The vote for UKIP is a vote for Labour argument is no

Comment on General Election 2010 Poll Results by David.

The vote for UKIP is a vote for Labour argument is no different to saying a vote for the Green party is a vote for the Conservatives or even a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for Labour/Conservatives depending on the seat.

I think you’ll agree where UKIP are the far right of the Conservatives, the Green party are the far left of Labour. And those that vote Green won’t want a Conservative government and those that vote UKIP won’t want a Labour government.

In case you haven’t noticed a lot of the Eurosceptic Conservative people have either left the Conservative party or generally removed from important roles. I don’t see the Conservatives ever removing us from Europe even if they are not completely pro Europe.

I suspect the reason for this was/is, although we have a Eurosceptic country, we don’t as a country understand enough about Europe to know why we are Eurosceptic and so beyond thinking it’s silly to expect us to use kilos instead of pounds, we can’t call British chocolate, chocolate and vegetables have to be uniform we don’t know enough to care enough about Europe to have it as a main reason for voting for a party and if the Conservatives squabbled over Europe again, they’d loose votes.

Look at how British people barely bother to turn out to EU elections (wasn’t it 38% turn out last year!) and when they do bother to vote, protest votes are obviously rife (2 BNP MEPs!)!

To be honest I don’t know if I’m Eurosceptic or pro-Europe, getting a balanced view of Europe to an extent of truly understanding if we are better or worse off in Europe is hard to say the least!

I suspect we are better off (would definitely cost the economy a lot to get out now) and I’d prefer to have close ties to Europe as strong trade links means much less chance of conflicts with a European country in the future.

We might believe right now we’ll never have another war with Europe like the second world war, but who knows what will happen 50+ years from now when oil has pretty much run out, world population has increased significantly and maybe resource shortages (food, fresh water….) could push countries to consider conflict over limited resources!

I suppose that makes me Europe neutral :-)

BTW lots of European laws are there to protect us from perceived issues. Some of the stuff they come up with is dumb to say the least, but other EU laws are pretty good. There is an argument being part of Europe does protect us to some degree from governments with nutty ideas. Imagine if UKIP gained some power, (some weird coalition government :-) they couldn’t remove us from Europe without a vote and without a lot more information about Europe I’d currently vote no to leaving Europe.

You know if Europe is so bad for Britain maybe the Eurosceptics should try to educate the British public why we’d be better alone (and I don’t mean the scaremonger approach like the BNP has with Islamification of Britain conspiracy theories)?

David