Vandalised conservative billboards

[Carvill, John]

> Is voting compulsory in the UK? I can only hope so.

Heh. Indeed not. And there are plenty of people who won't vote, due to apathy, disgust, too young to care, etc.

The big, big news over here during the last few weeks has been the impact of the 'US Presidential-style' televised debates: the Conservatives pushed hard for these debates, because they (rightly, we all thought) believed that they would come out best: Gordon Brown is terrible at presentation, whereas David Cameron is young and an ex PR man. But Cameron also pushed for the 3rd party in British politics, the Liberal Democrats, to be included in the debates, even though they had no chance whatsoever of being elected. The first debate was thus a shock: Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, came out a clear winner in the debate, and this has upset the applecart: now the election is going to be very close, maybe a hung parliament. So the Tories are, to an extent, panicking that, rather than an easy victory this coming Thursday, they may find themselves forced into a coalition government or, worse still, beaten outright; in either case, this would muck up their plans, which included the confident expectation that they would have at least 3 terms to cosset the rich, grind the faces of the poor, etc.