statistics
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month or two, you’ll have noticed that there was a General Election on Thursday. Before you give up on yet another political blog entry as there must be millions out there, I thought I would share with you the split of the votes cast, in my constituency, as shown in the pie chart above.
The percentages that go with this are as follows:
40.8% Conservative
26.4% Labour
25.3% Liberal Democrat
3.1% UK Independence Party
2.7% British National Party
0.9% Green
0.4% Christian Party
0.4% Independent
What find more than a little bit disturbing here is the BNP turnout – if you type 0.027 (i.e. the decimal value of 2.7%) into a scientific calculator and hit the 1/x button, then you get the reciprocal value of the number. (If you want the explanation of reciprocal numbers, go visit Wiki).
But essentially, what this does is tell how many people voted BNP in my area. And disturbingly it works out at 1 in 37 people. I was in the pub on Friday and there were probably 120 people in there… so statistically three considered that the BNP’s views were the best way to vote. There are a hundred houses in my parent’s road… so that is two or three households. If you count the number of flats in my block and houses in the cul-de-sac, it’s roughly 37… You get the picture.
You’ve probably got your own view on the BNP and it’s not for me to say what anyone should or shouldn’t think, but I find those numbers pretty disturbing. Urgh.
I think that a lot of BNP votes are what you might call ‘mis-informed’. People who think all those immigrants are out to get us – steal our jobs, bleed the state dry and kill us in our beds. Led to believe that by certain corners of the media. I just think a lot of their views go unchallenged largely and their choice to vote BNP makes sense to them – even if the BNP aren’t what they think (if that makes sense?).
(In any case, before I noticed the results you posted were just of your constituency. I was ready to rant about the fact that if you look at the national results >http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/default.stm you would notice that Labour got 6% more of the vote but 200 more seats. Which is, to my mind, a far more important issue.)
I did read an article after posting this from 2009 before the election was called (but after the BNP got the european seats) and did show that there were a lot of people who thought the other views of the party (besides the usual headlines) made sense ‘I want a secure job so I can support my family’, ‘I want to know I can get a hospital bed/council house/old age pension’ etc.
But in the end you don’t have to read much of the manifesto though to see that the views the policies are based on are pretty extreme. I’d like all of those things above, but if I don’t get them, it’s not because it’s somehow the fault of johnny-foreigner.
“But in the end you don’t have to read much of the manifesto though to see that the views the policies are based on are pretty extreme.”
Is the key point isn’t it. People don’t. The BNP play to their fears while trying to make themselves look like a reasonable choice.
I suppose the question is why do people feel they should vote BNP and for that I’m sure there’s lots of reasons.
One of the benefits of a democracy isn’t it, people can vote for a party with such views…
Yep, *nods* to everything.