To think voting for the Green Party is a wasted vote?

[Rebecca2014]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30829222

For one thing you will be giving a greater chance of the Tories and UKIP winning the election due to the fact votes are being taken from Labour and the Lib Dems. You are not taking votes from UKIP, you are taking votes from Labour the party more likely to win the election.

Second my family live in Brighton and the Green Party have been awful there, the rubbish collections...the roads, do not talk about what they done for the motorist in that town.

If you are voting for the Greens, why???

If you think the Greens are crap, vote for whichever party you feel has the policies and ethics that match your best interests. Which one is that. BTW?

People should vote for who they want, that's how democracy works

Democracy would work a lot better if WM didn't cling to a FPTP system....

Yes ItsAll, perhaps we need a referendum on the voting system

I am loving yet strangely surprised by the level of green support on this thread.

I think the majority of greens are 'quiet, conscientious, and inconspicuous' as a famous recycler once declared.
We do have a few very active activists and protesters, but there's a lot more of us than most folks realise.

I live in Brighton and don't think they have made an unholy fuck up of things. They have made a few mistakes but I think they get unfairly ripped apart in the media. Caroline Lucas has integrity and I will vote for her again.

There's so many reasons why op is wrong. It's a common though flawed misunderstanding of the way democracy should be working.

I used to say of the lib dems, before they turned on us, that if everyone who wanted to had voted for them instead of going on about how it was wasted because they'd never get in, they would have won hands down.

You need to vote for the party you believe in, or tactical voting will just ensure the victory of those you don't.

The number of people not voting in 2010 outweighed all the other voters btw. If they'd all voted for what they believed in...

Oh blow it, look at this for the full reasons flippantirritatingandboring.wordpress.com

Sorry my point on the indyref was that 55% voted no. But I think all but four (?) voting areas voted no, so if there had been a FPTP system that would have made the no vote seem much stronger than it was. Equally in WM the allocation of MPs does not really resemble the percentage votes for each party.

I don't understand why people voted against AV. Not ideal but better than FPTP.

I respect the integrity of greens. Incidentally the only party to stick their neck out and have explicitly pro choice policies, which I think is important. If the other parties were genuinely women and family friendly they wouldn't keep importabt topics like that off the table. And obvs none of the other parties seem convincing on climate change or environmentalism. I really worry about what things will be like in future if we don't get it together.
As PP have said- the only wasted vote is the one you don't use!

Thanks for clearing that up for me, muminhants. I did vote for AV, but there you go.

(link correction) Actually I was thinking of their other piece - they've obviously shoved another one out since I last looked. I should have just gone to where I found it www.guerillapolicy.org/politics/2015/01/12/2015-general-election-get-out-there-get-informed-and-vote/

I also don't understand why the Green party get such a hard time in this country? I agree with a pp that Caroline Lucas has integrity, something sorely lacking in politics these days.

In other European countries the Green parties play a far more significant position in politics. Although I was a no voter I was pleased to see the Greens at the forefront of the referendum debate. I have faith that their star is very much on the rise.

As for Brighton cycle lanes, about time some decent ones were put in. Other European cities put the UK network to shame. There are many other dodgier councils than Brighton that's for sure.

To clarify I mean the Green party getting either a hard time in the press or zero coverage, whilst other minority parties get seemingly endless inches of column space.

Not only am I voting Green in May - but I am a prospective parliamentary candidate for them (for the Isle of Wight). Long term mumsnetter and bbc parenting board member before that.

Tactical voting gets us nowhere.

I live in Brighton & Hove, and i'll vote green in the national elections. and no doubt in the local elections too. As I now live in the marginal seat (Hove), I do know that my green vote may not be tactical (and may not even be counted due to the stupid fptp system), but I am done with voting tactically - I'll vote for the party with policies I believe in. because people died so that i could have that vote, so it deserves to be treated with integrity and
and to the OP and others banging on about Brighton & Hove council conflating a local council's performance with national policies is completely irrelevant, conflating a RAINBOW-COALITION with the greens even more so... brighton council may have a green leader but it is a rainbow coalition - so elected representatives of all hues are making decisions. and some of those decisions wont be liked by all ... but they are not 'green' decisions and nor are they anything to do with the general elections (personally I dont give 2 hoots about the cost of parking as I have a bike and use citycarclub; and i do think it's right that the council held out against unrealistic demands from the rubbish collectors when pay rates were logicised - meaning that they went on strike )
the biggest threat to caroline lucas' re-election is people conflating rainbow council with one national party, something that's done also through negative articles in press saying incorrectly that brighton is a green council. she is very popular because she's a GREAT MP* who responds to constituents and acts with utter integrity. labour are gagging for that seat tho. and the hove one i now live in, that they'll probably get - o unless their vote is split by green votes...

