Sucking up to the expats.

Suddenly the both Tories and Laborg are interested in getting out the expat vote. Does that mean they've noticed they've alienated everyone else? I'm not convinced they'll have a lot of luck as the process of registering as an overseas voter can be a pain in the arse involving forms that need to be witnessed, but between the restrictions from the British end on who can witness them and Australian law (as if it's got a fucking thing to do with Australia whether I still vote in the UK anyway!) I really struggled to complete the forms at all. Might well be easier elsewhere but I still wouldn't be surprised if many expats don't bother - the same reasons for the apathy vote apply as they do for the 40% or so of UK voters who don't vote, except more so.

Personally I'd love either or both to look me up and send a begging email for my vote (HMRC knows where to find me), just so I can tell the both of them to fuck off. However, I'm in the interesting situation of having one of the troughers as my nominal MP, and one who has decided to step down at the election (though not paid anything back that I've heard about, natch). I had expected to tell my proxy to put my X next to the LPUK candidate if there is one, and failing that UKIP if they haven't been bankrupted out of existence by one sided application of the rules, and that if neither of those are options I was planning on spoiling the ballot paper some way that might at least raise a smile for whoever ends up counting it. Assuming that the main parties run to form and put up three examples of supine, vacuous, lobby fodder candidates this will still happen, but there's always the chance that one of them - and let's be honest, the Laborg is the least likely - might show some independence and libertarian values.

Meantime I'm going to have to get to grips with the Aussie system since there'll be an election here sometime in the next year.