Ah, OK, I had been under the impression that the UK used a proportional representation system.
Estimating how 600+ constituencies will turn out isn’t straightforward. A lot depends on whether people, or enough people, are more focussed on voting against X rather than for Y and therefore whether they’re voting tactically for the candidate most likely to defeat X even if they prefer Y. There’s a chance Labour will lose votes in constituencies with strong Muslim communities because of disappointment with Starmer’s line on Gaza. ReformUK may siphon off enough Tory votes to give Labour or LibDems a seat or two.
Above all we don’t know how many will just not vote at all.
Here’s one estimate of potential seat distributions, but I’d hardly take it as gospel:
Wow, is the SNP really expected to take that big a drubbing?
Yes, the SNP have had a bad couple of years - one leader giving up (just before her husband was arrested, to do with party funding), her replacement crashing their coalition agreement with the Greens, incipient policy divides within the party, and probably general fatigue - they’ve run the Scottish government for a long time. Any brownie points for Sturgeon appearing more competent and human than Boris Johnson in the Covid crisis are long since devalued.
I rather think Starmer won’t want too big a majority - too many backbenchers with no prospects of promotion to ministerial office and no outlet for their ambitions but intra-party factional politicking.
Yep, “kids these days” and also a pro-military “support our brave boys*”. I wasn’t at all surprised to see positive coverage in The Sun, they lap this kind of crap up.
As a cynical attempt to get people to talk about anything other than the government’s record, or the state of the country, it’s…not a bad stab actually.
Almost everyone on all sides of the politican divide have rubbished it, as well they should: it’s not going to happen, we can’t afford it and it won’t address any of the issues it purports to solve.
But “desperation” doesn’t begin to describe the Tories’ situation. So it’s this kind of stunt or just withdrawing from the election (we can but dream).
* I think it’s not that long ago that “our brave boys” was a common kind of refrain in the tabloids. I presume they have a less sexist equivalent now, but I don’t read them often enough to know what it is.
I’d say if that polling bears out on election day then Labour will get a very large majority. Remember it’s the sum of 650 first-past-the-post elections. On the other hand Labour need an enormous swing from 2010 in lots of the seats they need to win and the incumbent usually has an advantage.
If they don’t get a majority then it will depend on the numbers. We can count out Reform UK who are right wing. The Greens probably will not have enough seats (if any) to make the difference. The options would probably be the LibDems or maybe the SNP.
And yet more trouble for Sunak from his own side:
(As for partners in a hung parliament - unlikely - it would have to be the LibDems. They would be on the way up, and the SNP on the way down - as a previous Liberal leader said in a similar situation, “We may not know who’s won, but we do know who’s lost”).
Yeah try telling that to somebody who can’t rent a house for less than a grand a month
This is the result of all economic policies having the (usually intended but sometimes unintended) effect of concentrating increasing wealth in the hands of a privileged minority. Either way, the right will quite happily accept the anti-immigrant vote, while doing nothing to curb immigration and continuing to divide the country into the virtuous deserving haves and the lazy undeserving have nots.
We will get what we vote for, at every election. (This isn’t America, yet.)
Wow. This thread started with a couple of definite tory apologists in here. It’s like a party at the the golf club.
“A good job” compared with the total shitshows that were Truss and Johnson? It;s like saying Fred West was a nice serial killer compared to Shipman…
Expected? My god, some people have VERY LOW expectations of the tories, and they’ve not even delivered anything close to anything, their flagship disaster of Brexit, solving immigration while making the country rich, did neither.
Nope, uncontrolled immigration isn’t the top issue. It’s the top issue that the tories wasn’t to project, and any claim that they want to do anything about it has long since been lost. They have deliberately made it worst, because “certain people” will vote for any old idiot because of the subject, on any old crap (Brexit, not solved anything).
8 years of ZERO gdp per capita growth (I wonder why that is, strokeychin). NHS being a perpetual disaster zone. The 75 potholes 5 feet from outside my front door. Councils going to bankrupt. Open corruption.
And their strategy is to make sure every teenager will never vote Tory again, Sunak, for once you have excelled yourself. I didn’t think you could do worse, but you did. You did.
