How's it looking in Acock's Green?

Not spoken to John lately, but I think he is - rightly - quietly confident. He has run a very energetic campaign and should cruise home.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Excellent.

Local elections are a bit of a fraught subject in Tower Hamlets.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17857850

I'm not sure what difference Schapps thinks police outside polling stations make. It's postal voting where the concern is.

The Mail have an article today saying that a good night for UKIP would be to gain 30 seats, which seems a very low target if UKIP's recent poll ratings are accurate. The cynic in me suspects that they're deliberately setting a low threshold for what would be a 'good' night for UKIP so that they can more easily spin the results as some kind of big breakthrough.

We've got council elections this Thursday, I think.

Our MP (Mike Wood, Labour) is pushing, obviously, the Labour guy. Apparently he's the only one of the candidates that lives in the area. He's also the only one to leaflet the area.

Twice.

Edit: Ooooh, we have a Green Party candidate. But that'd be a wasted vote, this is a Labour area and I see little issue with that right now. Labour it is, then.

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Changin' avatars like there's no tomorrow

I live in a safe Tory ward - one of only a handful of Tory strongholds in Salford - so it doesn't really matter which way I vote, but the Greens are standing a paper candidate here and having joined the party recently I might as well vote for them. Plus, Salford Labour have long been a joke (this is the city that can't seem to get rid of Hazel Blears ffs). I'll probably go for a Green-Labour one-two in the mayoral election but I'm not exactly blown away by any of the candidates standing.

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Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.

I've been bothering folk in their homes in one of the handful of wards where the Labour candidate has a chance of winning in central Hampshire. I barely know her so I don't feel as engaged as I did during the general election campaign, but I've been pleasantly surprised that voters seem more receptive to Labour than they were two years ago. There's recognition that neither the local Tories nor the local LibDems can stand up for local people's interests, even when they agree with them, because they're obliged to adhere to the coalition's ideology of cutting funds for everything in sight. Labour has a chance to be the party of resistance.

At the national level, there's still reluctance and ambivalence. Ed Miliband is not yet an asset, and a few folk have remarked that they're glad they don't have to vote for Ken Livingstone. The biggest ethnic minority in my area is Indian, and it's still a problem that the Labour party is too white. We've also had criticism for too easily confusing religion with ethnicity in the party's defence of multiculturalism.

Gilligan's shit is totally unchallenged, isn't it?

I think Labour will do well here just hope we can take the council.

That's part of it. We've also got used to our politicians being young and 'fresh'. Livingstone is the only high-profile politician I can think of who was already in the political spotlight 30 years ago. You can alienate a lot of voters over 30 years.

Just voted for the council elections.

Went for Green.

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Changin' avatars like there's no tomorrow

I'm struggling to find who's even standing in my ward. We haven't had so much as a single leaflet from any of the candidates and there seems to be no information online.

(EDIT) - finally found something, on Wikipedia, of all places. We've got the usual three parties plus the Greens, so I've got to choose between Labour and Green.

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

Damn, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus website says different - it's a safe Libdem seat with Tory, Labour and UKIP also running. Amazingly, UKIP have an Asian candidate.

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

Hope he does better than this chap.