Not partisan in any way at all?

Not really, as you'll see.

The "danger" is largely theoretical, and plays into fear. I see you have fallen for it, but perhaps you were predisposed to distrust the Scots.

Don't be silly. I have no problem trusting Scots, I'm just very distrustful of Scottish Nationalists whose entire raison d'etre to this point has been seeking to break up the Union by whatever means necessary. The idea that they'll now be looking to play a constructive role in governing the UK as a whole when there's nothing they'd like better than to see Scotland alienated from the rest of us strikes me as a naive assumption. It would be directly contradictory to their interests.

It's not just stoking English reaction, it is stoking Scottish feeling. Last year, it was vital that the Scots remain part of the Union, this year, they are dangerous and we can't by any means accept the democratic will of the Scots voters.

Who is refusing to accept the democratic will of Scottish voters ? If they choose to send a bunch of nationalists to play a spoiling role in Westminster then that is of course their right. Nobody is trying to stop them, but it's right to point out the constitutional carnage that might ensue for the rest of us, especially when you consider how much of the business that Westminster carries out is devolved matters in Scotland itself.

And it is not legitimate for the Conservatives to use Trident as a pawn - Fallon's recent statements suggest that he would not support a Labour vote on renewal of Trident, in order to show how dangerous it would be to allow the SNP to vote against it is rank hypocrisy and totally undermines his "national security" argument.

Did Fallon actually say that he'd vote against trident renewal ? He may have done, but that's not what I remember. If he did then it was an obvious lie anyway, there's no way the Tories would vote it down.

It should be pointed out though that Sturgeon has already said non-renewal of Trident is a 'red line' for any deal with Labour. As such, if she keeps to her word then even if the Tories do support renewal of Trident the SNP could in theory render a Labour minority government unworkable. Would Miliband be willing to jettison Trident in the end in order to secure a workable government ? We don't know, but it's valid to ask the question. Fallon did it in a brainless way, typical of the man, but that doesn't mean that it was unethical to pose it in the first place.

I don't believe this cant. Labour was associated with the 2008 crash and ensuing recession and deficit. The damage from that is still there and would be regardless of who the leader is. And the 'competence' of him is indeed a message that the Tories and their friends in the press have been spamming us with for years, so despite the fact that he is up for difficult debates and facing real people (while Cameron can't even abide the NHA Party at his local hustings, let alone agree to more than one face to face debate with opponents), and looking - well, not a superstar, but a lot better than we are being told he is.

The relentless attacks on Miliband were an error, one of many made by this largely incompetent Tory campaign. He could only end up looking better by comparison because nobody is as useless as he was made out to be. It doesn't really change the fact that Labour ought to be running away with this election though. The Tories didn't even win a majority last time when the wind was with them and since then they've made a huge number of difficult and unpopular decisions.

Actually, a half-competent Tory leader would have won the 2010 election easily, and not allowed Clegg to get any leeway.

No disagreement from me. Cameron is a useless party leader. He's especially bad at election campaigns, where his usual tactic of trying to float above the fray and stay out things doesn't work and he gets forced into making a lot of public appearances. Inevitably the more we see of Cameron the more vacuous and uninspiring he appears. Lynton Crosby obviously knows this, which is why he's not allowing any unscripted appearances and why he was so keen for the debates not to happen.

My point about the incompetence of Labour was in part connected to the fact that the Tories are also badly led. This election should be an open goal.

Well, it seems that we have a repeat of 1992. Not just that the polls understated support for the Tories, but that Cameron will have a very slim majority to try and manage.

Labour did badly. Where I am we went into reverse, nor able to get back seats like Nuneaton or North Warks. My constituency saw the Tory lead almost double.

I thought the Lib Dems would hold more seats, but they really have collapsed. UKIP got lots of votes but only one seat. The SNP almost swept Scotland.

We have at least not got the "crisis" the pre-election polls predicted (Tories largest party but no support for a majority, Labour second but able to take power with SNP support). But I am not hopeful about the outcome we do have. A lot of people will be unpleasantly surprised by what the Tories do with power.

I made a comment about your election on the post about the US Constitutional Convention; perhaps it's more appropriate to put it here.

And the tail wags the dog (or perhaps the "Scottish Terrier"? lol)

I see that everybody is shocked. I'm shocked too; not because I am aware of anywhere near what you guys are, but from what you've told me so far I was expecting a hung parliament.

