So, who will win the election tomorrow? It looks like Labour will lose seats, and the LibDems will pick up some of the seats they lose. Will Blair still have a majority? And if he doesn’t, will there be a minority government or a coalition (given that it seems unlikely that either opposition party can win).
Put me down for Labour, with a majority around 40.
Don’t you know that Blair is Prime Minister for life?
I don’t really like the guy, but since he’s somehow pro-european (at least as much as a british politician can be), I will be relatively satisfied by his incoming victory.
Polly Toynbee doesn’t think so. The Iraq War seems to have taken a toll on Blair, when (very oddly) it hasn’t for the man who led him into the war, George W. Bush.
Labour by 90 seats.
Labour by 35.
(Please please please let the Lib Dems beat Oliver Letwin…)
I’ll go for about seventy seats majority to Labour with some surprising Labour losses in Scotland and some surprising Lib Dem wins and losses in England. Conservatives will come out up about twenty seats- gains from labour and losses to Lib Dems.
What I’d like to see- Labour loss of majority, coalition with the Lib Dems and PR introduced.
Bryan Eno summed up my position today on Radio Five Live-
I am not votong for a new government, I’m voting for a new opposition. I’d rather Labour had to out-think the LibDems rather than out-nasty the Tories.
Labour with a majority of 60-80.
May I ask why? He strikes me as one of the few Conservatives who are genuinely socially liberal, whilst being a rare adherent of both honest debate and intellectual honesty. While he gets accused of frequently rendering “gaffes”, it’s my experience that these are generally only in the context of the media’s expectation that a politician must hide his true intentions. If the Tories were more like Letwin and less like Howard, I would likely not be voting for Labour tomorrow. By contrast, the Lib Dems offer us nothing but the trite promises of a party who know none of them will ever be implemented; facile opposition to war at all costs, even more facile spending promises, and still more facile promises to tax only the super-rich. Tragic, when they could represent the real liberalism so completely missing from British politics.
Apologies if this is a hijack, but Letwin is one of my favourite politicians, and I’m curious to see why some demonise him so.
So far 6 votes for a Labour win by various margins. No votes for a hung Parliament? No votes for the Tories to win? The LibDems?
I’ve said right from when the election was announced that it was going to be tight. I don’t believe the polls and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tories crept in. If Labour do lose then Iraq will probably be the biggest reason.
Lib-Dems don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. They will probably pick up some extra seats, one of which I hope will be my constituency. I will be tactically voting for them in the hope that they can upset the sitting Tory, however it is very unlikely.
My ideal result would be a hung parliament with Mr Blair losing his seat to the independent candidate. I would like to see a Lib-Dem / Conservative coalition result. However if there is a hung parliament, it’s likely that the very minor parties - Plaid Cymru, the SNP, and the various NI factions - will play an important part.
I really don’t see the Tories winning: Howard isn’t sufficiently charismatic and their policies aren’t sufficiently radical.
But I reckon Blair will get a very modest overall majority, in which case we’ll likely be having another election next year.
May I ask where on Earth you see the common ground for that coalition partnership occuring?
I agree with Dead Badger on Letwin. Amongst the pathetic shower that are the Conservative front bench, he stands out as someone who actually seems to be a likeable person and capable of intelligent thought and debate.
Nope. A series of recent Economist articles (unfortunately only available to paid subscribers) indicate why the Tories will need an approximate poll lead of 9 points in order to achieve electoral parity with Labour. Such are the vagaries of demographic change that the Tories are in effect now a party of England’s south-east, and little else. Essentially nothing the Tories have done has managed to budge their poll ratings more than a couple of points beyond their current long-term level of 32%, and the futures markets for the electoral outcome are even more stolidly in favour of a Labour win. Even were the Tories to manage a poll of 36% to Labour’s 39%, they’d still trail Labour by roughly 80 seats in the resulting Parliament.
