UK General Election - May 7th 2015 (The Official Election Day & Results Thread)

[Phony Moderate]

Yeah, I suspect that there was much more to Ward's relatively strong performance than that...sadly. Any reasonable Lib Dem would have hoped for a bigger defeat for him.

[Phony Moderate]

Anthony Wells calculates that Labour need a popular vote win of 13% to win an overall majority next time...and that is on the current boundaries. To put that into context, their popular vote margin was 12.5% in 1997.

Of course Scotland could shift etc.

[Phony Moderate]

The SNP possibly does have a long-term problem. Look at the following modern examples of successful/dominant political duos:

Hawke-Keating
Blair-Brown
Howard-Costello
Chretien-Martin

Once of all those figures left the stage (though only Howard and Costello bowed out at the same time as each other) no one who was even half as impressive (in terms of political skill) emerged to replace them. The SNP's successful/dominant duo is of course Salmond-Sturgeon and beyond those two there doesn't appear to be any obvious successors who would be anywhere near as good.

[Phony Moderate]

A Comservative victory of one kind or another next time does seem likely right now. But when predicting far-into-the-future elections it is worth remembering Harold Wilson's most famous saying (which I also posted yesterday, incidentally).

After 2005 it was expected that Gordon Brown would steamroller David Davis (yes, him) in 2009 after a smooth transition between him and Blair occurred. But then the Tories elected Cameron, infighting broke out in Labour, Brown bottled an early election, the economy imploded and MPs expenses were exposed.

After 2001 many thought that the following Parliament would be dominated by a referendum on us joining the Euro (lol), public service reform and a battle between two modernisers - Blair and Portillo. But then the Tories decided to elect IDS, a major disaster occurred in Manhattan and Iraq was invaded.

[Phony Moderate]

The pollsters must be regretting that any pensioner turned out to vote.

[Phony Moderate]

According to Labour's private polling they were in a good position following the televised debates but their numbers sank during the last couple of weeks due to the SNP scare. The election was probably lost when Labour decided to (de facto) lead the Better Together campaign.

[Phony Moderate]

Worth noting that the Labour 'ABC1' vote is little different from that of 1997.

[Phony Moderate]

Having just watched a snippet of the 2nd Salmond-Darling debate (nothing better to do at this hour) I spotted what may have been key to ensuring the SNP's dominance of Scottish politics for a long time to come. Salmond pointed at Darling and uttered "In bed with the Tory Party! In bed with the Tory Party!" That had to have resonated.

[Phony Moderate]

Almost half the country doesn't even want to be in the UK, though.