Obligatory General Election Post

Did you hear the one about a bloke who went to see a monarch about dissolving parliament? If not, you'll be sick of reading and listening about it by the time polls close at 10pm on May 6th.

I'm not going to rehearse the reasons why, despite having a rotten crabby record, I'll be out campaigning for Labour in this election. Nor why the Tories would be much worse for the labour movement than even a Brown government determined to make the working class pay for the crisis finance capital got itself - and ourselves - into. And there's little point rehearsing why the far left are hurtling pell mell down what Dave Osler aptly calls "the parliamentary road to lost deposits".

Instead, I'm going to talk about what I plan to do with this blog. I might occasionally write something about the big national election stories, especially if there's a chance of showing the Cameroons in a bad light, but something tells me very few readers will be tempted to vote Tory anyway. No, the blog will be concerned with two niches.

First will be the circus that is the election in my constituency, Stoke Central. I don't know if it holds the record for most candidates in this election, but it's got to be in the top five. There are at least 11 confirmed, plus another to declare. If anything, for election anoraks this will prove a more interesting campaign than years where they simply weighed the Labour vote. And there will be posts relating anecdotes from door knocking, local gossip and wheeling and dealing, and maybe interviews with some candidates (if I can be bothered).

The second niche will be the far left. For once you're not buying into official optimism to say Respect have a chance of winning three seats. But outside of that, I doubt TUSC will unsettle many Labour nerves - David Henry in Salford probably has the best chance of causing an upset, and it's one I doubt many Labourites of the centre and the left would shed any tears over.

In total I reckon the organised far left (Respect, TUSC, SSP) are standing in 62 seats, excluding unattached independents and Scargill's SLP. Is anyone the wiser?

Apart from the political ramifications of this election, for once this is an interesting contest. The Greens, UKIP and BNP pose significant challenges in a handful of constituencies. The polls are volatile but still indicate no clear favourite. And on top of all that the wretched and undemocratic first past the post system could finally meet its Waterloo in a hung parliament. It will be messy. It will be tight. But one thing is clear: what happens matters.