Yes, while Brits always complain about the incumbent government here (moaning is pretty much the national pastime), the Tories of this parliament have been spectacularly bad and are due to be booted out en masse.
A stagnant economy for the best part of a decade at the same time as we’ve had high inflation and interest rates. (and the Truss / Kwartang “mini-budget” came close to doing a lot worse than that; the Bank of England had to do some quick maneuvering to essentially save the pound).
Cuts on every service you can name, from the crumbling schools to the NHS. Privatized utilities / infrastructure as bad as anyone can remember (e.g. scandals about sewage routinely getting into our waterways, trains horrendously expensive). Tory corruption / scandals even worse than in previous parliaments.
Most people I speak to are not optimistic about how many of these things can be fixed, and how long it will take, but just want to stop the bleeding.
In the latest news, a Tory MP who is stepping down announced that she was supporting the Reform candidate, rather than the Conservative candidate to replace her. This has been the worst start of an election campaign that I can remember.
The first General Election thread was started by me with this post: UK General Election {2024-07-04} - #24 by Fiendish_Astronaut
But @Wretching_Spanners complained it was bias so started his own - so for a quiet life I asked the mods to merge them.
Since I’m no longer the OP I feel more liberated to complain about the terrible job the Tories have done over the course of their time in office…
The Conservative government has been weak and unstable, and it’s not felt like they have acted in the national interest at all. In fact certain periods of Conservative rule have reeked of cronyism.
That is both the perception and, IMHO, the reality.
Since that election slogan we’ve had four different Prime Ministers, one of whom served for just 50 days. And after numerous political purges and disgusted resignations we’ve got possibly the lowest quality front bench I’ve ever seen in the UK - a set of ministers more interested in culture wars than policy.
Just to give you a small insight on the state of things, in last week or so:
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Foodbank charity the Trussell Trust announced that they have handed out a record number of emergency food parcels in the last year. In total, 3,121,404 parcels had been distributed in the 12 months up to the end of March with over a third going to children.
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The BBC revealed that United Utilities failed to stop the illegal pollution of Windermere in the Lake District for 10 hours in February and failed to report the incident until 13 hours after it started.
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Emergency measures have been enacted to delay court proceedings due to overcrowding in prisons.
Meanwhile the government has done the following :
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Esther McVey, a minister without portfolio (so she calls herself the minister for common sense and no I am not making that up), unleashed a new ‘war on woke’ with a ban on certain types of lanyards being worn in the civil service.
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Education Secretary Gillian Keegan announced plans to stop schools from teaching gender identity and to ban sex education being taught at younger ages. When asked how widespread the problem was she said "I mean, I don’t know because, you know, it’s not something that we’ve gone and done a particular survey of.”
It’s like this every week.
Over a year ago, I posted something on twitter about being invaded by the #beanomultiverse given how many cartoonish MPs would appear on television defending the government.
I think now most of them have OBEs, knighthoods or are lords.
Being one of the #twitterdamned, and me mentioning to, I dunno, ten or so of my friends and directly linking to it, it still only has 55 views, just about 14% of my followers.
There’s always been a “Lord Snooty and his pals” element in the Conservative Party, but they’ve usually been fairly well managed by their leaders in past decades. Brexit somehow left the baby gate open. At least the likes of Rees Mogg are among the vulnerable this time.
The notations on this chart offer some good context to the polling numbers.
What’s notable to me is that every uptick in Labour’s share seems to be due to some disastrous event that befell the government, rather than something positive Labour have done. But as opposition, it’s tough to set the narrative or get any traction for anything you do. Big tests to come for Starmer.
On the contrary - based on that episode, they would use a more traditional setting if he is serious about bringing back National Service.
National service is a great way to compensate young Britons for losing their right to live, work, and study anywhere in the EU.
I just realized that in a weird way, this kinda makes sense. According to the latest figures (YouGov survey of voting intentions, 23-24 May, source, PDF) only 7% of 18-24 year olds plan to vote Conservative anyway. So the thinking may be that there’s no harm in pissing them off (further). However… Rishi does seem to have managed to make this age group more determined to vote - with a surprising spike in numbers in the last few days. Fancy that, eh?
Since the election was called, 18-24 year old Britons have become more likely to say they are certain to vote
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