I'd vote for Caroline Lucas if she was my prospective MP; I agree that she has integrity. I used to be a member of Labour 25 years ago, I spent plenty of time knocking on doors, and then being told to fuck off back to Russia (1987 election). New Labour left me behind years ago.
I agree with a lot of Green Party policies, but I tactically vote against the Tories; I loathe them. In my constituency I'll vote Labour to beat them, although I'm not fond of my rather right-wing Labour MP. Unfortunately, that's FPTP for you. The Lib Dems did a deal with the devil, and then allowed themselves to get shafted on PR.

And good luck vixlow. Your Tory opponent appears to be continually shooting himself in the foot, and apparantly his local party is on the verge of civil war. Good!

I will be voting Green, because I love nature and because I believe in people, and without a planet, there are no people. They have sensible, costed, humane policies that protect the poor and vulnerable and have proposed initiating a universal basic income. This is entirely possible. If the money that was created for Quantitative Easing (£376 billion) had been distributed to the population instead of propping up prices in the Stock Market, every man, woman and child would have received £6,000 EACH. Instead money was given to those already rich, at the taxpayers expense, and what is worse, for every £1 'invested' in this way, there was only 8p generated in the real economy. The Greens are the only party with a sensible stance on fracking, green power generation, food sovereignty and a ban on bee killing pesticides and GMO's. And unlike UKIP, the Greens have voted FOR measures proposed in the EU to tackle inequality, something that I feel affects the lives of ordinary people more deeply than they realise.

There's no political party I want to vote for. They're all idiot, they all lie and they're all the same mentality deep down. Get the power, fuck the promises.

I wish we could do a no confidence vote. I bet we'd see a surge of voters!

vixlow tactical voting can get you everywhere. My dh doesn't like it, but take the example of my dm who lives in the south-west. Lifelong Labour supporter living in an area where Labour might get 10% of the vote max. So she votes Libdem to keep the Tories out. Sometimes she gets a Libdem MP, sometimes the Tory candidate wins regardless. For her it's about not getting a Tory government/MP, she knows she can't influence the Labour vote. It's a negative way of voting, but in a FPTP system it's what you have to do if you are in a more marginal seat.

I was quite shocked on Saturday when someone said on my local Facebook page that we only had Tory and UKIP candidates standing in my area! Fortunately I have since found out that at the very least I have a Green candidate standing. I tweeted Labour and Libdem to see if they are fielding candidates as well.

Tactical voting gives a false impression of support for the party you are voting for. On the Isle of Wight is has traditionally been a 2 horse race between Tory v Liberal. For the last 150 years. So all of us who don't want a Tory have voted liberal - and the lib dem's have thought they have 22,000 supporters here. They don't. And so here on the IW the anti Tory/UKIP vote has nowhere obvious to go now.

Nationally our parties have moved more and more into the centre and there is little difference between them. That is changing with the 5 or more party system that is emerging.

We need to vote for the policies we trust and most reflect our wishes. That party may not win - but the national share of the vote will make the national parties realise that policies do not have to be centre ground to be popular.

I am looking at the bigger picture.

All of the reading I have done and the "quizzes" online that I have done show that I should vote Green. On this one it, voteforpolicies.org.uk/survey/results/1g2Wm7PHQwglTYuMu#/personal-results I came out 50% Green, 25% Labour and 25% Lib Dem.

On the face of it I should vote Green but where I live is a Labour/Lib Dem marginal and currently Labour has a majority of around 3,000. I think I will be voting Labour . I just think that in my case Green would really be a wasted vote as if Labour lose this much needed seat to the Lib Dems it will likely increase the chance of another Tory/Lib Dem coalition. If my constituency was a Tory/Lib Dem marginal or likely to be a landslide for any party at all I might vote Green.

For people who live in safe/landslide seats, a vote for Green is not wasted, though the effects may not be seen until 2020. This article explains why, though sadly (from my point of view anyway) the same applies to UKIP

www.may2015.com/featured/the-one-two-punch-that-could-hand-ukip-and-the-greens-dozens-of-seats-in-2020/

If the greens can take over as the second party of choice in some seats, this gives them a much better chance of presenting themselves as the best alternative for those seats at the 2020 elections. This is how the Lib Dems got so many seats (compared to the past) in 2010. They spent the preceeding years consolidating themselves as a credible second choice in many seats and waited for the inevitable disillusionment with whoever was in power at the time of the election (happened to be Labour in 2010)

So if you live somewhere that the Greens could possibly take over as the second party than a vote for them is definitely not wasted, though it may take a while to come to fruition.