Be Excellent To Each Other

The Roman Party. Symbol: a Roman helmet. Slogan: 'Ave'.

I was tempted...

Here we had An Independence From Europe, BNP, Tories, English Democrats, Greens, Labour, Libdems, NO2EU, Pirate Party UK, Socialist Equality Party and UKIP.

There couldn't have been many places with Pirates running, could there?

We also had local councillor elections with just the main parties, LDs, Greens and UKIP. Yuck.

Salve, Caicilius!
Caicilius est in atrium!

No pirates on my form

Nope, wouldn't let her vote full stop.

She's registered to vote over here, has votes plenty of times since I've known her. Non-British EU citizens can't vote for general elections, but can definitely vote in all others. As far as she and I could tell it might've been due to moving recently, but AFAIK she sorted the paperwork. Bureaucracy is a German talent, after all.

(Yeah, she's not happy with the choice of parties over here, but then plenty of British people feel exactly the same.)

I am quite interested in some of the Pirate ideas. They've gotten places in Sweden and Germany. They're kind of similar to Green parties, with more focus on digital and civil rights, and they organise their parties over the Internet with electronic voting. Very strongly against the idea of career politicians as well, and see politics as a temporary civic duty like serving in a jury or something.

I dislike the Pirate Party types simply because of the horrific entitlement culture it represents.

"I should be able to have all this shit you spent money on for free! How dare you try to protect your intellectual property?"

Denial of voting rights for EU nationals happening up and down the country. Disgusting.

https://storify.com/sturdyalex/non-brit ... fy.co_rWA4

Similar here, and those bastard Greens. I voted mostly to displace the idiotic chip-scoffing Scots that vote for those SNP fucknuts up here.

Looks like UKIP won already!

First they came for the Jews voting rights of foreigners...

Not keen on or comfortable with the 'legalise piracy' aspect of Pirate parties at all, but the aspect of innovating in terms of how political parties are run and politics delivered, well, we could do with that somewhere along the lines. Updating rickety old 19th century institutions, and so on. I just think that they have some good ideas that the 'mainstream' parties ought to consider stealing.

According to their policy list, they want a copyright term of 10 years (which like a lot of their public WiFi stuff sounds very unlikely to me) and something listed separately as "significant copyright reform" whatever the heck that is.

I don't know where I stand on ten years being long enough or not, it's a difficult length of time to comprehend and it would have economic effects that I couldn't predict. But as I don't think it's a change they're likely to be able to effect, it's irrelevant. The rest of their manifesto (broadly: 'be less shit') seemed well-intentioned enough.

UKIP have made a lot of gains in the council elections.

They don't control anything, so have really just caused some chaos to date

They came close though, in Rotherham they took 10 of 21 seats

Thinking is they won't do that well in London

"At 05:30 BST, Labour has gained 69 seats, the Conservatives had lost 93, UKIP had gained 84 and the Lib Dems had lost 67"

So it looks like people are pissed with the government and are voting Labour or UKIP.

Now that would make an interesting coalition!!

The news is reporting it as bad for Labour, though. Did they expect to win a load more seats or something?

Looks like UKIP might have gained local council seats here, looking at news reports. Labour were trying to gain to break the current NOC council is a Con/Lib split, though all other surrounding councils have been labour.

Local council choices in our area were Con, Lab, UKIP, Ind. Labour were trying to gain to dislodge, but from the looks of it the seats it needed went to UKIP.

On the lead-up to these elections social media has been buzzing, but I've only heard of one party mentioned: UKIP. This is almost all done in ridicule, but that doesn't stop it from being the only party on people's lips, and though well meaning the old saying 'there's no such thing as bad publicity' can sometimes be true for political parties. They've recieved so much media (mainstream and social) attention, that I can imagine that it has driven some people to look them up, listen out for them, people who don't usually find themselves politically minded, those who decide that on a very much 'surface' level they like the rhetoric and suddenly they are a rash. I don't know... The news is miserable. I just don't think the ridicule tactic works out. It's just makes a media frenzy with one term ringing out.

Campaigns that set out to point out the negatives of one option without making an attempt to highlight the positive of another only raise the profile and media coverage of the negative.

Yep, BBC seem surprised at the success of UKIP this morning. They haven't fucking shut up about them for the last six months.

As Mrs T said to me this morning, she disagrees with UKIP and would never vote for them, but at least they have some balls and stand for something. That must be quite refreshing and appealing in a world of Cameron, Milliband and Clegg.

What are you talking about, Milliband stands for something: "I'm not Cameron or Clegg"

Depressing, isn't it.

I'm not exactly a fan, but Milliband seems to get a lot of shit based on how he looks rather than his policies, which is depressing. He stood up to Cameron and Obama to prevent military involvement in Syria, which is now agreed as having been an extremely good thing for him to do. That's hardly spineless.

Milliband is a bit of clown. He went on TV to bang on about family's being squeezed and then had no clue as to what the average shopping bill was!

That is piss poor, forget the topic, you don't go on national TV and not have the facts in politics.

Clegg, Cameron and Milliband are all London based rich boys out of touch with the majority of the UK.

Farage comes across as a straight talking none slimy guy. This is despite all the policies (or lack off) and racism people accuse him of. It should be a real walk up call to "mainstream" politicians that a party like this gets so much attention and votes.

UKIP have no real policies or organisation, but with some money behind them and skilled people sorting out the policies and getting rid of the nutters they could do better next time.

Sorry, what?

Farange is a London based rich boy and about as slimy as a slug in a pond.

All Farage is in touch with is the worst in the worst people, which is hardly a difficult trick to pull off. Even Nick fucking Griffin got some votes and got all over telly with the same technique. Farage just dialled it down a bit so that he can attract those racists who don't like to think of themselves as racists.

Maybe in practice but he puts himself across much better than any of those 3, he is full of crap I agree but at least he answers a question with answer, unlike the others.

Oh yes he answers questions. With barely concealed contempt for the interviewers.

He has some valid points, I don't agree that so called asylum seekers travel through many wealthy EU countries to come here and get benefits.

This happens and its not raciest to object to it.

It seems to have worked pretty well, doesn't it?

Let's not go mad. Ukip still controls no councils, and Labour gained more seats last night than Ukip did. Yes Ukip have gone from one seat to more than a hundred, but it still has no power.

I'm just depressed that they got as many seats as they did

I expect they'll do much, much better in the European elections.

We won't have to pull out of the EU, they'll just ask us to leave.