You’re right. I subtracted wrong in my head. As of now, with 170 seats not yet reported:
Conservatives – 237 (need 89 for a bare majority)
Labour – 181 (need 145 for a bare majority)
Liberal Democrats – 36
Northern Ireland:
DUP – 8
Sinn Fein – 4
SD&L – 1
Alliance – 1
Scottish National – 6
Plaid Cymru – 3
Other – 1
Ah, so his is one of the losses you’ll regret most.
Labour held on to Hammersmith. This is bad for the Tories, because they’ve really been pushing their candidate, Shaun Bailey as the symbol of the “new Conservatives”; young, black, social and community activist.
Yes. It was clear in my head. It’s getting late here.
No, it’s getting late here. It’s getting early there. People are starting to get up to go to work.
The BBC is predicting final seats as 306 Conservative, 262 Labour, and 55 Lib-Dem.
Now Lord Adonis and Chris Grayling are arguing about the whole “moral right” thing.
It’s a little ironic that the Lib Dems have done so badly in this election and yet are the ones who look like they’ll be in the position to decide the PM, making them the strongest party in this Parliament.
BBC projects 306 seats for the Tories which would probably mean they form a minority government. The smaller parties could come into the picture ; I am unclear on these parties and who they would support.
It looks like a major disappointment for the LDP who may not win much more than last time. The only silver lining is the possibility of a coalition with the Tories who would gain a stable majority. The interesting issue is how much the Tories will be willing to concede on electoral reform.
Caroline Lucas just won! She’s wrong about everything but still.
According to Prof. John Curtice, “On average, where the ethnic population is less than 2%, the swing from Labour to Conservative has on average been 5.1%. In contrast, where more than 25% belong to an ethnic minority, the average swing is just 1.7%”
It’s interesting because the Tories did a lot this time to try to reach out to minority voters, and it doesn’t look like it did any good.
Good news in that Nick Griffin just lost, and Labour’s majority in Barking actually went up. There was a Monster Raving Loony Party candidate for the seat too.
Now projecting 308, 260, 53.
Where are the other two seats going?
They didn’t say. I think the first forecast was before the Green’s victory, so that may be one of them.
I have been looking at the smaller parties and apart from the DUP I don’t see much potential support for the Tories. You have various left-leaning parties like Green, Alliance, Sinn Fein and SDLP. The SNP and and Plaid Cymru will possibly hold the balance of power. Who would they support and what price would they demand? Labour, Lib-Dems and all these smaller parties will likely reach the 326 figure but what kind of government would it produce?
Possibly the Tories would be quite happy to sit in opposition to a unwieldy and unstable coalition government which becomes increasingly unpopular and collapses in a year or so.
Damn, what the hell happened to all that talk of the Lib Dems doing well?! Tories currently have 279 seats, even if Labour and Lib Dems formed a coalition it would only be 273 seats in total.
Yet add up the total votes; 9.6 mil for the Tories, 13.5 mil for Labour + Lib Dems! Say what you want about the U.S. electoral college, but the parliamentary system is far from perfect too.
This isn’t a problem of parliaments, it’s a problem of First-past-the-post systems, which the US also uses. If there was a viable third party in the US, you’d see exactly the same thing happen there too.
Actually the British system is the pretty much the same that elects the House in the US. The reason you don’t get the large discrepancy between votes and seats in the US is the absence of a significant third party like the Lib Dems.
I stand corrected, said the man in the orthopaedic shoes. Tories up to 283, LDs just got to 50.
What’s next? Last time something like this happened back in the 70s they had another election a few months later.
When doing that kind of electoral arithmetic there’s a few factors: One seat isn’t getting done for a few weeks because a candidate died, Sinn Fein’s seats don’t count because that party will not sit in Westminster, and the Speaker’s seat doesn’t count either. Tricky innit.
February 1974. Ted Heath was Conservative Prime Minister. Labour got more seats, but nobody had an overall majority. Heath tried to form a coalition with the Liberals. When that failed, he resigned. Harold Wilson then became Labour PM. He did not form any coalition. His minority government lasted only until October 1974, when in the second general election of 1974, Labour got an overall majority of 3 seats.