UK General Election, 2017 - Election Day and Results Thread

[Zinneke]

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;

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

Anyway,, I thought that while we pass the time the brits could predict where the marginals are going to go. Here are what Sky have classified as marginals. I imagine you have to add Belfast South and East for NI, any others there?

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I imagine we will see a few surprise big swings if turnout amongst youth or previously disgruntled voters is high for Corbyn, or even May's brand of conservatism (as opposed to Cameron).

[Zinneke]

Not likely to be posting much on the night if at all and perhaps not even after (explain why here), but here's something to keep in mind for you all...

Contrary to popular belief - and guess who is responsible for maintaining this! - the people running the campaigns in each constituency (and therefore the national campaigns) don't really know (and never do) exactly what is going on. The necessary data is is not collected - canvassing data is a much weirder thing than is widely assumed - and would be impossible to collate anyway. What they have are general impressions, and while these can be accurate they can also be extremely wrong. At the last GE I helped out in a seat that was lost by what turned out to be a rather large margin and on a much worse swing than the national average; on the day the people running the campaign very clearly believed they were slightly ahead. One issue is that local campaigns are very much based on a GOTV principle but in a General Election most of the people voting do so totally independently of the exhortations of rosette-festooned activists.

Or to cut an overlong post short: even the parties themselves won't know what has happened until 10pm, same as everyone else. Because it is also not the case that private polling for parties is any more accurate than published polling for newspapers.

A related point is that early rumours from the various counts are very often wrong. Often they start spreading around even before boxes are opened...

Finally, the implied the swings from all the pollsters...

BMG: -3.0
ICM: -2.5
ComRes: -1.5
Ipsos-MORI: -0.5
Panelbase: -0.5
YouGov: 0.0
Opinium: 0.0
Kantar: +0.5
SurveyMonkey: +1.5
Survation: +3.0
Qriously: +5.0

_{Qriously may be voodoo thus italics.}

So Cameron's targeting strategy (for example he targeted that LibDem safe seat of which name I forget) was not as clever as we thought then?

[Zinneke]

How is Sunderland such a safe labour Brexit area when it voted heavily for Labour brexit?

Rephrase it like this and you will get slightly less vitriol than the coal miner question.

[Zinneke]

Respect to Jeremy Corbyn, but remember they predicted hung parliament last time out.

[Zinneke]

The country looks ungovernable. Join the queue of European nations where some tough compromises have to be made.

France looks the most stable majority, along with Belgium.

Also Chirac 1997.

[Zinneke]

somebody got a functioning BBC stream?

Also any independents that are interesting?

[Zinneke]

I'll wait for Nuneaton and if that's solid Torry its over.

[Zinneke]

Rudd is curtain apparently.

[Zinneke]

Ian Duncan Smith is under threat. Most Tory seats in London seem to be.

So is Labour overperforming?

Yes, looking at Tooting, Darlington and Wrexham.

[Zinneke]

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

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

Apparently the local tory there was heckled and did not attend hustlings.

[Zinneke]

It'll be interesting to see how the usual anti-Corbyn brigade react to the fact that the potential new partners of the Tories openly welcome the support of a (still existing) terror organisation :

http://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2017/06/01/news/arlene-foster-criticised-after-meeting-uda-leader-days-after-loyalist-murder-1041833/

[Zinneke]

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...

Might be because I'm studying network data anaysis, but do you think this might be because this region is now very much part of a London political consciousness that is more exposed to London Labour issues such as housing shortages, etc. (I imagine some migrated from London)? Or is increased turnout of previouslly disillusioned voters?

Also, what kind of results did Labour get in Essex.

[Zinneke]

I'm also curious as to why Liverpool is so overwhelmingly Labour (and so strongly remain). It wasn't the only city that was destroyed by Thatcher.

Hillsborough

[Zinneke]

Part of a series:

(North East)
http://imgur.com/a/zKBUJ

Would love to go back further to when these really start to become more meaningful (two-party state pre-74) but no handy resources available to hand and I'm not invested enough to pick through every constituency manually.

Lib Dems actually beating the Tories in the Northeast in 05 and 2010.

Any high profile LibDems in the Northeast?

[Zinneke]

It's really not surprising at all in the British context (if anything, what's shocking is to see Labour win seats like Kensington). Thank God we have a country where class politics is still a thing.

I know, but class was not a defining characteristic of this election. If anything, that distinction has apparently diminished significantly this election. I'm definitely aware of Kensington, as it was the last seat called with like a 20 vote majority or something like that. Most London constituencies have and continue to vote Labour. I'm just curious as to why such core London seats have such a strong Conservative vote. I don't want to be the one that compares everything to American politics (and I do apologize in advance for the comparison), but it seems like the equivalent of Lower Manhattan being a Republican stronghold. Is it really just that the affluent in that part of London votes heavily Conservative (although apparently with greatly diminished numbers)?

The affluent vote in London has usually been strongly Conservative, yes.  That weakened this time, but Chelsea & Fulham, Cities of London & Westminster and Putney were safe enough to withstand the tide, unlike Kensington, which in spite of the reaction people have to its name isn't uniformly posh.

In most other cities, the urban middle class have largely abandoned the Tories.  See Bristol West, for example, which does contain some working class inner city areas but not enough to explain the scale of the Labour blowout.  I think there are two points; one is that central London has more really rich people than other cities and also that it has more people working in finance; I'm sure financial sector people are quite a bit more Tory than people in other sectors.

In places further out of the cities, especially once you get out of the areas generally regarded as part of the city proper, the middle classes do tend to vote Tory.  In spite of hints of a trend in their favour, I don't see a Labour MP for Sutton Coldfield any time soon.

Have the Brexit parts of London nearer to Essex (Romford) swung to the Tories at all?

[Zinneke]

Does anybody know wat will happen to the SDLP and whether Fianna Fail will run in the next election to capture the soft nationalist vote?