UK General Election, 2017 - Election Day and Results Thread

[IceAgeComing]

Klartext; shouldn't you be getting back to washing your collection of black shirts rather than posting in here?  I'm sure that we'd all be grateful, its not like your posts are at all remotely interesting or true anyway...

is a seat only declared in the uk after all the votes in a seat has been counted or do they do it like they do in the US where they call a seat as soon as the polls close

The BBC will only ever count a seat once its been formally declared, some of the other broadcasters (Sky definately do this, ITN have in the past but god knows if they do this time) will start counting seats pre-declaration based on reports from their people at the count - although because of that they only do it for seats where are clearly one way or another.  It means that they run ahead in terms of results, but usually they won't actually say what seats that they'll given away to the parties until the declaration has happened.

[IceAgeComing]

I imagine that they'll be covering it on BBC World if you have that available to you - they also might stream it on the BBC website, I don't know whether the BBC News Channel is only available in the UK for streaming.  Sky have also streamed on youtube before; that might be a back-up option.

I have voted!  I was seriously thinking about going Labour in the end, but when I got there I ended up voting SNP because I have a feeling that its going to be close.  Turnout seemed pretty normal for about the time that I normally vote, the area that my polling place serves is very diverse (odd mix of middle class suburbia and a section of a deprived estate) so my hunch is that high turnout here doesn't actually benefit anyone - especially since the SNP/Tory divide isn't so much on class lines as Lab/Con is.

Truth hurts, I know. Hopefully you're not too triggered when attending your local AntiFa Clown Meeting tonight.

well that's an odd way to describe my cricket training; although i'm sure the lads won't mind being called anti-fascists, and a fair few can be rather clownish while batting...

I think that the influence that the weather has on turnout is incredibly over-rated by the way - I read something by someone who saw no significant difference in turnout or swing between places with rain and places without rain - sure if you've got like monsoon conditions or a blizzard or something then that will cut in on turnout but not just a bit of rain, we're all rather used to it.

Also from the people that I know who are Labour party members we all generally agree on the same prediction - Tory majority of 50, SNP closer to 50 then 40; Libs picking up a few in Scotland.  We'll see if that ends up being right...

[IceAgeComing]

Playing cricket here or in UK? I'm surprised you managed to find somewhere if its the former.

Nah in Scotland: although there is a club in Brussels that I would join if I was ever working there over the summer.  Actually came across a South Asian family playing a game in Parc Cinquantinaire last November which was interesting...

[IceAgeComing]

While 350-360 is good it is probably disappointing as the Tories were expected to get any where between 395-405 when the campaign began , and 395-405 seats likely means the Tories would be safe for 10 more years, while with 350-360 its possible that they will lose next time. 

big majorities don't guarantee success at the next election - if they went in to the next election with Major-level popularity levels then they'd struggle a lot.

[IceAgeComing]

Labour were elected with a majority of near 100 in 1966; Tories won a majority in 1970.  The Tories had a majority of near 100 in 1959; Labour barely got a majority in 1964.  Its not like getting into three digits secures you for an election because each election is quick clearly its own event; just because swing voters vote Tory this time doesn't mean they will in 2022 (assuming that we go that far)

[IceAgeComing]

He and Gideon are on ITV's coverage, if you are a machochist

[IceAgeComing]

theoretically any high turnout in Labour areas shouldn't influence the exit poll - that's not the way that they do this

[IceAgeComing]

Kensington is having a third recount later today; count suspended for now

[IceAgeComing]

Kensington is having a third recount later today; count suspended for now

Why? surely this posh safe tory seat isn't that narrow

within 30 votes apparently

[IceAgeComing]

talk on Vote UK is that they have some discrepency in the numbers in Kensington (perhaps they're missing a few votes somewhere) and someone else leased the counting hall this morning so they have to stop now - they'll re-do the count elsewhere tonight and see if that fixes everything.

[IceAgeComing]

Its quite amusing that after one of the big last minute attacks the Tories made on Corbyn the whole "HE'S FRIENDS WITH TERRORISTS, HE MET GERRY ADAMS IN THE 80S" thing; they now will be supported by the DUP who once, eh, had links to Loyalist paramilitaries.  Just one of those funny things...

