Ready for vote, bloke?

Tomorrow, the voters in the United Kingdom will head towards the polling station to decide what the next government will be like. Thanks to the single constituency first-past-the-post electoral system, and the surge of the third party, the outcome is anybody's guess.

Considering its declining economic prowess and political influence, the election in the United Kingdom doesn't deserve such attention from the rest of the world. But as the oldest parliamentarian democracy, United Kingdom has amazingly maintained its two-party system for so long. A change seems very likely to come, and it will possibly reshuffle the system once and for all. This will show that whether two-party system is possible in a parliamentary system, which is a very interesting question to think about.

But it is interesting to see that how obsessed the Iranian media are with Britain. Many Iranians still think it is Britain who is ruling the world, and the United States is simply manipulated by their former master. There is a book about how the British prime ministers influenced and manipulated the American foreign policy, but I don't think there are many people who would agree with this.

It seems the Gordon Brown hasn't been greatly affected by his "bigoted woman" comment, which, by the way, is in surprisingly proper but impolite language. This potential disastrous gaffe was followed by his timely apology. Spending one day with a voter he has offended probably is not enough, but it seems that most voters who lean towards Labor, according to the polls, have forgiven him. After all, that woman, who questions Brown why he doesn't stop immigration from Eastern Europe, is quite bigoted.

I was wrong in the last post to say that the internet is playing a huge role in this campaign. It doesn't seem so. Not many candidates have twitter accounts, and those who do only have an average of several hundred followers. The technology is still influencing this election, only in that TV is the new technology for the Brits. In this age, after the success of Tony Blair a decade ago, even for the most reserved British people, young and charmingly handsome politicians with good public speaking skills in front of the camera are the trend of the future leaders.