Alien Instructions, video 3: This election is important – here's how to choose your MP

By Douglas “Jalnor” Carr

Published 15th February, 2025

Greetings, Earthlings. The United Kingdom of Great Britain is preparing to elect its local representatives in Parliament. But most of the country is in the grip of the mainstream media puppet show giving half-truths and manufacturing its audience's opinions. Or they think it's a popularity contest for the rather Punch-And-Judy party leaders.

So how should you actually vote? Welcome to Alien Instructions.

First things first... do you want your National Health Service sold off gradually to friends of government ministers? Do you want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer regardless of who's actually good and skilled and determined? Do you want the Post Office scandal to end up being the tip of a very large and ugly iceberg? Do you want to see our country taken apart and sold down the river for ministers' profits regardless of who dies to do it?

If you answered yes to any of these questions... well, you need your head checked first, but that makes you a Tory. Or you might also like Keir Starmer if you're only a bit in favour of some of those. Otherwise, I'm going to start by saying vote for literally anyone except a right-winger. So no Tories, including red or yellow Tories, or their even worse cousins of the insane far right, like UKIP, Reform and the BNP. Please. If your local Labour or Lib Dem candidate is a decent person, then yeah, but a Starmer government would not significantly change the course, he's mostly just promising to let go of the accelerator, so don't make Labour your default.

I'm a data nerd, so this is not just an opinion, this is based on statistics that you can find linked below. The only good Tory is a fictional Tory. Feel free to pick someone you think is an exception and look them up. I'd be interested to know what you find, so let me know in the comments.

So... if you're still watching, you've probably accepted that your local conservatives shouldn't be getting your vote. You might be thinking about just not voting. They're all assholes, right? All out of touch, all in it for their own gain, right?
Wrong.

There are definitely plenty of those about, but there are decent people and they need your help to get elected. It's not just your right, it's your moral duty to your fellow citizens.

Especially the daft ones who will vote against their own interests because “the guy's funny, right?”

Or maybe you feel like not voting is a protest. None of the main parties talks your talk, or they've all failed you again and again... and no-one ever votes for the alternatives. Except that guy on the bottom right. He'll vote for the most insane bigot standing and there's nothing you can do to stop him. Even if only four votes are cast, it'll still be considered a valid election. You don't want those types to be the loudest voice, you don't want the most insane bigoted grifter on the ballot to become your MP.

You could spoil your ballot, which means basically making any mark on it aside from one pencil cross in a valid box, causing it to not be counted. That's actually an ancient defence against candidates paying for votes, if you do anything that might give away that this is your ballot paper, it's not counted. That used to be a thing – “vote for me and turn the L in my name into a T, I'll give you five pounds.” Back when five pounds could buy you a house. So anything other than that cross makes it a spoiled ballot. These days, it's more of a protest thing. But let's face it... the number of spoiled ballots, even when it's huge, is local news for about five seconds and no-one cares.

In the 2019 election, there were over 102 thousand spoiled ballots – which is just 0.367% of those cast, the biggest lot being in the speaker's constituency of Chorley, where they totalled 1303, just over 3% of all votes there. There's good reason for that, but it's not the subject of this video. In 2nd place was Leeds North East, where there were 531 spoiled ballots, worth about 1% of votes cast, which was also the biggest percentage of spoiled ballots aside from Chorley. Interestingly, in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, there were 324 spoiled ballots and Sinn Fein beat the Ulster Unionists by just 57 votes, while in Bury North, there were 111 spoiled ballots and the Tories beat Labour by 105 votes. But the elections there were still valid. Did you ever hear about that? Probably not. Because no-one cared. It doesn't even make the popular statistics, I had to trawl through the Commons Library spreadsheets and write my own sorting formulae in new columns to get those figures. Spoiled ballots, like spoiled children, do very little.

So you have to vote, but not for the nutjob. Will your vote even count?

Overwhelmingly, yes. Every election I've looked at, non-voters outnumber the votes for any party. What you see above is the breakdown for the last UK election. If every registered voter who didn't vote in the last election had picked a candidate that actually got next to no votes, over 100 of those candidates would have won a record-breaking landslide. The most egregious example is Kingston upon Hull East in Humberside, where Labour took 12,713 votes, the Tories took 11,474, while a staggering 33,196 registered voters didn't turn out.

They could have changed everything. They could have elected anyone by a country mile. There are another 214 constituencies where non-voters were the biggest group. There are actually only 76, out of 650, where enough people turned out that the non-voters could not have changed the result.

So yes. Your vote does have weight. You should cast it. If you're not registered, it's actually too late at the time this video goes up, but there's always next time.

But that still leaves whose name to actually put your cross next to.

Step one, you need to find out who they are. There's WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk, where you can find the official list of candidates for every constituency – and, if you don't know the name of your constituency, stick in your postcode and it'll tell you. Even I've been there, more often than many British adults have voted, because I've moved about so much. If your current MP is standing again, or any of the candidates have previously held any political post, you can find their voting record on TheyWorkForYou.com.

Once you know who's standing, look them up anywhere you can. Find out what they've been saying in local hustings if you haven't been. Go to the next hustings if you can. Find out what their party, if they have one, is all about and factor that in, it probably plays some part in their thinking. Find out their stance on every issue you can. Find out if they've committed any crimes in their past, or ever been banned from social media – those sorts of things usually end up in the local news somewhere. Even Wikipedia often has certified verifiable gold on anyone who's held a public position if you want to rule out a bad candidate. That's what you're doing, you want someone with no history of corruption, crime, bigotry or any of the other major problems turning our political landscape into a Jurassic Park day.

You can't be 100% sure who they are, but if you can see them speak at a hustings or talk to them when they're out campaigning, it comes down to how good a judge of character you are – can you sniff out when people fib?

If you'd like to learn how to catch people fibbing, there are probably instructional videos for that, by people who can explain it rather better than me. But if I explained this well, I'd appreciate a like, subscribe, maybe share the video... and, if you'd like to help me make more videos, sponsor me on Patreon or elsewhere. Lots of links below. Peace and long life.

This article was originally a YouTube video from 26th June, 2024 here.