[IceAgeComing]

Some of the swings in the south are... unreal.  Like we've all talked about Canterbury - but there's a bunch of other seats with similar increases.  Hove - Tory from until time began most likely until 1997, they regained it from Labour in 2010 before it went back to Labour in 2015) now has a 20,000 majority with a 15% swing from the Conservatives to Labour.  Brighton Kemptown, Tory since 2010 and before 1997 it was only Labour between 1964 and 1970: 10,000 Labour majority, swing of over 10% to Labour.  Portsmouth South - never Labour, Liberal Democrat from 1997 to 2015, Labour's share of the vote is up 20% and there's a 10% swing to Labour there as well.  Its not even just "metropolitan" areas where this is the case but even the rock-solid safe Labour seats - Labour got 17,000 votes of the Isle of bloody Wight - collectively, they and the Greens were only 10,000 votes behind the Tories (in a place that voted quite heavily to leave the EU).  That's the real interesting part of this election in my eyes...

[IceAgeComing]

Minority with DUP support. Note also that the SNP don't vote on a lot of English domestic legislation.

The SNP rule of the past (and probably not one that they'll try to break very often considering this parliament and the election result) is that they don't vote on matters that affect only England provided that there's no impact on Barnet consequentials - so if there's a bill that doesn't affect Scotland but would reduce, say, health spending; the SNP would vote against it citing the impact that it would have on the Scottish budget (since that's how the Barnet formula works).  Although in the past very few legislation has been purely England and Wales only; often there are little sections that end up impacting Scotland - an example was the Marriage Equality legislation for England and Wales which legalised same sex marriage there... but also in British army bases overseas; which technically meant that it wouldn't be treated as exclusively an "English law" in parliament.

That's going to affectively mean that the Tories have a majority on most England domestic matters that's totally workable - although I'd imagine that the SNP would vote on anything that the government would treat as a matter of confidence though...

[IceAgeComing]

Sinn Fein are now claiming that any kind of formal deal between the Tories and the DUP would violate the Good Friday Agreement - I don't know whether that actually is true but it certainly wouldn't be good for Northern Ireland: because the body in charge of the talks to restart the assembly is... the UK government.  A similar thing between the UUP and Major's government in like 1996 caused issues at that time as well.

Not going to take their seats though - they believe a lot in that whole "no oath to the Queen thing.

[IceAgeComing]

Brexit is the big thing in inner London - my experience is that young people in that part of the world were especially affronted by the whole thing, and its probably the place where that by itself would have been enough to spike youth turnout.  There's also the fact that the Tories campaign was very culture war like and nationalistic and that was never likely to play well in London; while Corbyn's manifesto would.  I think that the sky-high cost of living in London also makes that sort of politics a lot more attractive to a lot more people than in other places - rent is so high there, and ownership of a flat or a house is impossible for the majority of people who live there without decades of saving for the deposit for example.

[IceAgeComing]

There are big variations within that though - the big cities have swung to Labour a lot (Birmingham Edgbaston is a perfect example of this - a Labour marginal in Birmingham with a retiring incumbent that most people thought would go Tory, but actually they got the biggest majority they ever have there) while outside that the swing was lower or towards the Tories.

[IceAgeComing]

Charles Kennedy's old seat gives the SNP its joint largest majority. Discuss. Also... erm... Coatbridge et al and Glasgow Provan/Springburn for Labour... did the CORBYN IRA CORBYN IRA thing end up having a slightly different effect to that intended?

Thanks for getting this out so quickly; lots of interesting things in here...  The SNP's relative success in Edinburgh still interests me - Labour seemed to be confident in Edinburgh North and Leith and the Tories moved resources out of South West late in the campaign and everyone thought that it was because they were sure of winning it - if so then it shows the value of complacency in elections!

Also thanks for using the names for the Glasgow seats should have rather than boring calendar directions - they are more descriptive...

[IceAgeComing]

The current review is unlikely to continue in its current from though so it might not be worth thinking about it too much...

[IceAgeComing]

Electoral Calculus have done an analysis of how the results would have looked on the provisional 2018 boundaries.

Headline figure: C 298 Lab 245 SNP 32 SF 9 DUP 7 LD 7 PC 1 Ind 1 Grn 0, which is three seats short of a majority for the Conservatives but enough to govern alone as the combined opposition without Sinn Fein is only 293 seats.