This election is a no-brainer, and the only interest will be in whether the inevitable low turnout throws up some interesting results in marginal constituencies. I find the prospect of an early election in the next term very remote; only slightly less likely than the prospect of a Lib-Dem/Conservative coalition. A UKIP/Green alliance is only barely less conceivable, given the current direction of the parties in question. No, this election will be another ho-hum mandate for continued Blairism, which if one looks carefully is fairly ill-concealed Thatcherism, but without the gusto. My only hope is that the worrying authoritarianism that Labour have displayed in the past four years will be forgotten, along with their equally worrying disdain for any sort of excessive achievement in schools. The Pope springs eternal…
'Scuse me, that should read “7 points”, and “parliamentary parity”. Oops.
I can’t see them getting that. A reduced majority on a very low turnout. Brown within a year or two.
Think Thatcher 87, forced out in 90. Chancellor Major takes over.
I hope Brown is a better PM than Major was, even though I salute JM on his Irish peace achievements.
If the question is ‘who will be PM on May 6th’, then yes, it’s a no-brainer. If the question is ‘will it have an important influence on future elections’, the answer must be ‘possibly’, at least. If the Lib Dems make significant gains (with a Labour overall majority), the two-party Government/Opposition structure could begin to look decidedly weak. And every piece of local tactical voting is a step towards abandoning first-past-the-post.
Compare it to the 2001 election - no credible Conservative campaign (even compared to this one), small gains by the Lib Dems, the biggest stories were the successes of independent candidates and a few thousand morons voting for the BNP.
My bolding - what do you actually mean by this?
Overall, my guess as well (as it has roughly been since last year).
Hmm, yes, I went in to rant mode there. It’s one of my large bugbears with Labour that they seem opposed on principle to what they term “elitism”, to the point where they seem to consider that not only should there be equality of opportunity, but equality of achievement. They seem almost opposed to the idea that some children are cleverer than others, and that this might make a difference to how they need to be schooled; no proposed idea can suggest that this might be the case. In ridding the country of selective schools, they have ended up with a system which selects on the basis of parents’ ability to find and move to an area with a top school, in effect meaning that the best schools are now selecting for the children with the most attentive and well-monied parents. Maybe it’s satisfying for some to trumpet the abolition of academic selection, but what it’s been replaced with is to my mind far worse. And to be fair, I think Blair realises this, and would quite like to move to a system with some selection, but I think he’ll have a hell of a time bringing his party along with him. It’ll be interesting, anyway, and I don’t think the Tories have anything more coherent planned. As for the Lib Dems, they seem content to simply promise to abolish tuition fees, let the richies pay for it, and assume the rest of the education system will bump along just fine. What a choice, eh.
That’s as may be, but I think as memories of the last Tory government fade, and Labour’s incumbency problem grows, tactical voting is going to shrink, not grow. I really don’t see an end to first-past-the-post for many years, since neither the Tories nor Labour have shown any interesting in ending it.
Incidentally, I am quite curious as to what you’ve got against Letwin; or are you more keen for him to lose as a blow to the Tories in general, rather than for any reason specific to him?
Oh, come on, New Labour thrives on elitism.
This is the opposite of Labour policy - they’re determined to get rid of the Comprehensive system.
Huh? We had the eleven-plus right up to 1997? 
(Getting rid of specific selective anomalies isn’t the same as a complete system being removed)
Nobody would claim that the system as it is works well. But what solution to the demand for places at ‘good schools’ would you offer? (And if you want selection, how does the ability of richer parents to get their kids better-prepared for tests not also give an unfair advantage?)
Both. (I find him to be revoltingly smug.)
My opinion of Blair, on Letwin I have no opinion.
As to the result of the election I suspect that we are in for a few more years of the grinning buffoon before he hands over to Brown. Hopefully with a reduced majority, but given the gullibility of the great British public, I’m not sure. Let’s face it he’s been lying to us for eight years now and we are still falling for it.
I think the Tories will unable to get a majority due to poor leadership and badly thought out policies. Unfortunately that description also applies to the other two big parties as well (apart from the majority part)
Not until we have proportional representation so that every vote counts will we be in a situation where people can vote with their conscience rather than tactically voting for a party they don’t like so that a party with a leader they detest will not get elected.
So here we go, four more years of Blair.