Rage Against the Election

Well, I think it's fair to say that if there's any party logo poster that'll catch the eye, this is one of them.

I hadn't been following the UK election for May all that much until now, and I hadn't realized that the previously good-natured-seeming but hopeless Liberal Democrats were actually becoming surprisingly visible due to the discontent with the two main parties. I said at the time that it would be quite frightening if the power of the denizens of the Internet was harnessed into something world-affecting when Rage Against The Machine was propelled to the Christmas No. 1 by Facebook, and indeed, there's now a 100,000-strong group (where I got the above picture) promising to vote yellow - not an election-changing number, but a pretty surprising dent nonetheless.

British politics seem inherently more comical to me than American ones - perhaps because there's not a hope of anyone being as pillow-eatingly awful as most of the conservative lot here are, perhaps because of having grown up thinking of them as cartoon versions of themselves thanks to the likes of Spitting Image, Private Eye and Dead Ringers, and the mere existence of Boris Johnson helps as well.

But I've been playing around with the Election Seat Calculator for a surprising amount of time this morning, and spinning the numbers around is rather addictive, especially when you click the recent polls and see how even the split is (in votes and not seats) to cause a hung parliament. Today, the YouGov poll even has the underdog party ahead of both of the other two... and that's just unheard of.