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

[ChrisDR68]

There have only been three Labour leaders who have won a parliamentary majority in the House Of Commons:

Clement Attlee (twice), Harold Wilson (three times) and Tony Blair (three times).

Can Ed Miliband add himself to this list?

I severely doubt it myself...

[ChrisDR68]

So, When do the polls close tonight?

10pm with the BBC's exit poll around 20 minutes later. It was very accurate in seat totals for each party in 2010.

[ChrisDR68]

If this exit poll is anywhere near correct the remaining Lib Dems won't want to touch the Tories with a barge poll.

They will have to get an arrangement with the DUP.

[ChrisDR68]

LOL Lord Ashdown saying he will eat his hat if this exit poll is right...

He didn't looked shocked but I'm sure he's quacking inside at these figures

[ChrisDR68]

I predict the result will be inbetween the exit poll and the YouGov poll of today...

[ChrisDR68]

Kay Burley on Sky is saying the Tory vote is up on 2010 and the Labour vote is down.

That cannot be right.

There's no way Labour is lower than 29%!!!

[ChrisDR68]

Turnout of around 70% according to a lady on ITV.

So similar turnout to 1997...

[ChrisDR68]

Should get a lot of results around 1.30am... so unfortunately another 50 minutes to wait.

[ChrisDR68]

Pretty clear that the Lib Dem votes are going more towards the conservatives than labor at this point.

Towards the Conservatives and UKIP about equally it looks like.

[ChrisDR68]

Lib Demmies have a seat... woohoo!!

[ChrisDR68]

Jeremy Vine's swingometer's:

Con to Lab 0.2%
LibDem to Con 7%
LibDem to Lab 7%
Lab to SNP 27%

On results so far.

[ChrisDR68]

These elections all seem like some monty python skit

This is the 9th UK General Election I've observed and is a long, long way the weirdest of the lot

[ChrisDR68]

ITV are saying Alistair Carmichael is to hold Shetland so it won't be an SNP wipeout in Scotland.

[ChrisDR68]

Peter Kellner saying the vote shares could be around 36% Conservatives and 31% Labour.

Labour on around their level of support they achieved in 1987.

[ChrisDR68]

Nick Clegg wins and looks quite cheerful considering...

[ChrisDR68]

Yay Esther McVey loses in the seat that's next door to mine

[ChrisDR68]

Cameron doesn't appear too relaxed.

He'll find being PM in this parliament much harder than in the last one. His right wingers will make his life hell just like they did with John Major.

[ChrisDR68]

I think I would have felt less depressed, in a weird way, after the 79, 83, 87 and 92 results than I do now.

History repeating itself yet again. The polls were wrong and the Shy Tory Voter phenomenon is very much alive and well.

The Tory vote underestimated for the 6th general election in a row.

It feels quite like 1992 again except for what happened in Scotland and the brutal crushing of the Lib Dems.

[ChrisDR68]

Is this the most dissapointing/crushing election night in the history of the Labour Party?

Can't be far from it. Of course, 1970 and 1992 are also good candidates (strange how often the pollsters strongly overestimate Labour's chances). 1983 was terrible of course, but so expected that it can't have felt anywhere near this bad.

No, 1992 (in my memory at least). Really this election result was very predictable, we just allowed ourselves to be kidded by the polls that perhaps Miliband and Balls weren't as unpopular as we all knew they really were, and that losing Scotland didn't matter because the SNP are left-wing anyway. All a big house of cards and the cold light of day reveals these beliefs to be the fallacy we secretly knew all along. But a new leader, a miserable Tory government run by the 60 or so far right in their ranks, and a big win in 5 years beckons

I think it will be incredibly difficult for Labour to win remembering their wipeout in Scotland. Not impossible but incredibly difficult.

It's doubtful that any of the possible new Labour leaders will have anything like the broad appeal that Tony Blair had. He was very, very unusual in that regard.

[ChrisDR68]

Popular vote totals:

Conservative......... 11,334,920 (36.9%)
Labour..................... 9,344,328 (30.4%)
UKIP........................ 3,881,129 (12.6%)
Liberal Democrats.... 2,415,888 (7.9%)
SNP.......................... 1,454,436 (4.7%)
Greens..................... 1,154,562 (3.8%)
Others..................... 1,106,417 (3.7%)
--------------------------------------------------
Totals.................... 30,691,680 (100.0%)


Change from 2010:

Conservative.............. +631,266
Labour........................ +737,811
UKIP........................ +2,961,658
Liberal Democrats.... -4,420,360
SNP............................ +963,050
Greens....................... +889,319
Others........................ +758,668

[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.

[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.

[ChrisDR68]

Is this the first time there have been no Liberal or Lib Dem seats in the South-West of England since the 1950s?

Yes

You think the LD's might be permanently finished there (well nothing is perhaps indubitably "permanent," but you know what I mean)?

They might win a couple of seats back at the next election as the Liberal tradition is battered but still exists there. Being very pro-EU does them no favours though in this part of the country.

[ChrisDR68]

This election result was similar to 1987 in at least 3 ways:
1.Although the share of the vote for both Labour and Conservative was lower in 2015 than in 1987, in both elections the gap between the 2 parties was around 7%.

2.Although the final seat result in this election was 331-232 while in 1987 it was 336-271, if you gave Labour the 40 seats back from the largely even more left wing SNP this election would be 331-272.

3.In both 1987 and 2015 the polls were pretty much tied with most analyists predicting that Labour would have the slightly better possibility of forming a government.

I think you mean 1992 not 1987

[ChrisDR68]

The results was largely a wash from 2010 except the Lib Dems collapsed and the Tories benefited the most, hence their narrow majority. Labour lost seats because they lost more seats to the SNP than they gained from the Lib Dems.

The funny thing about this general election is that the Conservative and Labour popular vote barely changed. The reason why the Tories failed to win a majority in 2010 was because of the large number of Liberal Democrat seats. If the Lib Dems had had a similar number of seats in 1992 John Major would have failed to win a majority in that election too.

My feeling is that a majority of the protest vote that the Lib Dems hoovered up in 2005 and 2010 switched en masse to UKIP (and to a lesser degree to the SNP and Greens). That meant the Tory vote which stayed steady was enough to take all those Lib Dem seats in the south.

The fortunes of the Lib Dems is largely dependent on the gap between themselves and the Conservatives:

1992 - a gap of 24% - Lib Dems win 20 seats
2005 - a gap of 10% - Lib Dems win 62 seats
2010 - a gap of 13% - Lib Dems win 57 seats
2015 - a gap of 28% - Lib Dems win 8 seats

The difficulty for the Lib Dems is that they are competing with the SNP, UKIP and the Greens for largely the same protest votes.

In 2005 these parties polled in insignificant numbers. In 2015 this changed radically meaning the road back to recovery for them will be very long, very hard and very slow.