictum, which is basically dishonest.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Yes, I know, as I’ve written on other threads, actually I agree entirely, Mike. In many ways, Brown made his own bed and dug his own hole. I posted the link to the Roy article not so much as an apologist piece for Brown but largely because of Roy’s powerfully-penned ‘alternate take’ on immigrants.

  • Abe Rene

    Suhayl

    (a) Singling out Muslims at airports to give them a hard time, and then ask them to become informers, sounds like a very stupid idea, unless of course a sufficiently large cheque is involved. But I would insist on a five-figure sum. What do they I am, cheap? Not being a Muslim might be a slight problem for me, of course.

    (b) Jack Straw loves immigrants. Look how he helps them in Blackburn, dines them at elections and how they vote for him in turn. Of course the food has to be provided by non-party members, or someone might accuse him of Treating, and it would never do for the Minister of Justice to be a party to such works unless they were totally deniable.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Abe

    a) Ha! Absolutely! Five figures at the very least!

    b) I know what you mean. I really meant that it’d be really powerful if someone (and I don’t mean via the sort of transnational corporatist argument deployed by corporatist Republicans in the USA when faced with their own backlash against the importation of mass cheap labour to enhance their profits, the answer to which is that workers need to stick together and force up wages and conditions for all) actually came out and stated loudly and clearly that (whichever cohort of immigrants is current at a particular time; right now it’s East Europeans):

    Immigration into Britain is a good thing and immigrants deserve our respect (and we, theirs) and that actually they/we come to WORK not to scrounge and that they/we actually CREATE jobs not take ’em off us and that they/we make life on this sceptred isle more exciting in every way and that it’s been happening for hundreds and hundreds of years (fellow-blogger, Anno, the Huguenot descendant; Michael Howard’s Jewish Romanian parents; my pal who owns a florist’s shop down the road, my barber, my optician, Boris Johnson’s Ottoman great-grandfather; the very French-named Nigel Farage’s ancestors; me; our gracious host’s wife, etc.).

    It’s got zilch to do with Sir Jack of Blackburn.

    It’s got everything to do with pointing-out the emperor’s clothes, distraction from the real sources and machinery of power and wealth and the currying of visceral hate.

  • Abe Rene

    Here’s a possible scenario that could occur after 6th May:

    1. Hung parliament; the Lib Dems get about 100 seats and the Tories and Nulab are nearly equal.

    2. Immediately after the result, the Blairite section of the parliament labour party do a deal with the Tories. They don’t defect wholesale since that would antagonise their constituents, but they form a ‘special section’ which exempts itself from the Nulab whip. Jack Straw joins this Blairite-Tory axis.

    3. The Blairites are expelled from the Labour party, but most of them are not particularly worried about it and spin their decision to their own constituents as a ‘principled decision’ along the lines of the SDP in the 80s.

    4. Tony Blair returns to the UK, to cement the special relationship with the USA. He and family eventually emigrate to the USA to become US citizens, and he is photographed singing ‘The star-spangled banner’ with tears streaming down his face.

    5. The Brownite Labour party is driven into the wilderness with the LibDems, their analysts predict for 100 years. Some of them can’t stand the thought and cry ‘An eternity, an eternity! How can we endure such endless punishment?’ The LibDems reply ‘No sweat, we’ve done it and are getting stronger all the time (smirk)’.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Tee-hee! I like the vignette of Number 4 especially!

    Oh, the other thing I’d really like to hear a major politico say at election-time is:

    Why, in the name of Lady Godiva, Ilkley Moor and the Highland Fling, does every election this side of the Napoleonic Wars one way or another have to end-up being about ‘immigration’ and the Bogey-Man?

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