Primus Inter Pares - March 2006 General Election

[Lumine]

February 2006 - Livingstone is determined to succeed

Prelude: A minority Labour government has survived 2005 but faces another election again, amidst domestic accomplishments and the adoption of the European Constitution but also with high unemployment, a recession and ongoing chaos in Northern Ireland. With the Conservatives still deep into the right, the Lib Dems moving left, New Labour bracing for survival and a new Eurosceptic populist party taking the country by surprise, who will win?

Labour Party: Back under Livingstone, Labour is running on the same manifesto as 2005, leaving aside the recent outcome of the referendums into Europe. Despite economic woes Livingstone continues to assert only Labour can get the recovery right through spending stimulus, and that a deep reform of the country's institutions is required for Britain to follow the road of progress.

Conservative Party: Despite being derided in the media as the "Quiet Man", IDS is on the campaign trail on a classic Thatcherite and Eurosceptic campaign, but with particular focus on a hardline stance on Northern Ireland, plans to fight poverty and stand for social justice through ambitious and compassionate welfare reform, and standing for "strong government" as the only real alternative for Labour.

Liberal Democrats: Rejecting an electoral alliance with New Labour, Hughes is on the warpath after moving the Lib Dems further into the left, challenging Labour as a saner, more competent alternative for a progressive left-wing government. While keeping most of the stances held by the party, Hughes has doubled down on environmentalism, the promotion of further investment in the economy to achieve recovery, a moderate stance on Northern Ireland and a particular focus on achieving social justice in Britain.

New Labour: Their survival threatened by their rejection by Simon Hughes, Blair has gathered resources to expand New Labour across the country, hoping to take the fight to the Lib Dems and Labour as the moderate center-left party. New Labour therefore continues to support a peace process in Northern Ireland, a humanitarian foreign policy, social liberal policies, investment in public services while taking a more fiscally responsible stance and education and crime reform.

New Deal: With the right-wing Eurosceptic parties collapsing, Robert Kilroy-Silk has gathered several members of the Eurosceptic left to form New Deal, a populist, economically leftist (thus anti-austerity), staunchly Eurosceptic party with a social conservative touch. Kilroy-Silk is running an insurgent populist campaign, arguing neither Labour nor the Tories can stand for the working class and rallying against the ongoing immigration surge into the UK.

Three days for this one, info on the Livingstone II Premiership can be found in the main thread.
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Note: Each PM has a dice roll on issues regarding stability and unity in their parties. Livingstone has twice rolled the worst possible number, leading us to have New Labour and New Deal.

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New Labour is running across most of the country due to have large financial resources, New Deal is only running in about a third to a half of the seats since it's a new movement.

I was bracing for a possible nightmare in having to determine the share of the seats, but I'm not sure I can even find a plausible explanation of Labour winning almost 50% of the vote out of nowhere.

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Upon further reflection, I came up with a solution for the potential meltdown of some parties, should have thought of it before. I just hope we don't end up with Labour in 60% and winning almost every seat, lol

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LibDem reluctantly.

EDIT: current results have the Conservatives returning one member.

How much would that depend on the number of candidates New Labor and New Deal were running? It appears that neither is running a full slate.

I put it in Electoral Calculus, which assumes full slates I think.

Indeed. I'll be using the 2010 Election because it allows me to model UKIP to partly match New Deal, and I'll be removing a portion of its vote share to assign equally to all parties. I also discount a particular percentage to account for the "Others" vote for each party, so all of the five main parties lose 1% to account for an "Others" vote of 5% for this particular election.

But I'll be playing with some of the seats, so simple EC results are referential only.

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Lol these elections are a joke.

I'm not blaming the author, this is a great TL, but the voters...my god.

Yeah. In real life Labour under Livingstone with these economic conditions would have been defeated in a landslide in 2005, even with Widdy as Tory leader.

Probably. In all fairness I have tried to make this TL as plausible as humanly possible, but short of outright sabotaging the Labour Party or giving the Conservatives an extra bonus every election I'm not sure on what to do.

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Open question, would people object if I introduced a penalty bonus?

Rather than just targeting Labour, the idea would be that if a party is reelected in a General Election it faces a penalty the next election to the benefit of the main opposition, and the penalty grows as more elections are won (to reflect how hard it is to win more than three to four GE's in a row).

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How about next election have Ken say something really anti Semitic?

