UK Election: ILXit Poll

Streatham: will be voting as previously advised.

Hornsey and Wood Green

It's been a pretty safe Lib Dem seat the last few times.

wow, H&WG is #77 on the lib demz' hit list.

In the end it came down to a conversation I had the other night. Are you voting for the party or the constiuency MP. I believe that it should be the latter, but know it was actually the former.

So sorry Jezza, the X marked the Lib Dem box.
Islingtong Norf.

REVOLUTION NOW BAYBEEE!

Ahem.

close call and I could have gone green but sarwar will win, either/any way, it seems.

That's something I might need to check...

: (

Although I could have voted for a Megatripolis supported candidate 'Rainbow' George Weiss.

PS: When I lived in London (many years ago, in Streatham...what a great place?), Crouch End and Muswell Hill were already trendy.

Although I've voted for smaller parties before, I need to make sure the Tories don't get the swing, while the New Labour incumbent still goes loses.

xpost to dave--i just don't think you can describe what we have as democracy.

Mike, yes, Alan Simpson is probably the only reason why I would have voted Labour again, and I regularly curse the fact that he's not my constituency... BUT, why Lib Dems otherwise? I mean, one of the things I like about Simpson is his Old Left-ness, and I know that the Lib Dems are GREAT for civil liberties etc etc, but aren't they totally anti-Trade Union and pro-big business? How does skipping from an Old Labourite to a totally capitalist party work?

xposts

a vote to lib dem at islington south and finsbury. they were 7000 behind last time round, it'll be closer this time, will beat the tories at least.

chris smith was a decent MP but now he's retired and replaced by a lady who sent her kids to go to school in potters bar. i can't blame her really but still.

i am one of these, and actually i would like to change my vote now, you have made me rethink all this. voting for the libdemz was a bit silly given that i don't agree with many of their policies. i still want labour to get fucked of course, but the actual idea of a lib dem government appeals not much more.

Hurrah. S'not just me then. The Lib-Dems hate Trade Unions. Always have. I couldn't vote for a party that sees no role for organised employee representation and actively thinks it 'perverts' the marketplace. That's not, last time I checked, a terribly left-leaning policy.

or not, if they don't.

Small point that, but I can't say I agree with the thrust of the argument anyway. Universities were in a similar state prior to the change anyway; in that it mattered which university you got your degree from, same as it does now.

Finsbury and Islington South people - I was pleasantly surprised to see that Emily Thornberry, who ran up against bumbling Tory wacko Julian Brazier in Canterbury four years ago, was the Labour candidate there. She drove me into the middle of the country to interview (funnily enough) Chris Smith where we drank beer and ate black pudding sandwiches. I liked her and would have voted for her if I had the chance (far more than all my completely anonymous candidates including the Labour MP who I have never seen say or do anything ever). The party must rate her quite highly to give her that seat.

Missing premise: Number of graduate jobs.

Missing premise B: Graduates earn more on average because they are graduates.

I am dangerously close to agreeing with Political Pete on this one - I don't see that there's anything wrong with a large proportion of over-18s in education, but I do think that changing the status of the polytechnics was a mistake.

(I don't like Fife much either)

Why do you think changing the status was a mistake? It's really just a name. The only 'major' change I can see is that now, in Glasgow, people don't refer to Strathclyde as 'the poly', because the poly's now not a poly. I guess my point was that in the past, if you had a degree from Oxford, then that was not treated by employers in the same way as a degree from . I can't speak for employers, but surely this is much the same now. I mean, if you have a degree from Napier University, everyone certainly in the area knows that this is basically Napier College. Plus the papers publish a league table of the best universities every year.

And Fife is a run down skank hole.

I'm just an elitist, I guess. If the degrees from Napier really aren't as good as the degrees from Edinburgh or H-W, then why are they still degrees? It's not as if an A-level from Exam Board A is different to an A-level from Exam Board B.

