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The Results and the Headlines
It was the most unpredictable night in political history.
No-one foresaw that David Cameron would win an outright majority. The Labour party had more votes but fewer seats than 2010. The Liberal Democrats have been all but wiped out.
Big beasts of Westminster who won’t be returning include Vince Cable, Jim Murphy, Douglas Alexander, Danny Alexander, Lynne Featherstone, Simon Hughes, employment minister Esther McVey and of course Ed Balls.
Nigel Farage failed in South Thanet and has still never been an MP.
The SNP are the third party with 55 seats.
The polls said too close to call but in the end the Tories had a clear win.
Election Deadlock
No more opinion polls are allowed now the election is under way but every single poll in the last 24 hours has the Labour and Conservative parties tied. Several put the two parties dead level.
Britain will have another hung parliament but it is impossible to predict this whether David Cameron or Ed Miliband will be prime minister. The rules state that Cameron stays in Downing Street until we know who can form a government. That could be weeks away.
YouGov, who produced the biggest of the final polls interviewing over 10,000 voters, predicts Labour and the Conservatives will both have 34 per cent of the vote. UKIP is on 12 per cent, the Lib Dems have 10 per cent and the SNP has 5 per cent. The SNP share will translate into 50 or so seats whilst UKIP, who will get almost two and a half times as many votes, will get fewer than five seats.
The outcome is just too close to call. If you have a vote, make sure that you cast it before 10pm tonight.
Longest Ever Campaign Has No Effect
This general election campaign has been unlike any before it. The date was known almost four and a half years in advance. Before the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, passed in 2011, election campaigns lasted just a month.
The 2015 campaign kicked off in earnest when the Conservatives unvelied their first campaign poster on January 2nd, arguments about the TV debates started a couple of days later, so we are talking four months of solid electioneering. The longest election campaign in British history has made almost no difference at all to voter intentions.
Compare The YouGov poll at 100 days to go:
CON – 34%
LAB – 33%
UKIP – 14%
LDEM – 7%
GRN – 7%
with the TNS-BRMB poll, today the last day before the vote:
CON – 33%
LAB – 32%
UKIP – 14%
LDEM – 8%
GRN – 6%
Note a single party has changed their share by more than one per cent. Given that the polls have a 2-3% margin of error that’s no change at all.
Scotland on The Brink
For the first time in generations, there is a serious possibility that there will be no Scottish MPs in the party of government. Three days ago Alex Salmond told the Scottish people that “Scotland stands on the brink of unparalleled influence at Westminster.”
In fact the opposite is true. Scotland stands on the brink of having zero MPs in government and negligible influence at Westminster. If there are no Scottish MPS from the Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Labour parties, there will be no Scottish MPs in government.
To put that in context, since the turn of the twentieth century there have been thirteen English Prime Ministers, seven Scottish and one Welsh. That’s counting Cameron and MacMillan as English.
The current government has twelve MPs representing Scottish constituencies and two in the Cabinet. It is unheard of for there to be no Scottish MPs in the Cabinet. Though hard to believe, if Scotland returns a full sweep of SNP MPs, the Secretary of State for Scotland will be from an English or Welsh constituency.
Nor will there be another Scottish referendum. Salmond and Sturgeon have ruled it out in this parliament and it would be unlikely any government without a single Scottish voice would be likely to call one. Salmond’s words were half right, Scotland really does stand on the brink.
Delia Follows Coogan with Vote Labour Message
Delia Smith, the nations favourite cook, has followed actor and comedian Steve Coogan with a plea for voters to vote Labour. She warns that Conservatives would be a “recipe for disaster” for the NHS and believe that under a Tory government it would be “run like a supermarket.”
Steve Coogan issued a video over the Bank Holiday weekend saying that the election “is on a knife-edge”. Coogan is no stranger to campaigning in the public eye as a prominent member of Hacked Off, the campaign for media regulation.
Miliband: The Russell Brand Interview
The LibDems Play it For Laughs
Of the three parties that have dominated politics in the UK for the last century, it is the Liberal Democrats that seen their support collapse in the run up to the current election. They believed that in joining a coalition they would see more sunlight and their credibility would rise. In truth it took just months for their share of support in the nation to fall from 23% at the election to less than 10%.
Their support has bumped along at around 8% and no-one has been paying them much attention. With the new nationalist kids from UKIP and the SNP now on the block, they just haven’t been getting the airtime.
Whether its desparation for attention or a genuine strategy the LibDems have been playing the election for laughs in the last few days. When Grant Shapps hit the spolight for allegedly tampering with Wikipedia the Lib Dems put out a press release from Paddy Ashdown saying “Grant is a wonderful guy – he is a credit to the Conservative Party …and if, like me, you have been lucky enough to meet him, you know you have been touched by greatness. Quite simply, a colossus.” Nick Clegg also suggested that it might have been Michael Green (an alias Shapps has used in the past) that was responsible for the edits.
At the weekend when Cameron forgot which football team he supported the LibDems created an Error 404 page that said “Just like David Cameron’s loyalty to Aston Villa, this page does not exist.
It’s a good gag, but maybe not enough to turn the tide.
Swap My Vote
There has never been a closer election in the history of the UK and in the first past the post constituency system there is every chance that your vote will count for nothing.
There is much talk of tactical voting especially in Scotland where there is usually just one real alternative to voting SNP in each constituency. The UK sytem can lead to a strong sense that if the party you support isn’t popular in your constituency there is little point in voting.
A new platform called Swap My Vote offers a potential a way to make your vote count. The Swap my Vote platform helps pair voters who want to swap, each casting each other’s preferred vote in a constituency where where it could really count. Swap my Vote introduces two individuals to each other and the ballot stays secret. You are responsible for trusting your partner.
This isn’t totally new. Pairing takes place in the House of Commons, where a member who can’t attend, say for health reasons, pairs with an MP on the opposite bench, to cancel out each others vote. In the USA vote swapping was found by the Supreme Court to be protected speech under the First Amendment.
In the 2010 election, an average of just 29% of votes cast gave a candidate victory and over half of votes were for losing candidates. In a sense 70% of votes were ‘wasted’. There’s no way of knowing how many voters will take up the offer and what the level of trust will be but it’s nothing if not an ingenious attempt to deal with the concept of ‘wasted votes’.
Can We Support a PM Who Doesn’t Know Who He Supports?
David Cameron is the PM who made Andy Coulson his Communications Director, either knowing that he was guilty of phone hacking and not caring, or not knowing. That was a forgivable error, it seems. He also made the schizophrenic Grant Shapps, Conservative Party Chairman; another dubious judgement call.
It transpires that there may be an even bigger issue of trust at play. Can we vote for a PM who doesn’t remember which football team he supports? As the campaign enters the last two weeks David Cameron tells voters that he’d “rather you supported West Ham”. Cameron is the nephew of Sir William Dugdale former Chairman of Aston Villa Football Club and is on the record as a Villa fan. He has even taken his son to see them.
West Ham play in similar colours to be fair, but given that the inevitable coalition negotiations that will follow the May 7 vote, can we trust a man who doesn’t know which side he’s on?
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