Vote For Policies Update 4th March 2015

The Vote For Policies site has now been up and running in its "updated for General Election 2015" state since 19th February, that's just under 2 weeks, and an amazing number, over 76,200, have completed the survey in this time.

The national results so far are as follows:

Vote For Policies - 2015 General Election Update

After what feels like an age of waiting, the site at Vote For Policies has finally updated and now invites you to compete their survey with quite a few differences from their previous site.

The first and most obvious difference is that you are now asked in which of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom you are completing the survey from. This is because they have included several parties that were not represented in their last edition. The site now includes The Scottish Green Party and the Scottish National Party. Neither of these parties were included previously and although Green interests were represented as the Green Party of England & Wales were included, this was not completely satisfactory as The Scottish Green Party are autonomous.

Vote For Policies Not Parties

I have long been a supporter of "radical' democracy for the basic and simple reason that ours doesn't work properly. It does not provide the framework for all the people in our country to have, as standard, a proper say in the way our country is run and as a result their lives are worse of for it.

I have often seen simple and logical ways of possibly improving our democracy. Ideas like changing the seating arrangements of parliaments. Instead of having all members of the same party together in a bunch, why not have members sit in their respective areas. For me this would lead to less partisan behaviour and more behaviour based on local issues with members banding together to sort out matters relative to their own voters patches. Is that not why we voted for them? To represent our interests? This may have only a small effect and there are possible problems with it too but why not give it a go and see if it makes a difference?

Another idea that I heard muted was that we should not get names of parties on ballot papers,  just the names of candidates. Whilst this would definitely be a radical step, I can see part of the rationale behind those who talk of it. It would certainly make the electorate seek out what the actual person stood for and also make the candidate work much harder to get their personal message over to the voters.

The above may be a step too far for most, but what about the electorate seeing all of the party's policies without seeing which party it belonged to? A blind taste test? Well that actually ALREADY exists..... at Vote For Policies.