befogged

So, today’s the day. I left the house early and was at the polling station at 10 past 7 this morning, just in time to interrupt a hopeful tea run by one of the overseers.

I’ve really enjoyed the build-up to this election. Perhaps because it’s a more close run thing than the most recent few, everyone I encounter seems to be more politically engaged than normal. I’ve discussed politics with colleagues, family and friends in much greater depth than is normal, and frankly I’ve loved it.

Some of my fondest memories are of weekend mornings when I was a teenager. Mum often had a lie-in at the weekend, but I inherited my Dad’s larkish tendencies so would often be up before she was and would make Dad (ok, I wasn’t quite as larkish as he was when he was commuting to London every day!) a cuppa when I got downstairs. If we were in the mood, we’d sit at the kitchen table with a cuppa and put the world to rights. As with religion, my parents never actually specified a preference outright - the emphasis was all on questioning, researching, discussing, and coming to my own conclusions.

When I hear of parents being outraged at their offspring’s political preferences, I feel so incredibly grateful to my own parents for encouraging in their children the open minded, intellectually curious approach to life that they’ve always taken themselves. I know that they would never think worse of me for the choices I make, though I suspect they’d be disappointed if those choices weren’t fully thought through or were expressed dogmatically.

They’re voting in a Tory stronghold, as ever (hello, bit-of-Lincolnshire-near-Thatcher’s-birthplace!), but things are a bit less certain in my own constituency. The red and blue teams have both held it in recent memory - there’s just a few thousand votes between them, and turnouts have been low at the last few elections. The Liberal Democrats have been gaining share of the vote steadily over time, but while it’s not as forlorn a hope as in some areas it’s still only around 14%, and there were conservative gains at the more recent MEP elections.

So the question that always arises in these circumstances is whether to vote tactically (and that goes so far against the grain for me that I’ve had sleepless nights at the mere thought that it might be held to be necessary). If you care, and I do, it hurts to be torn between ‘preferred candidate’ and ‘dear god, don’t let that bugger in’. I hope that whatever happens we’ll be a step closer to electoral reform and proportional representation, which would hopefully end the dilemma so, so many people face of whether to vote tactically or from the heart. One way or another, though, I’ve done my bit for the democratic process - all I can do now is see how it all plays out.

I have pizza, dips, cake and pear cider.

Bring it on!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.