Hello everyone. I’m here in Zurich. I’m not dead. At some point when the dust has settled I will post about that, but this is not that post.

What this post is is reminder that if you live in the UK and entitled to vote then you should be voting in your local and MEP elections tomorrow (that is, the 22nd of May. Thursday). It’s important.

(If you’re not in the UK but are eligible to vote then ideally you should be voting too – e.g. I’ve asked my sister to vote as my proxy – but this notice comes too late for you)

If you have no idea how to vote, honestly you will probably still be a net benefit if you pick a random one of the main three parties. You shouldn’t do that, but it’s at least a better option than not voting (I’m not a big fan of the status quo, but I’m a bigger fan of the status quo than I am of UKIP, who are polling distressingly well). If you want to spend 5 minutes of your time on figuring out how to vote in the european elections instead of flipping a coin, votematch will give you a decent idea of which of the parties running will best support your preferences.

(It’s much harder to figure out how to vote in the local elections because a lack of good information caused by everyone pretending they’re not important. My general policy is to have my local vote follow my general politics).

For myself, I’m voting green in everything. They’re basically the most left wing of all our parties who are in with a chance, and you might have picked that up about my politics.

(It’s unclear that this is the perfect decision from a tactical point of view, but it’s not a bad idea from a tactical point of view – the greens have historically done well in local elections, and their polling in the MEP elections is decent enough that I think they’ve got a chance – and I think there are secondary benefits to increasing the Green’s vote share by making them seem like more plausible candidates in future elections)

Obviously if you just want to follow my lead and vote along with me like the good loyal audience you are, that’d be grand, but really you shouldn’t do that. Spend a little bit of time today making up your mind if you already haven’t, and then go out and vote.