Will the expenses row alter the way you vote long term?

No it wont affect how I vote long term as coming from Wales where you could stick a red rosette on a donkey and it would get elected as am MP, and me not being a Labour voter, my vote has little effect on the whole scenario. I still continue to vote even though I know it doesnt mean much!

Im enraged with this MPs expenses thing, how they can get away effectively in some cases, with fraud. Claiming £16k for a mortgage that no longer existed?! If any Joe Bloggs did that theyd be hauled over the coals and sent down for it.

ARGH! Im getting more angry the more I think about it.

Hmmm, we like David Cameron at the moment with conservative and every time labour gets a bit of bad press I like him even more. However, I dont really know much about our local government and need to find out. I am 24 this is the first year I have actually recieved the right to vote and will be doing so but I have some research to do. How do I go about this?

It will certainly affect how I vote in the June local elections and the next Westminster elections.

I've been in email conversation with my current (Tory) MP who claims for a second home, despite being within commuting distance from London. He thinks it's unreasonable to expect him to get a train after 11:15pm or before 8am - I've done stupid commutes like that for weeks at a time, on the exact train line he would have to use, and I was far from the only one doing it. The MP for Cambridge City, who lives further up the trainline, commutes, does not claim for a second home and yet manages to attend 20% more votes than my MP.

I also don't buy this second home business when Parliament only sits for about 165 days a year.

Also, the attitude of "I'm absolutely entitled to my expenses" rather than any kind of embarrasment or contrition from my MP means he has definitely lost my vote. I'll probably go for the LibDems.

I'm in a very 'safe' conservative area and our MP has not been mentioned in this so the expenses won't affect my vote in a general election. But if I was in a constituency where the present MP had been taking the piss with their expenses then I think it would certainly affect whether I could bring myself to vote for them. But of course then you have the problem of who to vote for instead - it may be a rock and a hard place for some voters...a potentially better person but one who belongs to a party whose policies you do not agree with.

I don't have a way i vote in the long term, i'm not party political i just go with the ones that say the most things i agree with. Now if people have done stuff i really don't agree with then there is no way i'd consider voting for them.

I don't know. I think it's part of a whole picture, for me. I am in such a quandry, and I imagine I'm fairly typical of a lot of the people who voted Labour in 97 and afterwards, with growing disillusion.

Even die hard Labour voters like me probably won't be able to vote for them next time around, or in these elections. I'm unconvinced by the Lib Dems in practice, and I don't know that I'd ever be able to live with myself if I voted Conservative. I have taken on board what's been said on threads like this before, and I agree that maintaining a lifelong anti-Tory stance on the back of a kind of 80s Ben Elton "down with Thatch" bandwagon is ridiculous. But I don't trust David Cameron further than I could throw him; I think all the "nice Dave" stuff would evaporate as soon as they got into office and it would be the same old stuff about individualism and be buggered to the old, the sick, the disabled and the less well off as it ever was. And yes, I do also take on board that the Blair government was as right wing as any in many respects. Sigh.

But not voting is wrong and bad and would make me feel sick as well. What to do?

As for the expenses, I hardly think any of the parties have covered themselves in glory, have they? There have been real abuses of it on all sides AFAIK. So I'm still pondering. I'm not surprised about the expenses thing - is anybody? And actually, lots of organisations work in that way, don't they? If you get x budget for things, you're encouraged to find ways to use it all up before it expires, whether it's the photocopy fund or a second home allowance. I can't imagine that MPs are the only 650 people in a population of 60 million who would take advantage if encouraged to. It's not right, but it's not surprising. And politics these days seems to attract people who are in it for their own greater glory (on all sides) rather than having ideals.

It is really easy to assume that they are all 'at it' but they aren't. Another MP in my town certainly isn't and he's from the same party.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5305149/Kelvin-Hopkins-the-MP-who-disdains-to-claim-MPs-expenses.html The difference is down to morality. I do hope that people consider this whole affair in the next general election.

It's a two-prong problem really, you don't want your local MP to be someone who is inherently dishonest (and even worse if they make excuses to justify their behaviour) because they are representative of your immediate community. However, if there is not anther same-party candidate standing for election in your constituency, then neither do you want your party to suffer overall as a consequence of that individual's actions by voting for a member of another party.

I do not have this problem as I didn't vote for the MP in my constituency (the cat-drinking-milk imitator) as I only moved here two years ago. I will examine all the candidates in the running but most likely with vote overall on the basis of supporting my favoured party.

I don't subscribe to the view that because the system is flawed it is the systems fault and that MPs have purely been exploiting it. They are responsible for that exploitation and if they had integrity would be actively working to change the expenses system (as, in fairness, some of them already do). That said, this isn't a new problem and actually I'm a bit beleaguered as to the sudden flurry of attention - this is age old, if I knew about it when I was 17 and taking my politics exams, I wonder why it's suddenly become the story of the week? Possibly it's because of the contrast with the state of national finances - that in a recession, people who are seem to abuse the system with impunity appear more of a pariah than under more prosperous economic times?

WT - Best way to kickstart your research is to get hold of each party's electoral manifesto, this will codify their fundamental principles and intentions for government. Usually you can find these online. Give me a shout if you want any further information.

Frankly, the only thing that will change the way I vote is a different voting system.

At present, living in a rock-solid Tory seat means that I usually vote for the most amusing candidate on the ballot paper, because I like shocking friends with the news that someone who reads at least two broadsheet newspapers a day, subscribes to the Economist and grew up watching Weekend World with his family every Sunday lunchtime voted Monster Raving Loony in 2001 and Legalise Cannabis Alliance in 2005.

But why not? They didn't affect the outcome one iota, and I knew that going into the polling booth. ?