Perhaps the voters of the UK figured, look, I don't want to end up with a bloody hung parliament so let's send the b*&%#s back whether we like them or not, and just pray we don't end up with a government in doubt for weeks? (Like Israel typically does!)

Three seats are still uncounted. But David Cameron has already been re-invited by the Queen to form a government (is that the proper way of putting the formal aspect of it?) even when it was at 326. It's now at 328 (three seats uncounted, seven when it was released he went to the Palace to meet with the Queen). But wait, what happens if 3 (or 4) MPs have naughty scandals, or die? I think before that would trigger a general election, would it not have? But now it certainly wouldn't because of the aforementioned Act. Correct? I still cannot believe you guys have to wait five years. The Canadians aren't that patient! (Certainly the Australians are not: they have no fixed terms, and the max. term is THREE years for a Federal Parliament!)

Danivon: I can totally sympathize with your objections to such a deliberative body being elected entirely based on FPTP single member seats rather than something more "innovative" or with a little more electoral "zazz" like STV or PR lists (like the German Bundestag or the Irish Dail). I am looking at the results--now only one seat remains to be counted--and it seems that the Lib-Dems were hammered like a ten-shilling prostitute, excuse the vulgarity (and the anachronism), to the great aggrandizement of the Scottish National Party. I can see that you are totally correct about FPTP being somewhat "anti-democratic": the LDP won 7.8% of the popular vote but have 1.2% of the seats in the House of Commons; the SNP polled 4.8% of the popular vote but have 8.6% of the seats in the House of Commons.

But I still do not think either of us should start engaging in what I consider "electoral innovations" but that's probably a topic for the other thread (wherein it involves the USA that is).

OK, now it's 330 to Tories as a real majority. But my question still stands: since that is pretty slim, will anything happen if 6 MP's buy the farm, or resign? and if not, would I be right in assuming that that exact situation would make things very politically bad before the Fixed-Term Act and the present development of a greater than 2 1/2 party system? (Because with the tails having wagged the dog in this election and the last, the way they have, this seems to have ushered into British partisan politics a sort of "new era", to me at any rate but I could be wrong about that).

I had understood that, previously, you (the victorious party) would have wanted to win the game by more than just a couple of touchdowns, in order to have a more "comfortable" majority, right?

I also like how you guys name your constituencies. Our congressional districts have numbers. (Probably makes them easier to gerrymander without drawing too much public attention to the fact.)

BTW another dumb question, is the vote hanging at 649 seats, not yet 650, because the Speaker hasn't been elected yet, and he's like, the 650th seat or something?

Cameron is not a charismatic politician. Would you say this is a referendum on the Tory view?

It's interesting to me that in both the UK and Israel voters moved to the right more than expected by polls and media. Although the countries have very different circumstances, there are similarities as well, especially domestically.

That was astonishing. I had a hunch that the Tories would do a lot better than the polls were predicting but obviously I never thought they'd get anywhere close to a majority. I was thinking about 290 or so would be a decent result for them and I expected it to finish up about there. The biggest shock for me was Vince Cable losing his seat. Not only is he one of the most popular of the Lib Dems, he also had a huge majority and his seat was something like number 100 on the Tory target list. When I saw that one come in I realised that we were looking at a Tory majority government. Winning the likes of Gower and Vale of Clwyd from Labour was also a frankly baffling achievement.

Where do Labour go from here Dan ? It strikes me that the picture isn't quite so bleak as it appears. This was a good election to lose for Labour in my opinion. Obviously it would have been better to lose to a minority Tory government, but nevertheless it allows you to get rid of Miliband and refocus with a better team and a clearer picture of what you need to do to rebuild, while Cameron will now have to struggle with party management and implementation of many unpopular cuts (not to mention the looming EU referendum issue).

The issue for Labour is that they're going to be pulled in two directions. Some will look at what happened in Scotland and say that they need to move even further to the left to win back their core vote up there while others (the old Blairites essentially) will say that the election was lost in the English marginals and that Labour need to tack back to the centre and start to find ways to rebuild the kind of big tent that Blair had. I must say my sympathies are more with the latter. Even if Labour had somehow held every seat in Scotland they'd still be sitting on only 270 seats. I think the Scottish Labour Party perhaps needs to be allowed to go its own way and adopt a much looser relationship with the national party, allowing a new Labour leader to tack back to the centre ground. Who that leader should be is less obvious though. I really like what I've seen of Dan Jarvis, but in truth I've not seen very much and this could just be a kneejerk reaction.

