Tag / general election

by Andrew Pilcher

Politics as unusual

We’re in the final stages of a truly wierd and utterly pointless general election at the moment, another one of those side-effects of the Brexit process that was made inevitable as soon as Theresa May announced she wasn’t going to be holding another election when she became prime minister.

These are all my local candidates. Amber Rudd, the home secretary, has become the Prime Ministers representative on earth since calling the election she can’t be bothered to turn up to any of the debates about it. I feel sort of sorry for her – her father died two days before the big TV debate, but she’s a slave to her ambition, so she dutifully turned up at the debate and got laughed at for asking to be judged by the Government’s record.  There’s a real chance she may be unseated, as the opposition forces have been making a coordinated campaign against her, and the latest polls show her losing. But we’ve been here before. I’ll believe it only when it actually happens.

Peter Chowney is the leader of the staunchly Labour-controlled Hastings Borough Council, and is her likely successor. He has his own questions to answer about dodgy planning decisions in the town.

I consider myself to be a natural Liberal Democrat, but I can’t bring myself to vote for Nick Perry, who has brought their share of the vote down from around 20% in 2010 to 3% in 2015. Neither can anyone else. They have become irrelevant.

UKIP are nutters. I may have made their candidate appear a little too sane.

The final lawn sign isn’t my own creation, but I’ve seen it around a lot plastered to walls and as a meme in my Facebook feed.

 

by Andrew Pilcher

Church and state

smith-pilcher-794-150506It’s the General Election tomorrow. After a long, slow, interminable buildup that has left the country in a strange mixture of feverish excitement and deep, deep coma we finally get to vote for the least worst candidate from the selection of chancers and nonentities put before us.

Hastings and Rye is pretty lucky in being a marginal constituency – in other words it’s one of the few in the country where a vote matters. Most constituencies are safe seats. For example, in Tunbridge Wells, an amoeba would be voted into parliament if it wore a Conservative rosette, whereas in somewhere like Gateshead a Labour-leaning ebola virus would win an easy majority. Hastings is one of the few seats in the South East where the balance is on a knife edge. The current Conservative incumbent, Amber Rudd, has a majority of 3%, and the groundswell in Hastings shown by council elections over the past few years has been definitely leftward as the austerity measures brought in by her party have bitten in this deprived seaside town. I can’t say how the final result in Westminster is going to pan out – no-one can, it’s that close, and no-one is really up to the job – but I’m reasonably certain that Hastings will be turning red on Thursday.

I’ve drawn my local polling station, the Christ Church and St Andrews Church Hall in the first frame. Polling stations can be anywhere. When I was a kid my primary school was closed for the day whenever an election took place so it could be used for voting. Several pubs and fish and chip shops are used as polling stations, in Hastings our local paper’s offices are being used. Before the Church Hall was made a polling station in my ward, I used to vote at the playing grounds of Hastings United Football Club.

Vote here