People are discussing politics on the 'GM bankruptcy' thread, so I thought I'd chip in with something that's happening over here in Europe - namely the European elections that are being held on Thursday.

Politics is in a really bad way in the UK right now. On top of an awful recession, continued deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan and the spectre of big, scary things like swine flu and terrorism hanging over our heads, now we have the MP Expenses Saga. For 25 straight days now one of our biggest national newspapers, The Daily Telegraph, has been publishing the details of expenses claims MPs have made. Some of them are absolutely outrageous, and while a handful of MPs have commited actual fraud, many of them were acting in what were now obviously ridiculous rules, despite the fact that doing so was morally wrong. Even the MPs who haven't done anything wrong have suffered a blow to their credibility, because everyone in Westminster knew what was going on so why didn't someone stand up and say, "This must stop!"?! The major political parties - Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat - are now all calling for changes to expenses rules, as well as wider-ranging parliamentary reform, but maddeningly they all still refuse to just accept how badly they behaved. The comedian David Mitchell summed it up perfectly on BBC's Have I Got News For You: "essentially they're saying, 'This swimming pool is full of piss, therefore swimming pools are a bad idea', not, 'We've been pissing in the swimming pool.'"

Anyway.

Like the rest of Europe, we have European elections on Thursday, where we get to pick our members of the European Parliament. Since there's widespread disgust at mainstream politicians over here at the moment, smaller, fringe parties are expected to do quite well - one party, UKIP (UK Independance Party) is predicted by some commentators to come second in the election, behind Conservative but ahead of Labour and Lib Dem. Trouble is, UKIP are idiots, who have themselves been accused of exploiting European Parliament expenses in the past. Even worse, the British National Party, a right-wing fascist organisation who want to kick out all non-whites, apparently support the recriminalisation of homosexuality and whose leader has a prior conviction for incitement to racial hatred, might do quite well, due to people shunning the major parties and casting protest votes. Other parties, such as the Green Party and Christian Party, stand to pick up some more votes as well.

Okay, that's the introduction over.

This is really a message to any UK members: please go out and vote. I urge you not to vote for UKIP or the BNP, but if you want to, then that's your call. If, however, like me, you were considering skipping it because you didn't know who to vote for, then I have a solution. While listening to music on Spotify (a really cool piece of software that allows you to listen to millions of tracks free and completely legally). I heard an advert for something called Vote Match. I clicked the link and took at their website, which is here:

http://www.votematch.co.uk/europe/

This is what Vote Match aims to do, in its own words:

Vote Match has four aims:

-To help educate people about the policy differences between political parties standing in an election.
-To inform people about the institution they are electing candidates to.
-To encourage people to vote by providing them with information on where parties stand on the issues.
-To be fun.

It's actually really simple. They sent out a questionnaire to a range of political parties and asked them to respond 'Agree', 'Disagree', or 'Open-Minded' to each of them (some parties, like the BNP, chose not to take part). They then picked out the questions that split the parties - i.e. the ones that showed the different positions they hold. What YOU do is take the questionnaire, answering the questions in the same way, and then at the end you pick out which are the most and least important policy areas for you. Then it gives you a table showing you which parties you agree with on each issue, and gives a ranking to each one based on how closely your beliefs match. It's simple!

I took it, and got the party Libertas. I looked up some information about them, and apparently they're a pan-European party, with around 600 members standing in the elections across Europe. They're Euro-sceptics; they want wide-spread reform of the way the EU works, but unlike UKIP they know that it's vital that the UK remain part of the EU. I'm probably going to vote for them, unless I come across a position they hold that I simply can't agree with.

So I encourage all you UK members to take Vote Match, find out about the parties and cast your vote on Thursday. We're all angry at Westminster, and I'm looking to put in a protest vote too. But if those protest votes are made without due care and consideration, then we might end up with a result we really regret, such as (I shudder at the thought of it) an MEP from the British National Party. I think you should join me in voting Libertas, but I leave it up to you. If nobody replies to this, and the thread slips down the board and dies silently, then that's fine. Because if one of you goes to Vote Match, if one of you even considers voting when you weren't going to, or perhaps even goes and votes because you find a party you actually want to back, then I've done my bit.

Someone on the GM thread said that if you don't buy American, you don't have the right to complain about the economy. I'm not sure about that, but I am sure about this: if you can and don't vote, then you don't have the right to complain about the government that everyone ELSE elected.

Personally, I want to keep the right to moan and bitch. Don't you?

Interesting link, Jonny.

To be quite honest - I am so fed up with people falling with the prevailing wind of politics. There is nothing short of a witch hunt for Gordon Brown and Labour going on. It's clearly a coordinated attempt to discredit each and every day, and this is geared towards a populist 'uprising' over MPs' expenses. The fact is, this whole rigmarole with expenses has been going on for years and years - does this make it right? No, but it also doesn't make it a reason to blame just the one government. What people do not realise or care about is the fact they're being manipulated by a media thirsty for a change. The exact same thing happened to the Conservatives during the early '90s.

The expenses saga is just a sideshow - the real issue is the economy. The time for the blame game is after the sleeves have been rolled up and issues tackled head on. Expenses are merely a symptom of a larger problem, and you don't tackle just one symptom when treating AIDS, no, you tackle the overarching issue, which is what we must do now.

Electing a government based on nothing more than an issue like expenses, which permeates all political parties, is tantamount to a nationwide suicide. We need to think more.

We're generally an apathetic bunch when it comes to voting - yet we like nothing more than to moan. Political energy is needed, but as a nation we need to collectively remain objective and focused on what is best for us all in the coming years - not merely responding to, and acting on what we're told.

Andrew