steepholm

Thanks for the link, Brian. The article certainly has some good reasons for not voting at all, but not so much for voting Labour, it seems to me. I don't buy that it's any longer the party of the poor or of the labour movement. They introduced the minimum wage, and I give them credit for that; but thirteen years into a Labour government, Thatcher's anti-union legislation remains virtually untouched, and whenever there's an industrial dispute (recent examples being the PO and BA) government ministers line up to criticize the workers for striking, rather than than the management. Also, inequality has grown rather than shrunk under Labour - substantially so. All the above might have been expected from one-nation Tories as much as Labour.

I agree that the Greens aren't ready for government (not that that's a realistic prospect, of course), but un-thought-through as many of their ideas are, they at least recognize a basic truth that all the other parties seem committed to trying to forget: i.e. that you can't have an economic model based on continual growth, when your resources are finite in themselves, and have to be shared amongst an ever-increasing population. That strikes me as a pixie-dust idea in itself, one that can only be sustained in the short term if we agree to shunt the problem onto a) the third world and b) our descendants. That's not an attitude I can live with or vote for.