I love reading about the UK's political shenanigans, and although it's almost too late to matter, here are some suggestions on who to vote for.
From the left we have:
- Victor S, who isn't in the UK but wants you to Vote Mebyon Kernow.
- Red Pepper, who complains about the "right wing Labour government" but says you can still vote for some of them them if you pay attention to his handy election map.
From the right we have... uh... I'm actually having trouble finding conservative UK bloggers who list Tory candidates. You can go to Who Should You Vote For? and answer some questions to find out which party most closely aligns with your political inclinations. That's kinda fun, but I can pretty much guess my answer already. Check out this DoWire.org page for more on UK elections.
I'm not a big fan of parliamentary democracy because it lacks strong separation of powers between the executive and legislative authorities in comparison to the presidential system. Here's more on the mechanics of United Kingdom general elections.
hi MW, i got into a little discussion about the relative merits of our parliamentary democracy and your system, and we did end up agreeing that yours was mostly better.
The UK is also a monarchy, of course, and I rather like the fact that the figure-head is entirely apolitical. I'm at liberty to criticise my PM without accusations of being unBritish; even if Americans don't actually get stoned for criticising the Pres those who do take an absurd guilty pleasure in it. Over here it's just not an issue...
I think both systems would benefit from carefully implemented PR.