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Small Business News
Baffling European Elections Clarified
If, like me, you see the up and coming European elections as bit of a puzzle, then you may find Vote Match Europe 2009 a useful website.
Politics has been substantially damaged in recent weeks in the UK and widespread disaffection with the political process and politicians in generally will sadly distort the voting in the coming European elections. Life, of course, must go on and when the furore has died down the UK and the rest of Europe still need to be governed and we need to make sure the right people are in place to do that.
Voting is a personal choice of course, but it is often coloured by what we do and the special situation small business people find themselves in means that new drivers often override past personal views. Take for example immigration, a contentious subject if ever there was one. It may seem to make sense to limit immigration to our overcrowded little country till you suddenly find yourself hiring an immigrant working twice as hard as and for less money than the local labour.
Similarly many 'Government' grants that go to small business in fact come from Europe. When you scratch the surface it is surprising how much of our payments to Europe come back to us this way.
Still, exactly who stands for what, who is the local representative and what they do is less clear than it could be so I decided to do a bit of research and found the Vote Match Europe 2009 (votematch.eu) website. This site makes it easier to make a judgement on who to vote for by asking your opinion on a series of questions then asking you what your strength of feeling is about each subject.
It is easy to use and the end result is an analysis of how closely your views match the views of various European political groupings. Drill down a bit more and you can usually find a UK party that comes close to supporting your views.
Certainly worth a look folks, but a word of warning: you may get a surprise at the end result and who you should be supporting - I certainly did.
For more information on your local EU representatives, take a look at:
http://www.europarl.org.uk/section/your-meps/your-meps
by: Joe Quin
17th May 2009
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