‘Cultural’ Event Number Two

That Thursday was the European elections and we got home early enough to go and vote. This was important to me as it was the first chance I’ve ever had of voting in person! I’ve normally done a proxy vote as I’ve been out of the country but I was finally able to put that cross in the box by myself. It was really exciting. I couldn’t believe how long the list of parties was. There were some really weird (to my mind) ones. (I’ve just found the official results online so I can be precise in the names). The funniest one was the ‘The Party for Cornwall’ who, I believe, want Cornish independence of something. I didn’t know what they were doing on a ballot in North Somerset but unbelievably they got 154 votes!

Looking at the results I can say with certainty I live in a rather right-wing area. The conservatives won with 33% of the vote, then UKIP came second with 22%. Rather surprisingly, given that, the next two parties were the Lib Dems (16%) and the Greens (10%). Labour only got 7% which, given the fact they’re the ruling party, is really quite pathetic.

The last thing I’ll say on this minor digression into politics is that it was really difficult to find these figures. I did a Google search for ‘european elections – north somerset candidates’ which I thought was pretty specific as I wanted a list of the candidates (the results weren’t originally of interest). The relevant website was the 17th result, after the results for Poole and Mendip, and information from the Alzheimers society on how to vote. I know that the results are dependent on how many people are interested in each website but I don’t know what it says that more people are interested on how to vote to get the best government interest in treating Alzheimers than are interested in the results of the election they just voted in.

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