When I voted at about 2.20 pm yesterday afternoon in my little village in West Sussex, there were about 5 other voters in there at the time, with more coming in as I left, which was more than I expected to see after lunchtime on a weekday.
I managed to seek out the Sussex TV debates online, through the BBC South East facebook site, and formed my opinion on whom to vote for that way. I also read the excellent topofthecops.com website, which confirmed, as had been my thoughts initially, that we should not be blindly voting for political parties, but should instead choose a candidate based on their personality, integrity, and incorruptability.
I voted for a candidate who was linked with a party I would never normally consider voting for, because the candidate, in those TV debates, seemed the least politician-like, the most embarrassed to be there, and therefore I judged the candidate to be the most likely to carry out the role without influence, subterfuge, or crowd-pleasing tendencies.
Sadly, inevitably it seems, this candidate did not make it through the first round of counting, but I wonder how many people might have voted differently if they had actually heard the candidates speak, rather than only having read their manifestos (in most cases in Sussex, written by other people for them), or worse still, only voting based on the parties who had supported their campaigns?
Also, I could not find out anywhere online any information as to what the links with the political parties had to do with each candidate, and how much it might affect their impartiality in the role. Can anyone help answer this?
However, I feel, when given the right to vote, one must carry out that right as a duty, and was dismayed to learn that many of my friends had not bothered, claiming ignorance, and spouting commonly misinformed views that this sort of thing was "all right for America, but we're not America" (whereas in America the similar roles they refer to are not voted for by the public), and that it was going to cost a lot more money in these austere times etc., when actually it will not cost any more than the existing police authorities.
So it seems that public opinion was wafted in this direction, by whom, for whom, and to what end, who knows?
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