I did do some reading on BBC here and there, and listened to a few remarks from the last Conservative and Lib-Dem party conferences on BBC radio (I have that app on my droid phone that lets me listen to those stations) and got the feeling that the LDP and the Conservative parties would have loved, all along, to dump each other; if only they could have. It seems to me your last government was the ultimate marriage of inconvenience.

Why were the polls so far off? I thought this was going to be a close election, and by all the polls that I had seen, it was supposed to be. I am interested in the British/UK opinion on why.

Polling (generally speaking) appears to scant toward the liberal viewpoint in many countries. I know that would be a forum for another location, but it does make me wonder...

It's probably a little early to say, the post-mortem hasn't really happened yet. The polls weren't entirely wrong anyway. They got Scotland more or less bang on and a lot of the regional results were in line with recent polls (notably the Lib Dem collapse in SW England).

The explanation is either going to be the so-called 'shy Tories' factor, whereby people are reluctant to admit to pollsters that they're voting Tory but in the privacy of the voting booth they do it anyway, or simply that there was a very late swing to the Tories that the polls didn't manage to pick up. There's also a question about the reliability of different polling methodologies. In the few weeks leading up the election day the Tories had been showing consistent leads in telephone polls (give or take one or two) but had a much patchier performance in internet based polls, which meant that the weighted average of all polls showed the parties neck and neck. Could it be that the phone polls were simply more accurate, or that people who were polled over the telephone were generally older and more likely to turn out ?

It's hard to say at this point. I don't really agree that there's any kind of inherent left-wing bias in polling though. That's not a phenomenon I've ever come across before.

Sassenach wrote:It's probably a little early to say, the post-mortem hasn't really happened yet. The polls weren't entirely wrong anyway. They got Scotland more or less bang on and a lot of the regional results were in line with recent polls (notably the Lib Dem collapse in SW England).

The explanation is either going to be the so-called 'shy Tories' factor, whereby people are reluctant to admit to pollsters that they're voting Tory but in the privacy of the voting booth they do it anyway, or simply that there was a very late swing to the Tories that the polls didn't manage to pick up. There's also a question about the reliability of different polling methodologies. In the few weeks leading up the election day the Tories had been showing consistent leads in telephone polls (give or take one or two) but had a much patchier performance in internet based polls, which meant that the weighted average of all polls showed the parties neck and neck. Could it be that the phone polls were simply more accurate, or that people who were polled over the telephone were generally older and more likely to turn out ?

It's hard to say at this point. I don't really agree that there's any kind of inherent left-wing bias in polling though. That's not a phenomenon I've ever come across before.

I've also heard of studies that in person polls tend to veer left. Typically the pollster is young and the individual who is polled wants to appear sympathetic to disadvantaged groups and please the questioner. This dynamic can change results by a few %.

On the subject of why the polls were so badly wrong, this makes for a very interesting read:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdo ... ere-near-b

Turns out there was one man in Britain who called it bang on (although credit needs to also go to Dan Hodges of the Telegraph, who's consistently predicted Labour defeat for the last 4 years in the face of widespread derision).

You can see the raw analysis that he cites here:

http://www.ncpolitics.uk/2015/05/shy-to ... 2015.html/

It's a fascinating read but very long and a little dry. Dan will probably enjoy it though.

JimHackerMP wrote:BTW another dumb question, is the vote hanging at 649 seats, not yet 650, because the Speaker hasn't been elected yet, and he's like, the 650th seat or something?

No, it was a seat down in Cornwall I think that was waiting for the last boxes to come in.

the Speaker was included in the tally of Conservative seats, as that is what he was elected as before he became Speaker.

Ray Jay wrote:I've also heard of studies that in person polls tend to veer left. Typically the pollster is young and the individual who is polled wants to appear sympathetic to disadvantaged groups and please the questioner. This dynamic can change results by a few %.

Our polls are generally conducted either by telephone or over the internet. So that was not it.

Online polls tended to favour Labour, telephone polls tended to favour the Conservatives.

