UK General Election - May 7th 2015 (The Official Campaign Thread)

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The anti-Ed campaign the Tories are running may work, but it runs the risk of becoming seen as nasty and cruel, and inadvertently humanise Ed via a healthy dose of pathos. See: The PC's anti-Chretien 1993 campaign.

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Plaid Cymru have launched their manifesto. Key pledges include:

Living wage by 2020
1000 more doctors for Welsh NHS
Transfer of justice system and policing to Cardiff
Opposition to Trident (duh)

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Yes. Both nationalist parties are hilariously hypocritical on energy issues.

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The valleys Labour machine is intense though, and previous PC local experiments have been disasters typically. UKIP will probably create some amount of background rumble in the very white working class seats, but probably only to the extent of wiping out any remaining Tories to about 0.5% of the vote.

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Wood is about as fluent in Welsh as I am (i.e. Not at all) IIRC

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Tbf Benton was deselected because he was becoming lazy and not bothering to turn up to work. Historically Hifly tends to forgive dull backbench hacks (especially in Australia) as long as they make a big noise about being soccon, but the constituency party was err less charmed.

Anyway, it's not the 1980s and Labour doesn't have an entryist problem. Let's cut this talks of purging.

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I guess it's too late for the SNP to find candidates to field in the rest of Britain. Shame.

If only they'd trademarked the name 'British national party'

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Question:  Does today's Conservative Party still like to talk about the days of Thatcher with misty eyes, a la the Republicans with Reagan?

The ones that enjoy being in power don't. The ones that like to be in perpetual opposition do - last year a bunch of backbenchers proposed renaming a Bank Holiday as 'Thatcher Day'. I swear, that party ain't right.

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A UK not based around class differences is unfathomable.

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Well Ashcroft has announced he is resigning from the House of Lords in order to focus more on his polls. So we have plenty more where they came from!

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Gorgeous George up to his usual unpleasant tricks in Bradford West. This time he seems to be trying to smear the Labour candidate who says she was forced into marriage at 15. Galloway apparently has received TOP SECRET information that proves she was actually forced into marriage at sixteen and a half.

Of course this does raise the question of how Galloway managed to get access to the private marriage certificate of his opponent.

He also had an imao worthy tweet war with a local pub.

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Kippers are also standing in 10 NI seats.

the Tories always feel obliged to run in NI. They are Unionists after all - so they normally have to drag whatever fossils willing to look silly on a stage.

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Could the Murdoch papers sulk over Leveson and refuse to endorse anyone?

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I do hope that Ed is presented as some sort of Don Draper-esque lothario from now on.

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The trouble is, the SNP basically want to turn Scotland into a tax haven - which is obviously kind of irritating for Labourites.

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On a completely unrelated note, I like scrolling through this thread and seeing the multichromatic repeated UK avatars. It has a very pleasing Pop Art aesthetic.

Also although manifesto launch day is all very important yadda yadda, what really brought my attention is the fact that some crazy has apparently restarted the Whigs!

Choice quote: “once you’ve got over the barrier of explaining it’s with an ‘h’, it’s not about hair, people are interested”.

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That Con gain in Steel's old seat is quite interesting. Will the Lib Dem vote there be squeezed? And if it does, which party will be the benefactor? (I.e. Would unionists try to prop up the Tories, or is there a reflexive 'anyone but the tories' instinct?)

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If Farage doesn't get in, I suppose that means Carswell would become leader? Someone like him - more cerebral, kind of kooky - would definitely bring a different edge to UKIP.

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LOL they're in my borough. Seeing as the major issue that Labour had a backlash in Enfield in the first place was the closue of local A&E services, I doubt privatised healthcare goons will go down a treat...

It certainly makes up for the shenanigans that occurred when Joan Ryan was reselected by the local Labour Party, against the wishes of literally everybody.

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I will say right now that a Labour defeat would almost certainly not be down to Miliband, the SNP or Lynton Crosby. It would be down to trendy middle-class liberal leftists who obsess about global warming, UKIP and marijuana on a daily basis.

I think you vastly overestimate the influence of hispters on the electorate...

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I'm sure they'll basically resemble their Canadian counterparts and collapse when people actually go into the booth. I think they stand a decent chance of being second in a handful of seats like Bristol W and Sheffield C, but I highly doubt their 'surge' (if you can call it that) will last.

I think there will be some regional pockets of Green strength that may save a handful of Coalition MP's, like Mulholland and Huppert; but really guessing at this point is a crapshot.

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My feeling is that so much of the uni vote has been lost for good (even before the Green rise) for this election, the only thing that will save them is anti-coalitin voters to be split between different parties. That's why I'm almost starting to feel that Clegg is in a weaker position than more ... generic Lib Dems like Mulholland. The DPM is such a disliked figure amongst students that I doubt many students would bother wasting their vote, but perhaps a more neutral figure will end up with students casting votes for Greens instead.p

My thinking has been for a while to watch university seats: there could well be some substantial LDem-to-Green movement in many of those, particularly those held by the LibDems. Of course this will mostly be terrible news for the LibDem incumbents, even if not quite as awful as LDem-to-Labour movement. A loss of half a vote (effectively) is better than the loss of a whole vote, but...

Thing is, the Greens are probably gonna save some uni seats for the LibDems - Bristol, Leeds NW ie.

Thing is, uni seats are only a very small minority anyway and aren't hugely important in the grand scheme  of things. I highly doubt the Greens will make an impact on the Tory-Lab marginals where the election will be won.

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LMFAO a Young Tory in his twenties tried to start a Cameronettes fandom claiming to be a  thirteen year old girl. You can't just beat that grassroots Milifandom Tories,

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YouGov, London: Lab 44, Con 32, UKIP 10, Lib Dems 8, Greens 5

Also, 78% say they are 'absolutely certain' to vote, which is higher than the UK as a whole (around 70%) but below Scotland (over 80%).

Why are the Greens not stronger in London? Is Labour poaching potential Green voters because of the tightness of the polling?

I'm addition to what Al said, the Greens are targeting surprisingly little London seats. (For example, even on their very optimstic list of 12 target seats, the only London one I noticed was Holborn and St Pancras. Other London seats where Greens have had ephemeral success or favourable demographics (e.g areas of Lewisham, Haringey, Islington etc.) seem to have less invested in than non-London student filled areas - Oxford W, Cambridge, Norwich S, Sheffield C etc. Heck, the Greens are throwing more at such inexplicable locales as St Ives, Reading E and Solihull than at London)

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LIb Dems have hilariously silly broadcast out which might as well be anthem for moderate heroism, involving an elaborate metaphor about The Highway Code.