United Kingdom

Does BBC appear to have a pro-Conservative slant?

That's what it appears like to me.

NorthReport wrote:

Another right-wing government and it may push the Scots over the edge.

It looks like Scottish independence will be greatly strengthened tonight if the SNP win almost all of Scotland's seats. And if the Conservatives have a referendum on being in the EU, Scotland will likely have another referendum on staying in the UK.

Respect's George Galloway has lost in Bradford West to Labour's Naz Shah.

JKR wrote:

 

Live election results:

http://www.bbc.com/news/election/2015/results

Ah, results are starting to come in.  Labour is ahead so far.

SNP surges at Labour's cost

http://www.bbc.com/news/live/election-2015-32594267

Nick Clegg should also resign. His coalition with the Conservatives has almost completely wiped out the LD's.

Labour seems to be gaining seats outside of Scotland, from the Liberal Democrats, but the Conservatives are also gaining seats from the Liberal Democrats. An effective majority is 323 because Sinn Fein doesn't take their seats. 

The Speaker also doesn't vote so the real # required to control the UK House of Commons is 323.

NorthReport wrote:

Do the Cons want to leave the EU?

They want to renegotiate their relationship with the EU and put that new relationship to a vote in the UK. One reason they support an EU Referendum is because UKIP wants out of the EU and they are demanding a referendum. In order to keep Conservative voters from voting for UKIP, the Conservatives have promised a referendum on the EU.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_referendum_on_United_Kingdom_mem...

Quote:

In January 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron promised an "in/out" referendum on British membership of the European Union in 2017, after a period of renegotiation with the EU, if the Conservative Party wins an outright majority at the general election of May 7, 2015.

So, as of now . . .

Conservatives  -> up 17 seats

Labour -> down 29 seats

SNP -> up 49 seats

Liberal Democrats -> down 38 seats

http://www.bbc.com/news/live/election-2015-32594267

Caroline Lucas retains Brighton Pavilion for Green Party.

Debater wrote:

I hope that the Green Leader is re-elected in Brighton.

What's going on there?

Apparently she got back in.

Policywonk wrote:

Debater wrote:

If you look at this map of the UK, you can see it coded according to party.

Look at all that yellow across Scotland!  You can see one tiny red dot in South Edinburgh.  That's all that's left of Labour in Scotland.  SNP has swept the rest of the region.

Most of England is Conservative Blue.

Green Party retains their seat in Brighton.

http://www.bbc.com/news/election/2015/results

Actually the reason why the Conservatives are doing so well is the collapse of the Liberal Democrats. More of their seats have gone Conservative than Labour, and the Conservatives only needed less than 20 net increase for an effective majority, which it looks like they will get. The map is a bit deceptive as it doesn't reflect population concentrations. Perhaps not as starkly as the Alberta election map, with most of the NDP seats in Calgary and Edmonton. 

So why did so many Liberal Democrat seats flip to the Conservatives? Most LD voters felt betrayed and punished the LDs. So why would it go to the senior coalition partner in the government they detested?

Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls loses seat

Helen Pidd

 Ed Balls speaks to other delegates during the recount in Morley and Outwood. Photograph: Craig Brough/Reuters

The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, has lost his Morley and Outwood seat, becoming the highest profile Labour casualty of a terrible election night for the party.

Balls, who has been an MP since 2005, failed to defend his 1,101 majority in the face of a stealth ground campaign from the Conservative party.

The Tory candidate Andrea Jenkyns was declared the winner after parties “mutually agreed” a recount at around 7am. Rumours had swirled since polls closed that the Tories were feeling confident about their chances. Balls disappeared before midnight and surfaced grim-faced at 7am to receive the news that he was behind on around 260 after the first count.

Forty-year-old Jenkyns, a music teacher and amateur opera singer, has essentially been campaigning full time since her selection in April 2013. She even quit her job in a secondary school and sold her house in Boston, Lincolnshire, moving back home with her mother Valerie in order to dedicate herself to defenestrating Balls.

Selling herself as “non-politician” from humble beginnings, Jenkyns didn’t go to university and she worked her way up from being a Saturday shop girl to a senior retail manager.

In her late 30s she decided to retrain and has recently achieved an Open University degree in international relations and politics. On her website she describes herself as “an upfront, direct, and strong Yorkshire lass who passionately stands up for what she believes in.”

Her father was a lorry driver who built up his own haulage business. He died a few years ago after contracting the superbug MRSA in hospital in 2011 - it was this tragedy which spurred her on to run for parliament.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2015/may/08/election-2015-live-...