Sassenach wrote:Where do Labour go from here Dan ? It strikes me that the picture isn't quite so bleak as it appears. This was a good election to lose for Labour in my opinion. Obviously it would have been better to lose to a minority Tory government, but nevertheless it allows you to get rid of Miliband and refocus with a better team and a clearer picture of what you need to do to rebuild, while Cameron will now have to struggle with party management and implementation of many unpopular cuts (not to mention the looming EU referendum issue).

Well, I though 2010 was a good one to lose (especially as the loss was not the total disaster it was predicted to be). I also do think it will be tough for Cameron now - he has made a lot of promises and he has to be seen to keep them. Most obvious of his problems is going to be how to negotiate a treaty change with the EU that he can then sell back to us in a referendum.

He has promised not to raise many kinds of tax, and that means if the cuts don't work, or there's an economic shock from outside, fiscal policy could be controversial. And yes, there are quite a few Tory MPs who have had a taste of being able to rebel. Unlike in 1992, UKIP are a potential defection route to the right.

Labour could not have "won" the election, the best would have been my 'prediction' - a minority government that was not able to be propped up by the Lib Dems, and so needed the SNP for confidence & supply. After that campaign that would have been a very difficult place to be, as any problems would be seen to vindicate the dire warnings. So yeah, another one to lose, perhaps.

On the other hand, if the economy does improve and the deficit goes down as Osborne wants it to, then the Tories would be in a very strong position in 2020.

The issue for Labour is that they're going to be pulled in two directions. Some will look at what happened in Scotland and say that they need to move even further to the left to win back their core vote up there while others (the old Blairites essentially) will say that the election was lost in the English marginals and that Labour need to tack back to the centre and start to find ways to rebuild the kind of big tent that Blair had. I must say my sympathies are more with the latter. Even if Labour had somehow held every seat in Scotland they'd still be sitting on only 270 seats. I think the Scottish Labour Party perhaps needs to be allowed to go its own way and adopt a much looser relationship with the national party, allowing a new Labour leader to tack back to the centre ground. Who that leader should be is less obvious though. I really like what I've seen of Dan Jarvis, but in truth I've not seen very much and this could just be a kneejerk reaction.

Personally I would like to see a more confident Labour party able to have some left wing policies and still reach out to the centre. We have been far too quiet about what we were for, apart from a few interesting policy positions from Miliband, until very late on. And frankly there was not the internal open policy discussion that I thought we had been promised. We had less than we had during the first two Blair terms.

Because when I look at it, some of the policies which were centrist are the ones that really backfired: massively expanding PFI, tuition fees, housing policy (as in not really having one other than build more, slightly cheaper, and screw councils even if their public housing was good).

That does not mean there are not areas where Labour probably should shift away from the left. But the ream issue for me is that it has been very much about timidity rather than position.

In terms of leadership, there are a few early names up. Burnham I have a lot of time for (he was my '1' vote in 2010, Ed Miliband was '2'), but he does have a weakness stemming from his brief term as Health Secretary over Stafford - which is unfair as he actually ordered an inquiry, but the mud has stuck. Yvette Cooper would be a good strong female candidate, if it were not for who her husband is. Maybe there are others who were around in the Blair-Brown governments, but all would have a credibility issue, especially on the economy and the budget.

Chuka Umunna has a lot of fans, but I don't really see a lot of substance there. Jarvis I don't really know much about either.

To be honest, I would rather that Ed had stayed on for a while, because in 2010 the election campaign for Brown's replacement was not actually what we needed right then. And a lot of people are (belatedly) joining the party now but won't be able to vote.

I must admit I don't know a lot about Jarvis either, but from the little I've seen he looks like a good gamble. His backstory is very good. Rather than just following the well-worn Oxbridge-SPAD-safe seat route to Parliament he had a couple of decades in the Paras and served in a lot of the hot zones (I'm pretty sure he was in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but I could be wrong). That will sell very well. He also appears to be coming more from the moderate wing of the party, which I think is what's needed. The lack of experience is a concern but this can also be spun as a positive since he wasn't around in the Blair/Brown years and so none of the mud from that time will stick to him. A fresh face with an attractive backstory and real world experience could be just what Labour needs.

Chuka Umanna would be a mistake in my opinion. Labour has lost an awful lot of core supporters to UKIP and it's hard to see him winning them back.