I’m leaving it a little late, but I wanna look through party policies, more specifically MEP policies. The people I have a choice of are listed for the West Midlands.
Is it wrong that I’ve mentally already ruled out Bushill-Matthews because he doesn’t have his own website? I guess it could show that he’s not exactly technically competent, and that’s really something that’s important for me to be expressed in Parliament especially at times when file sharing policy and law is being made. However, it looks like a Conservative policy to have all their MEPs on the same site, so I guess I can let them slide. Conservatives are the only people using @aol.com and @hotmail.co.uk addresses. Don’t they see the security implications of not hosting their own email servers?
Finding out what a person is standing for is working out to be really hard… Most of these pages are like CVs, or just blogs of political news, recounting the news too, not even offering their view on the matter. Assuming though that every single one of their views is the same as the party they stand for, I guess I’ll look around the party’s websites.
But they’re not much help either. Take immigration, a blatant issue at the moment, one of the hot ones that everyone needs an opinion on. Labour’s immigration page lists various facts over what’s happened whilst they’re in power, but I really fail to see why they’ve listed a few.
In 2007, we removed an immigration offender on average, every 8 minutes.
It’s nice to know that there are that many in the country. How did they get by you? We’re an island, it’s not like people can just flee across the border. And if immigrants are up to swimming an ocean to get in, I think maybe we should let them in on merit.
Other than saying they want to give ID cards to immigrants (wasn’t that happening to everyone anyway?), and increasing the number of people who work at these borders (which everyone wants to do), I don’t think they’ve mentioned anything controversial to differentiate themselves.
Oh, I suppose when you look at the Conservative page side by side with the Labour one, you see where differences are. Labour don’t have an interest in setting a limit to the number of immigrants allowed per year, which I can understand. If we have a system where we only allow people in that we need, why set a limit? Once all positions have been filled, just stop letting people in. Tory’s do want an arbitrary limit though, the point there being that too many slip through, and if we just say no to them before even letting them speak we’ll have lowered their burden on our public services. The Government has nothing to gain by allowing millions of people to come into the country, if anything it’d just make their jobs harder. I don’t see the point in setting a limit. I think we should just let in people we need, but be very strict about the guidelines for “who we need”. If there’s not a job position already available for them, leave that job for someone that’s already settled here. I’m a little bit shocked by it myself, but I guess that’s a point to Labour…
There’s these border patrol people too; Tory’s want them to be apart of the police, whilst Labour want them to have “police like powers”. Semantics really. Just something to argue about. The police are already over stretched as it is, why give them another job which requires them to get rather niche training. Have a specialist team to do that. Increases jobs and they’ll be more focused. Labour win.
Both of those points aren’t relevant to this election though, European Parliament doesn’t have the power (or the need) to touch either of those things. But it really shows that I have no other information to go on, other than the party policies. I can’t find much about what the hopeful MEPs want.
I can’t find anything the Lib Dems have said about immigration… What? I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t seem to have written up, public policies for most things. I’m not going to bother looking at UKIP. I’d never vote for a less globalised world.
Lib Dem Liz Lynne’s site has a few sections on her website listing a few things; Iraq, business, various campaigns. That’s exactly what I want to be reading! I clicked through to the business one. The links on there link to search results… completely pointless. Meh, I had such high hopes, Liz! Looks like she’s about giving business more power over themselves, and deregulating some things though.
Liz was [...] on the Vibrations Directive and the Noise Directive, negotiating a number of key amendments to make them less onerous on businesses.
I like this pro-business stance. I’m really all for businesses creating their own morals, even to the extent of Ayn Rand’s ideologies, and so they’re the ones that get punished for them if there’s a mistake.
All in all though, the Internet doesn’t really tell you enough to decided on who to vote with. I’m going to keep researching, but unless something changes my mind, I think it’ll be Lib Dems for me, despite it being a wasted vote here (but hey, maybe enough people will think like me).