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

[All Along The Watchtower]

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http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-32633462

[Silent Hunter]

Did Labour or the Tories lose their deposit in any places?

Labour lost at least one in Scotland (Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine) and possibly lost some others.

[Torie]

Nick Clegg is now officially the worst leader of any party this century.

Well, I suppose that might be arguably right from an electoral success standpoint, although the PC's back when lost all their seats but one in Canada when the Reform party split off.

But I must dissent strongly from my point of view that he was the worst leader. In fact, he was one of the best leaders ever. He took what he knew would be a politically damaging step to allow the UK to have a stable government in a time of financial crisis when that is what the UK really needed, and acted with honor and steadfastness in the coalition, even when it was politically difficult for him to do so. I salute him for his courage - and for putting Britain first over any party interest. Kudos to him. Would that more politicians act so selflessly.

[Bacon King]

Did Labour or the Tories lose their deposit in any places?

these are what I've found so far:

lost Labour deposits:

Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk; Ross, Skye & Lochaber; Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine

lost Tory deposits:

Glasgow NE; Liverpool Walton; most of their NI candidates

[Oakvale]

Nick Clegg is now officially the worst leader of any party this century.

Well, I suppose that might be arguably right from an electoral success standpoint, although the PC's back when lost all their seats but one in Canada when the Reform party split off.

But I must dissent strongly from my point of view that he was the worst leader. In fact, he was one of the best leaders ever. He took what he knew would be a politically damaging step to allow the UK to have a stable government in a time of financial crisis when that is what the UK really needed, and acted with honor and steadfastness in the coalition, even when it was politically difficult for him to do so. I salute him for his courage - and for putting Britain first over any party interest. Kudos to him. Would that more politicians act so selflessly.

I agree completely. It's very easy for a party of protest to sit on the opposition benches and whip up populism, it's quite different for them to actually take responsibility knowing the risks.

[Gary J]

It appears Cameron actually implemented Netanyahu campaign strategy applied to Scotland and well it worked.

I'm not familiar with LD interior politics, how do they select a leader? must he be an MP?

The party constitution requires the leader to be a member of the House of Commons.

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The leader is elected by the party membership, using in effect the alternative vote (the version of the Single Transferable Vote involving filling a single office).

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[Torie]

Will the Tories get rid of the speaker Berclaw (sp), whom allegedly they don't like?

[Barnes]

As I posted last night, parties simply don't do that no matter the size of their win.  The Tories would waste a lost of time on a political fiasco right at the beginning of the new Parliament.

[Marokai Backbeat]

What you call "honor and steadfastness" I call "abandoning campaign promises en masse and going against nearly all of his party's supporters' wishes." Nick Clegg fandom at this point is just sad.

Agree to disagree.

[Bacon King]

Will the Tories get rid of the speaker Berclaw (sp), whom allegedly they don't like?

He'll still elected via secret ballot so it probably wouldn't work anyway

[Torie]

What you call "honor and steadfastness" I call "abandoning campaign promises en masse and going against nearly all of his party's supporters' wishes." Nick Clegg fandom at this point is just sad.

Agree to disagree.

No problem, although I question the bit about "going againt nearly all of his party's supporters' wishes." I would like to think that most LD party members are patriots too, in the best sense of the word. The LD leadership knew that there needed to be spending cuts. They were not innumerate.

I assume that the Tories will now get about the business of excising all those depopulated Welsh coal mining constituencies that as Al so colorfully put it, would rather drink battery acid than vote Tory, now that the LD's are not around to stop that particularly implementation of the one person, one vote principle.

[Barnes]

Most the voters that gave the Lib Dems 63 and 57 seats respectively in 2005 and 2010 were Labour supporters protesting Blair and the Iraq War and fashioned the Libs as a viable center-left alternative.  They were certainly not happy to have in effect voted to put up a Conservative government. 

[IceSpear]

If England was so satisfied with the current government, then why were the Lib Dems punished so harshly? Was it something like:

Voted Lib Dem in 2010, satisfied with current government -> Conservative
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, dissatisfied with current government -> Labour
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, mostly as an antiestablishment/protest vote -> UKIP

Also, I wonder how much there was polling error, and how much was just a last minute breaking of the undecideds to the Conservatives due to a combination of a) Miliband's personal unpopularity finally catching up to him, b) Fear of SNP influence, and c) UKIP tactical voting.

[jaichind]

I am very interested in the 10 seats LAB managed to win from CON because the #1 CON target on LAB's list was actually held by CON.  I took a look at them.  4 of them were in the North, 1 in Midlands, 4 in London and 1 in Southeast.  What is interesting is that in 8 out of the 10 seat the CON vote share actually went up only to have the LAB vote share go up even more.  Only in 2 of them (both in London where LAB did the best in all regions relative to 2010) did the CON vote share go down. One by 0.9% which is almost nothing and one by 3.1% which represented a real loss.  

I also noticed that in 9 out of the 10 seats, the UKIP vote share is either fairly low or low when compared to seats nearby.  This tells me there was an attempt in pretty much all 10 seats at UKIP tactical voting.  It just was not good enough.

[jaichind]

If England was so satisfied with the current government, then why were the Lib Dems punished so harshly? Was it something like:

Voted Lib Dem in 2010, satisfied with current government -> Conservative
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, dissatisfied with current government -> Labour
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, mostly as an antiestablishment/protest vote -> UKIP

Also, I wonder how much there was polling error, and how much was just a last minute breaking of the undecideds to the Conservatives due to a combination of a) Miliband's personal unpopularity finally catching up to him and b) Fear of SNP influence, and c) UKIP tactical voting.

I feel it is b) and c).  Of course b) leads to c).