I only did one A-level, but my understanding was that some were considerably harder than others... O&C for example? At least that's the way I understood it at the time.

green, hackney sarf and shoreditch. hovered for ages in the booth over green/lib dem.

it's a weird one: solid labour stronghold - in 2001 labour had 64% with lib dems and tories on 13 or 14% each and greens/other minorities 7ish i think - but rebellious old-labour backbencher brian sedgething has been mp for this area for like evah, and when he retired the other week he defected to lib dems. i haven't lived here long enough (only been here since september) to know if ppl here just voted for him cos they knew and trusted him or cos they're just lifelong labour voters or what. his replacement candidate is labour lapdog m3g h1ll13r. will ppl here take brian s's hint and go lib dem or do what they've always done cos that's what they always do? hmmmff. in the end, last time i couldn't vote for what i actually thought (was in shepherds bush and got scared into voting nu labour) so this time i did.

I have complex feelings about Fife, but a thread about the general election is perhaps not the best location to air them.

-- N_RQ (bl0cke...), May 5th, 2005 2:39 PM. (later)

Exactly the same for me. Lib Dem, Hornsey & Wood Green. I voted Labour in 92, 97 and 01.

The new bug got in in Tooting but he's an anti-war Muslim so I hope he'll do a bang-up job of representing the area. I do wonder whether Poles were mentioned on the doorstep.

I walked into the polling booth at 9p.m. yesterday with no more idea of who I was going to vote for than I've had for the past year or so. Our Local MP was (hopefully still is) Lynne Jones, who has stuck to her principles to the degree that the local party tried to de-select her not all that long ago. On the one hand, I felt she deserved my support. On the other hand, there hadn't been anything through the door from her that deviated from the party line. Although Tony Blair wasn't mentioned on any of her propaganda, it still felt like voting for the ID Card and Top-Up Fees party.

So, I didn't vote for her. I regretted it almost immediately, and if I could have snatched my paper back out of the ballot box and drawn a cross next to Lynne Jones's name I would have done. Unfortunately, they don't seem to like that sort of behaviour at the polling station.

I found/find myself in the strange position of hoping the person I voted for hadn't got in after all.

The BBC's results were much better last night. ITV's "faster" service seemed to consist of guessing the results from constituencies that hadn't declared yet. Cheating, in other words..

Oh yes, let's slag off Media Studies, because its an easy target, isn't it?

As one of those "prats" who did Media Studies (with English, fwiw) at a POLYVERSITY (OH THE HORROR!) I think I have some insight to offer into the merits of such courses. It wasn't the best course in the world, by any means, but it changed the way I thought, it broadened my horizons and it exposed me to a huge number of viewpoints that I wouldn't otherwise have encountered.

Its easy to knock Media Studies - it can be made, by those of a reactionary standpoint, to seem trivial and a Mickey Mouse course. The reality is that everything we hear, read, see, encounter has, at some point, been shaped by media. Media keep our society going. Knowing how they operate, and how they can be (and are) used to make us think in certain ways is vital to anyone who wants to keep some semblance of a less spoon-fed perspective (although I'd be surprised if any of us are entirely free from media influences).
More people should study this subject, not less. If not at degree level, then at GCSE level. This is one of the most important areas of study for the 21st Century, and as our lives become more fragmented the importance of looking into the nature of this fragmentation cannot be overstated.

Okay, it isn't strictly vocational. I agree that not everyone is suited to an academic degree. but I find the New Labour ethos that the only worthwhile education is that that gets you a job or a piece of paper to be reprehensible. Education shouldn't be measured in such terms. Its something much more fundamental than that. Otherwise let's just call it "vocational training" and dispense with any pretense that it could be otherwise.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony of talking about the value of an English Degree from a NEW UNIVERSITY and then producing a sentence like that one. They didn't teach us how to rant coherently. Perhaps they do at the proper universities.

i helped gain a 0.5% swing from the tories!