As you may have noted there’s going to be a general election here in the UK within the next few weeks. As such I’ve been having a think about who I should vote for. I live in South West Herts which looks to be intriguingly poised so it seems my vote is more likely to actually count this time. The long term MP (and fine individual for helping me out with my Geography coursework) Richard Page is retiring after some 20 years or so and as with the end of all long term MPs there’s now a bit of excitement as to whether the Tories might lose. It would seem unlikely given the demographic but there’s always a chance so I thought I’d have a swing by the sites of all the candidates and see who I should vote for. Sidenote: generally I attempt to vote for the man, not the party in first past the post elections so we’ll put the general issues to one side for a second.

David Gauke, Conservative has a blog and a fairly active one too. Not a great design and a pretty poor show to so obviously copy and paste your stuff in from Word (thus getting formatting like £ messed up). Anyway a quick read through his stuff satisfied me that whilst there’s no way I can support him but that he’d probably do a very decent job for the community if elected.

Now by inclination I’d probably go for Ed Featherstone, Lib Dem but his website is anaemic and quite frankly the Lib Dems have been arch nimbyites in local politics and that’s not something I can easily forget. His canvasser seemed very nice when they popped round last week though.

Which leads us on to the blog of Kerron Cross, Labour. Which I have to say I really like, in style it’s much more of a proper blog than the Tory candidate, although he lacks bells and whilstles like RSS feeds. Although his conversational tone really won me over and you really feel you know a bit more about the bloke than when you started. Which is a good thing becuase from what I can see I like. It seems mildly bizzare that SW Herts is where Labour decide to stick in Christian Socialists as their candidates but I’m not complaining as they tend to mesh rather better with my opinions than most other parlimentary subgroups. So at this stage it would appear that I’ll be voting Labour for the first time this May. Good oh.

ps Note: if we had a proportional representation system I’d almost certainly vote Lib Dem as overall I agree with their policies much more, especially on digital and civil liberties. Plus labour promise to draft strong ‘anti-piracy’ laws:

We will modernise copyright and other forms of protection of intellectual property rights so that they are appropriate for the digital age. We will use our presidency of the EU to look at how to ensure content creators can protect their innovations in a digital age. Piracy is a growing threat and we will work with industry to protect it.

Ick.