{"id":11494,"date":"2014-05-22T22:32:46","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T21:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/?p=11494"},"modified":"2014-05-22T22:32:46","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T21:32:46","slug":"european-elections-in-abingdon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/?p=11494","title":{"rendered":"I’m one in 380 million"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"European
\nAs one of 380 million people in Europe entitled to vote I went into my local polling station: the Guildhall in Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England, and received a voting paper. The voting paper for our region, South East England, was very long and included 15 parties – most with ten candidates. <\/p>\n

The elections are for membership to the European Parliament – the only directly elected EU institution, and one with great powers, but not easy to understand. <\/p>\n

At a normal national or local election I would come home after voting, and watch with interest for the result. This time there will be no result until Sunday – when all nations have voted. Even then – given the complex political groupings in Europe – I won’t know who has won. The media here in the UK will concentrate on how well the UK parties have done – something we do understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As one of 380 million people in Europe entitled to vote I went into my local polling station: the Guildhall in Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England, and received a voting paper. The voting paper for our region, South East England, was very long and included 15 parties – most with ten candidates. The elections are for membership […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}