Yes, yes, the election results were announced on Sunday and today is Tuesday... my weekend has been a little busy and tiring.
For those that don't know (/me peers around) the BNP got the last MEP seat in the Northwest region and also got a seat in Yorkshire and the Humber region. In the Northwest it is their party leader Nick Griffin who will be going claiming to represent me.
The most depressing thing about his victory is that the number of votes cast for him went DOWN on the number cast in the last election. Unfortunately for us, every other party's went down too and so he got a larger share of the vote.
Like it or lump it, he is a "democratically" elected Member of the European Parliament. We're stuck with him for 5 years. Five long, terrible years.
I wish I could say I'd done more to stop him. I wish there had been more I could have done. But the truth is, after the council elections last year where I felt a lone voice in Warrington I feel let down. Given my personal stance on political parties I couldn't bring myself to be try and defend them in public to a rightly angry public. "Go and vote. Yeah, for one of the parties which is fleecing you. Go on..." doesn't quite have the right ring to it.
I'm also not enamoured to "Hope Not Hate" as a campaign name. As an anti-BNP person I don't understand it. Well, I understand all the words and I sort of grasp it, but it just doesn't seem to fit right.
I tweeted on Thursday "Just voted. I feel dirty". I did. I voted, in the end, for the Lib Dems. I don't support the Lib Dems - I think they're an incoherent, inconsistent bunch of bandwagon jumpers - but it was a toss up between them and the Greens (who I have also reluctantly supported in the past) but some of their more anti-science views put me off in the end this time. I was under the thrall of Polls which suggested that there was a chance of Labour being pushed behind the Lib Dems and I thought that was a worthy enough goal.
So the BNP got in. And now the anti-BNP campaign is angry and being extremely hostile. From trying to stop Griffin getting into the Count on Sunday night to today's forcing him to abandon a press conference, the people doing this aren't helping. They make it look juvenile. Like it or not (and I don't) he's been elected now. We have to fight his views. No Platform hasn't worked. It never will. He has a platform, he has freedom of speech, we have a duty to counter that speech whenever we can.
I was at the rally yesterday in Manchester. It was a lot better than I had anticipated from the advertising, but still, some of the rhetoric employed seemed to be going counter to where I believe we need to be going.
But, yeah, sometimes words cannot adequately do justice to how people feel about a situation. When that happens, relatively inconsequential words take on whole new levels of severity as Von from QYN/TYN said last night "It's just... bad".
Alex
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