Animosity

The Tories and Labour have been sending out their attack dogs all weekend now... even Norman Tebbit has been dug out to leap to the defence of Michael Howard. Yeah - that's really going to help the nation learn to love him.

It's quite clear that despite the consensus that finally emerged, this is going to be an issue for many weeks, and there will be many attempts to keep coming back to it. Security is doubtless going to be an election issue, which is pretty ironic given that most people really would naturally assume the Tories are going to be the toughest on things like this. It just goes to show how much the political landscape of Britain has changed and is changing before our very eyes.

Yesterday I was referred to a very intriguing site - So Now Who Do We Vote For? It's a travesty that this electoral system we have requires people to strategically analyse the way they vote, but given that we have it, we have to work within it. So efforts by sites like this could come in very handy. It provides, or at least it will when it's complete, a breakdown of every constituency and where it would be tactically sound to place a vote, bearing in mind the voting record of the sitting MP. After all, not all Labour MPs supported the Iraq War. Plus, it allows you to contribute your own view on the constituency... well worth a look.

Once again this raises the issue, could tactical voting be a major player in this election? Sure it was around last time, in the form of tacticalvoter.net... but its impact must have been minimal. Now, four years later, there are millions more people on the internet. Millions more are also pretty pissed off with Blair, and a hell of a lot has gone down over this last Parliament.

If sites like this can achieve popularity, it really could make people think carefully about where to place their vote. This is exactly what I was encouraging, and if there are resources available to assist people in getting all the information they need, I fully support them.

It would be nice if there were a few upsets this time...