What do you think of these election promises - how will you vote?

ARE YOU VOTING FOR CRAFT?

Today the UK votes for a new government. We’ve pulled out the main points from the party manifestos concerning craft and the place of creativity and craft skills in education, and set them out side by side on the blog for you to compare.

What do you think?
Do their promises for the arts and for craft meet your hopes, needs and expectations?
Do these affect who you will be voting for?

It would be great if you could share it as widely as possible and let us know what you think, here on Twitter or on Facebook. We’d love to have as many opinions as possible.

Thank you!

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The Green Party, if elected, have promised to inject millions of pounds into the arts. They would get my vote if I really thought the candidate in this area had a chance of getting a seat in Parliament.

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My vote is for the Green’s for many reasons. The arts being one of them. I personally believe the longer we obsess about money & immigration and warfare (etc) the less we’ll actually have of any real value in the end.
If I vote for Labour or Tories, well, then we just get a repeat of what we’ve always had. And look where that’s gotten us? The more people that vote for a actual change- the quicker we’ll actually get it.
So my vote for the Green’s will count, hopefully along with many others who value the world we live in over how wealthy some top bosses somewhere are, and my vote will count as one less for Labour, Tories etc and will definitely be one less for UKIP.

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I have the misfortune to live in a safe Conservative seat, so it is likely that my vote will not count. If I were to vote with my heart I would probably vote for an independent candidate who is standing in my area an who has a strong focus on environmental issues, or failing that Green or Labour. However, I will probably be voting Liberal Democrat today because they have a better chance of kicking the Tory candidate out of this seat.
I personally find the Conservative attitude towards the arts and creativity in general to be completely shocking. Britain has always been strong, going back hundreds of years, in manufacturing and design, yet they give these fields (and small business in general) no consideration whatsoever. Instead they favour the financial services industries that got us into that pickle back in 2008. They seem to think that everybody will be happy in a little desk job answering the telephone all their lives and this is the only thing our children should be educated and trained to do (a bit of a sweeping generalisation, but I have worked in financial services and this characterizes the majority of jobs available there).
Also-why so much attention to the established names in the arts-theatres that show plays written years ago, museums which house paintings hundreds of years old? Don’t they realize that all these things were new and dangerous once, and if the arts are to have any future then the country must also support things which seem to be shocking now.

Sam :fish:

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I voted Conservative, though I’ve often voted Ukip. If I had voted for ukip today it might have let Labour in where I live, which is my worst case scenario. The Green party oppose nuclear power, which has given me a living for over 3 decades and which I believe is vital for this country’s power supply, so I couldn’t vote for them.

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Everyone’s vote “counts”. Please don’t think that just because the party you voted for did not win the seat that your vote was wasted or did not count.

Millions of people have died to give us the freedom to vote for a range of candidates from different parties without fear of violence or intimidation.

I am at a loss to see how my new Conservative MP can possibly represent me, given that our backgrounds, lives and ideals are so diametrically opposed and that he ignored me at the train station this week because I was there to catch a bus rather than a train, but short of emmigrating to Denmark or moving to Scotland, we’re stuck with each other for the next 5 years.