this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Speaking personally as a brit i'm not going to comment on whatevers going on with the american election but in the case of britain at least im absolutely not going to be voting for Keir Starmer since most of the left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for the most right wing and second worst (to his "credit", unlike Tony Blair, he doesnt have the blood of a million iraqis on his hands, only 30,000 palestinians) party leader labour's had in recent memory were the exact same people 5 years ago saying they couldnt in good faith vote for the most far left, trans positive labour leader in decades because he criticised Israel which led to the largest conservative majority in years.
Under Sir Kid Starver, Labour stopped members from voting for a ceasefire right at the start of the Palestinian genocide, members have repeatedly been expelled over bogus antisemitism charges, starmerite labour's trying to push to have the NHS privatised, the party has pivoted so far to the right that you have promiment members saying “Margaret Thatcher was a visionary leader for the U.K; no doubt about it", they've proposed policies to segregate trans people out of single sex NHS hospital wards and those are just the things from the last few months or so that i remember off the top of my head.
I'm going to vote for the Greens instead.
Don't you have proportional representation over there and then the House decides the PM? Voting for a third party has a non-zero chance of being useful. Go for it, why not?
Americans voting for a third party under FPTP may as well just throw their ballot in the trash. Same difference.
As far as I know (and I could be wrong), they use an electoral-college type deal -- you don't vote directly for the leader, but instead for your district's MP in a FPTP vote, and then as you said the majority in parliament decides on the prime minister. They were trying recently to switch to proportional representation because it's clearly better, but as far as I could tell it didn't work.
So yes, just like in the US, her voting Green Party won't change anything aside from strengthening the conservative party, unless she happens to be one of a couple of districts where the Greens have a competitive race. I actually voted third party in many elections in the US (in elections where Hitler wasn't on the ballot), so I won't say I think it's throwing the vote away... I also however traded votes with family members a few times when one of us was in a competitive state and the other wasn't, and I wanted them to vote third party while I was doing an establishment-party vote in a race where the outcome was more uncertain.
I actually guessed that most of those would be true, and the point of view that the message would express, the instant I read "Speaking personally as a brit" and before I expanded the message.
im not even refusing to vote, im just voting for a different party which isnt actively trying to screw me over, why would i ever vote for Sir Keir "trans rights can’t override women’s rights" Starmer?
Makes some amount of sense. And sure, I have no idea if you're telling the God's honest truth about all this stuff or if you're exactly what I'm accusing you of being. (My server for some reason showed the wrong age for your account, so strike that one.)
But, the fact remains -- I am not lying when I tell you I predicted exactly a bunch of the features of your account, and more or less what you were going to say in the post (the talking point that people are trying to pressure you into voting for the less-harmful candidate when you emotionally don't want to, and that you're taking a principled stand against it by refusing and voting for a third party instead, which is an incredibly common shill talking point) just from reading the few words. If it's pure coincidence and you just happen to hit all those shill boxes by accident then I apologize, but honestly, I doubt it.
my vote for the Green party isn't an emotional "I cant bring myself to vote for this piece of shit" thing, its entirely a strategic vote - it signals to the Labour party that there are people willing to vote for them if they were to move back to the left rather than constantly chasing the votes of the mytholigised moderate conservatives who are finally too disgusted with the rampant corruption and infighting of the current conservative to keep voting for them, it helps the green party gain more ground that labour wont get a >51% majority in the houses of parliament so they'll have to coalition build with the green party and listen to some of their demands if they want to get stuff done (after all, they're not going to be coalition building with the Workers Party of Britain since its basically just one guy who hates the modern labour party with a burning passion and gives a speech at the house of commons every now and again about how the county of Rochdale needs more NHS funding and also how Starmer and Sunak will be seeing the fires of hell for their crimes), and there's not much risk of the conservative party winning now after the last decade of corruption stories and infighting (the funniest of which was the exposé of david cameron's pig fucking ritual about a decade ago imo), the splintering of the far right of the party to join with the remnants of the Brexit Party (which was formed of the remnants of UKIP and the overtly fascist British National Party) and form into the Reform Party and the split off of some of the left of the party into the Liberal Democrats Party and, in a few cases, into the starmerite Labour Party.
Before the genocide in gaza i was still considering holding my nose and falling in line just in case, but seeing the rabid zionism of the Labour Party in action as loads of MPs have either been forced out for alleged antisemitism for criticising Israel or left in protest over the culture that Starmer's forced onto the party from the top down gave me a realisation that it was necessary to actually vote for people who will oppose them in parliament rather than just hope that someday they'll change and get better