Ugh, of f**king course it would help the Tories.

What are the odds that this abomination ever comes to pass now that the Tories don't have a majority on their own?

Probably not high because these boundaries really hurt the DUP.

But would that mean they'll just change the NI boundaries while leaving the GB ones unchanged?

The calls of gerrymandering would be sky high if they did that - it's just not the done thing.  I assume that they'll change the rules to a position that the DUP would like and restart the review - but that sort of thing would also be very popular with the other parties since they'd probably go back to something like the old rules.

[IceAgeComing]

Who really knows?  That's just based on the assumption that the DUP will sink the review (the early calculations I've seen for the new boundaries would have the seats split 9 Sinn Fein/7 DUP which they clearly don't want - can't say for sure though) and considering that the current seats are based on 2003 electorates with Wales having a representation bonus that everyone promised to get rid of seven years ago, they'll need to do something.  My assumption is that they'll amend the bill to make it something like 650 seats and a 10% margin of error which would fix most of the problems that the bill has (letting the commission go a little higher or a little lower in terms of seats would be even better, doubt that will happen though) and restarting everything would probably be preferred - although who knows if we even have time for that to go through this parliament...

Another reason that the review might be stopped now is simply the massive increase in the electorate since they started the review - they're using electorate sizes from right after the introduction of individual voter registration when the electorate was deflated quite a bit - and before the European referendum and this election engaged people to actually register.

[IceAgeComing]

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This actually isn't very surprising: the trend with this question in the past is that supporters of the government tend to not want an election while supporters of the main opposition party do.  Considering that Labour are leading in the polls now...

[IceAgeComing]

Also Foot was certainly on the left of the party - but the main problem as Al has said wasn't so much with that but with the fact that the left decided to run on a much more radical platform than Labour now are: plus also the perceived power that Militant had in the party (probably overblown but in some parts of the country the left were very dominant) - in some places you had MPs being de-selected for being from the right of the party, for example.  There's a reason why the current leadership haven't gone down that route (although they've spoken of doing that) and why the manifesto was reasonably moderate: they don't really want there to be a split in the Labour party since that didn't work very well for them in the 80s, and basically put the left of the party out of any influential positions for a long time - and these faction debates are mostly about power, after all.

Also the "left" of the Labour party meant something a little different in the 80s; you had your Bennite-type people sure (which make up the new hard left) but then also your Militant types who were Trots and removed from the party during the 80s (when Militant was chucked out they formed the Socialist Party of England and Wales which now form part of TUSC and aren't particularly relevant - not to be confused with the Socialist Party of Great Britain who're a very odd lot - and my favourite section of the far left just because of the impractically of their policies) - Corbyn and co are the former.  Not that in terms of policies much changes at the moment:

[IceAgeComing]

its not an exit poll and although its got a larger sample size than normal; cross tabs that small aren't going to be particularly accurate.

[IceAgeComing]

well it seemed to work for them in 2015...

[IceAgeComing]

The polls weren't really covered in 1945 in any depth - the assumption was that Churchill, the great war leader, would win the election when in reality the electorate remembered how the (Tory-dominated) Coalition didn't fufill their commitments post-WW1; so they didn't trust the Tories pledge to implement the Beveridge report - plus also Labour had proved themselves in the eyes of many in 1945 to be a sensible governing party due to their involvement in the war time government - there are still areas that voted Labour in 1945 that never have since.

1981 was the height of Alliance-mania: the Tory government was incredibly unpopular (sky high unemployment, they were still 100% committed to full Monetarism which really didn't work and they began to move away from it before the 83 election); Labour were busy in factional warfare (with Militant being the thing that the Press would continually talk about) so the centrist Liberal/SDP Alliance appeared like the only credible option.  They declined for a few reasons: the Falklands War and the aftermath thereof created a big rally round the flag affect for the government; plus by 1983 the Alliance wasn't this shiny new thing in anywhere near the same way as it was; so voters began to move back to the big two.   They still did incredibly well in terms of vote share with 25.4% (higher than any centre party has managed since the 1920s); but it was incredibly uniformly distributed so they only managed to win 20 seats - while Labour who got barely two percent more (27.6%) managed to win 200 seats.  Shows the stupidity of FPTP in anything more than a pure two-party system, really...