LANCASTER & FLEETWOOD, like HOVE, is another constituency previously held by the Cons where the collapse of the Lib Dem vote went to Labour in large enough numbers to flip the seat from Con to Lab:

http://www.bbc.com/news/politics/constituencies/E14000776

Debater wrote:

JKR wrote:

NorthReport wrote:

There will have to be serious constitutional change in the UK if they have any hope of keeping Scotland in.

 

I don't think the Conservatives are interested in changing the constitution for Scotland. In this election the Conservatives have been warning the English that a Labour government would be a puppet government of Scotland and that the English have to vote Conservative if they want to prevent that from happening. That strategy seems to have worked for the Conservatives in this election but it might end up tearing the UK apart. And maybe many Conservatives wouldn't mind Scotland leaving as Scotland is to the left of England.

It's interesting to see the surge of the Scottish National Party happening during the same year that the t.v. series "Outlander" has become so popular. 

There probably isn't a direct relationship between Diana Gabaldon's popular series and tonight's vote, but it is a reminder nonetheless of the long historical tensions between the Scots & the English and the fact that many Scots still remember the way they were treated.

It looks like nationalism has trumped other considerations in this election. It seems to me that the Conservatives played the nationalism card and it won them the election and now they are going to have to govern with the consequences of doing so. The Conservatives and UKIP won well over half the vote in England and the SNP won over half of the votes in Scotland squeezing out Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the process.

Debater wrote:

So although Labour lost ground in the UK (particularly in Scotland obviously) the silver lining is that they still picked up some seats.

And the total collapse of the Lib Dems could be a warning to other centrist & center-left parties that if they help the Conservatives to govern, they may pay the price from progressive voters later on.

There is a warning here to the Canadian Liberals.  The Trudeau Liberals have lost a lot of progressive voters over their support of Bill C-51.  I have seen a number of Liberal-NDP swing voters who were previously in the Trudeau camp switch to the Mulcair NDP this month.

When the LD's agreed to form a coalition with the Conservatives five years ago, very many people thought then that the LD's were going to be decimated in this election because of making that decision. For over 4 years the LD's have been hovering under 10% in the polls so their fate today should come as no surprise.

But looking back at the situation they found themselves in after the last election, it is hard to see what the LD's should have done instead of what they did. They could have formed a very unwieldy coalition government with Labour and the nationalist parties but that would have required cooperating with the separatist SNP and even then they would have had a majority of only a couple of seats or so.

The LPC here in Canada could find itself in a similar situation that the LD's were in in 2010 if the CPC gets a strong minority with over 165 seats and the NDP comes in a weak second. Would the LPC form a coalition with the 2nd place NDP if it required outside support from the BQ? Hopefully the LPC would but that would have negative consequences for the LPC, as would propping up a CPC government.

In Scotland, there was a rout of all Unionist parties. This broke the back of Labour's chances.

Even last night, Labour showed it could snatch a Tory riding in England. The problem is that the Tories were better at the reverse.

If more Lib-Dem voters had gone Labour, the deal with the SNP would have gone through. If even more Lib-Dem voters went Labour, Labour would have had a majority.

There is no evidence that Labour lost votes to Ukip. In England, the number of Labour votes went up.

It looks like a lot of Tories went Ukip, and a lot of Lib-Dems went Tory to stop that from happening.

Also, the Tories have become much more generally Eurosceptic, which neuters much Ukip and Labour sentiment.

In Canada and the UK, Liberal votes are up for grabs. They way they shift can have a huge effect, as we saw in Alberta, and now last night in the UK.

Despite his loss and resignation, Ed Miliband has not left the Labour Party in bad shape. He ran a good campaign, and contributed to an increase in the popular vote. Unfortnately other parties were better able to capitalize on that than him.

It woudn't have happened if Liberals had voted Labour. Even if the Liberal vote had held, Labour would have got more votes than the Conservatives in many seats, and we might be looking at a Lib-Lab coalition, which they had when I was living there.

Miliband did better in the popular vote than Brown did. Maybe the next one will do better than that. Labour it seems still has some recovery to do from the Blair-Brown years.

The new Labour leader won't be fighting against Cameron in 2020, we already know that.

Given the choice between austerity-lite and austerity, voters opted for the real thing.

under Miliband the party never effectively challenged the Tory narrative about the deficit. How could it, since it clearly accepted the Tory premise that, despite Britain retaining sovereignty over its currency, and even though Britain can currently borrow at historically low rates, the country was still somehow so much at risk of going the way of Greece or Ireland as to require a “triple lock” on spending. Every time Ed Miliband hummed a vaguely populist tune on the economy, Ed Balls, his shadow chancellor, would break into a rousing chorus of “No new spending.” (Watching Balls go down to defeat was one of the day’s few compensations.) The only politician to confront the austerity con head-on was Nicola Sturgeon—and look where that got her.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/206729/fear-wins-big-britain