Hooray - here it comes! May the 5th. Watch the coverage, listen to what the various parties are saying, think about it and then vote. It couldn't be easier. Try not to fall into the trap of just voting for which ever party seems to satisfy your personal vanity, in the class conscious, pre-conditioned way you think you "belong" to one party or the other. This is just a retarded way to approach a ballot box, and a vote through habitual and blind unquestioning loyalty is worse than a wasted non-vote. Save that sort of insane loyalty for football, which is where it belongs and makes absolutely perfect sense.
The good news though, is that this announcement effectively means that (as we had been hoping) the ID cards bill has been quietly abandoned. The good folks at no2id.net were planning a celebratory drink in a Westminster pubs and I had planned to go along, but never quite made it out of the Rat and Conker Saloon lounge, where I have been encamped for the last 72 hours with my laptop.
It'll be close between the two main parties, who enjoy similar levels of support, largely from people who would vote for a chimp in a rosette simply because that's what they've always "been". There's rarely any applied thought, so many people would quite happily vote for all sorts of outrageous things without thinking, based on the party they mistakenly think represents them. The ID cards bill has been opposed by lobby groups, who represent the small percentage of voters who think, the Judiciary, the Lords and many back-benchers who aren't in Blair's inner circle. If it was left up to the voting public to decide, we'd all have to start coughing up our cash and making appointments to go and give samples of blood, skin, fingerprints and semen starting in June.