[ChrisDR68]

Most the voters that gave the Lib Dems 63 and 57 seats respectively in 2005 and 2010 were Labour supporters protesting Blair and the Iraq War and fashioned the Libs as a viable center-left alternative.  They were certainly not happy to have in effect voted to put up a Conservative government. 

If that was true the Labour popular vote would be something like 3 million up on 2010 and they would have won this election in a landslide.

Most lost Lib Dem voters seem instead to have gone to UKIP which would indicate they are general protest voters and not Labour voters.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Most the voters that gave the Lib Dems 63 and 57 seats respectively in 2005 and 2010 were Labour supporters protesting Blair and the Iraq War and fashioned the Libs as a viable center-left alternative.  They were certainly not happy to have in effect voted to put up a Conservative government. 

I think the results prove, if nothing else, that people were disgusted with the LibDems with very few exceptions, no matter where their votes were coming from.

What did the LibDems accomplish, except take the edge off some of the Tories worst instincts? The LibDems have been a mopey little caucus that have just propped up the Conservatives as if they were Conservatives themselves. To my knowledge they didn't achieve almost anything they campaigned on; the singular social policy achievement of the government, gay marriage, was spearheaded by Cameron himself. There hasn't really been much of some sort of economic revival that makes the UK stand out from the rest of the world's recovery, and regardless of the nice gesture of the coalition itself, the UK is more divided than it was when the Coalition began, despite the "honorable and steadfast" leadership.

If you support the LibDems you may as well support another party, since they either accomplish nothing or their power gets absorbed into another party in practice. And this is coming from someone who was beating the Nick Clegg drum in 2010 louder than most people, for the reasons Barnes points out.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The collapse of the liberals is more proof that Moderate Heroism is not a viable basis for a party. Seeing as a lot of Clegg's arguments were literally lifted from the Australian Democrats playbook, it is not surprising the party ended up confused and without a clear niche. The other strategy - coasting off local popularity simply could not work with a demoralised and broken activist base; and diminished funds.

[Barnes]

Most the voters that gave the Lib Dems 63 and 57 seats respectively in 2005 and 2010 were Labour supporters protesting Blair and the Iraq War and fashioned the Libs as a viable center-left alternative.  They were certainly not happy to have in effect voted to put up a Conservative government. 

If that was true the Labour popular vote would be something like 3 million up on 2010 and they would have won this election in a landslide.

Most lost Lib Dem voters seem instead to have gone to UKIP which would indicate they are general protest voters and not Labour voters.

I don't quite know why you think people voting for the Liberals who are the most euro-friendly of all of the major parties would suddenly switch to UKIP.  Sure, the Liberals since the 1970s have taken their fuel from protest votes, but those voters in the last two elections were protest votes from the left who did not want to have the government that they got over the last five years.

All of those people were certainly not true liberals in their hearts and can't be descried as part of the center ground that Clegg fashioned himself the leader of.

[Marokai Backbeat]

The collapse of the liberals is more proof that Moderate Heroism is not a viable basis for a party. Seeing as a lot of Clegg's arguments were literally lifted from the Australian Democrats playbook, it is not surprising the party ended up confused and without a clear niche. The other strategy - coasting off local popularity simply could not work with a demoralised and broken activist base; and diminished funds.

Oh it works out it some extent, provided you never take power and have to actually implement policy of any sort. The LibDems managed to build on previous successes reasonably well when they never had any responsibility.

[Torie]

If England was so satisfied with the current government, then why were the Lib Dems punished so harshly? Was it something like:

Voted Lib Dem in 2010, satisfied with current government -> Conservative
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, dissatisfied with current government -> Labour
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, mostly as an antiestablishment/protest vote -> UKIP

Also, I wonder how much there was polling error, and how much was just a last minute breaking of the undecideds to the Conservatives due to a combination of a) Miliband's personal unpopularity finally catching up to him and b) Fear of SNP influence, and c) UKIP tactical voting.

I feel it is b) and c).  Of course b) leads to c).

I notice that there are a lot of Labour held seats in Northern England, particularly in general the more rural ones, where the Tory plus UKIP vote was above 50%, and even more such seats if you put say half the LD vote in the center right column. Several more are very close to that. So that is something that Labour might worry about, if they don't want to become like the US Democrats, and be largely leashed to more urban seats. This might be particularly worrisome for them, if as may well be the case, Scotland, one way or the other, is gone for them forever more.

[ChrisDR68]

I don't quite know why you think people voting for the Liberals who are the most euro-friendly of all of the major parties would suddenly switch to UKIP.  Sure, the Liberals since the 1970s have taken their fuel from protest votes, but those voters in the last two elections were protest votes from the left who did not want to have the government that they got over the last five years.

All of those people were certainly not true liberals in their hearts and can't be descried as part of the center ground that Clegg fashioned himself the leader of.

The Lib Dem leadership is pro-EU but the ex-Lib Dem voters we're talking about (particularly in the South West where the Libs were wiped out) are quite Eurosceptic. It would be easy for these voters to switch to UKIP.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

What are some weird results people can find? I'm finding Isle of Wight pretty peculiar.

Lib Dems in 5th! Greens in 3rd! All odd.

[Хahar 🤔]

It seemed like the issue that hurt the Liberal Democrats most was tuition fees, in the sense that that was where they were perceived to have sold out. The raise in tuition fees was passed in December 2010 with the support of a majority of LD MPs. The questions I have:

1. Could the Liberal Democrats have stopped the government from implementing this plan?
2. If the answer to the previous question was no and the Liberal Democrats had withdrawn their support for the government over tuition fees, how would they have done in the following election?

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

At this point Labour, just like most of European Socialist/Social Democratic parties, should simply disband and start over.