Voting in the U.K. general elections

The Telegraph's Catholic blogger, Damien Thompson, links to a nifty online guide that helps U.K. voters in matching their political positions with the major parties for the upcoming general elections.

I used the guide and discovered that my political views match the U.K. Independence Party 67% of the time and the Conservative Party 36% of the time.  Since I had never heard of the UKIP, I looked them up, read their platform, and concluded that I would indeed vote for the UKIP candidates in my district if I were a subject of Her Majesty and eligible to vote.

Now, I am freely admitting this piece of personal info in near-complete ignorance of the British political landscape.  For all I know, the UKIP may be some sort of horrible fringe movement.  I know that the British Nationalist Party verges on the execrable.  Voting Labour is out of the question and there seems to be no real difference btw Labour and the Liberal Democrats. 

The attraction of the UKIP for me is their strong opposition to the E.U.'s interference in the U.K.'s national sovereignty.  If the UKIP's assertions about the E.U.'s encroachment on the sovereignty of member states is accurate, then European nations are doomed to becoming little more than American-style states under the control of a federal European bureaucracy managed by hard-line, anti-Christian leftists.  It's the Roman Empire all over again without its legendary religious tolerance and local control.  For example, according to the UKIP material, a German gov't minister notes that fully 80% of Germany's laws are enacted in Brussels not Berlin.  He asks the pertinent question:  what's the point of a German parliament?

An anecdote:  back in 2004 an English friar told us at table one night that Brussels had recently decreed that bananas imported into the E.U. must not be curved; IOW, only straightened bananas could be imported.  Why?  Because curved bananas resembled bicycle tires when packaged and this confused customs officials.  The moral of the story?  When you create a bureaucracy to manage a problem, the bureaucracy will eventually begin inventing problems in order to justify its own existence.  Sound familiar?

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