That could be possible (particularly if he rolls badly on "personal scandals", and both times he's recieved a high score). I do have a few ideas for the next election, although a lot will depend on the results.

As an aside, my current calculations with the penalty for Labour produce a bit of an hilarious parliament.

[Lumine]

Open question, would people object if I introduced a penalty bonus?

Rather than just targeting Labour, the idea would be that if a party is reelected in a General Election it faces a penalty the next election to the benefit of the main opposition, and the penalty grows as more elections are won (to reflect how hard it is to win more than three to four GE's in a row).

That might be a good idea. You also might look at what I've seen some people on AH do. They let players select the leaders of the various parties and then decide the next election based on the quality of each leader, popularity of the government, and how the campaign goes(all based off of dice rolls.)

As a side note I'm really enjoying this timeline, even if I don't comment( that's more in general than just specific to this thread, I suppose.)

Thank you! I really wanted this TL to work, and it has done so reasonably well (to the point in which I'm considering a version starting in the 70's, or earlier). That would be an interesting idea, although there is a lot of fun in giving players the choice to vote in the GE's (even if the results can be really weird at times).

For the time being at least I'll just work with penalties if things get even weirder.

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Yes start with 1945!

I'm considering the 1945 General Election, the 1963 Tory and Labour Leadership and then the 1964 Election, or the 1975 and 1976 Conservative and Labour Leadership Elections. The only problem I'll face with those is that Electoral Calculus starts with 1983, so calculating seats would be an issue.

As to Primus Inter Pares, it should go on until the present day.

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March 2006 General Election:

March 2006 - Kilroy-Silk, man of the hour

Labour Party: 30% (292 MP's)
Conservative Party: 28% (246 MP's)
Liberal Democrats: 14% (43 MP's)
New Labour: 11.5% (36 MP's)
New Deal: 11.5% (6 MP's)
Others: 5% (27 MP's)

The campaign began amidst a sense of uncertainty, with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems under new leadership and the polls constantly predicting a hung parliament, a complicated outcome to have due to the hostility amongst New Labour and many Lib Dems towards both Iain Duncan Smith and Ken Livingstone. Despite the desire for change in a large part of the electorate, the Conservative campaign soon became infamous not only for its poor propaganda (due to IDS's placing key but less competent allies in CCHQ), but for the total lack of charisma by their own leader, which hampered the entire operation to defeat Livingstone. But while some expected the Lib Dems to capitalize on the weakness of the Conservatives it soon became clear Simon Hughes was not the man for the task. Despite a strong start, Hughes's efforts became unraveled as newspapers leaked the fact that he had had homosexual experiences in the past, bringing questions to his opposition to gay marriage.

As the campaign went for the first few days and Hughes and IDS faced hostile scrutiny some predictions turned towards Labour making a few gains off the Conservatives and securing a small but workable majority. Then Robert Kilroy-Silk made his mark. It was the first time a leader's debate was to be held in the UK, and after much speculation Livingstone, IDS, Hughes, Blair and Kilroy-Silk managed to agree to have a five-way debate. It was to become known for Blair's well managed and well-recieved appearance (giving extra life to New Labour), for Livingstone's famous cornering of Hughes's on gay marriage, and more importantly, for the live and complete evisceration of Iain Duncan Smith by Kilroy-Silk, who went after him with all guns blazing and left the Conservative leader unable to respond to fierce criticism about his character and his policies.

The effect on the polls was explosive. Kilroy-Silk was the man of the hour as New Deal began to  rise, easily hitting 20% in the national polls despite the fact that his party had no candidates in most of the country. The collapse of the Conservative campaign led many to fear a wipeout, and with IDS ineffective as ever it took a collective effort from popular figures like Patten and Clarke to take over the campaign and renew their attacks into Livingstone and Kilroy-Silk. In the end, with economic conditions failing to improve as unemployment rose all the way to election night, the nation woke up to an even more Hung Parliament. Labour and the Conservatives alike had lost 4%, meaning that Labour, once again the victor, stood at 292 MP's with just over 30% of the vote, almost thirty seats away from a majority. The Conservatives won some twenty extra MP's on ridiculously margins, spared only by the divisions across the board. Hughes and Kilroy Silk faced disappointment at their own respective performances, Hughes dragging his party back to 2000 levels as Kilroy-Silk only returned 6 MP's despite winning more than 10% of the vote overall. The one winner of the election was, ironically, Tony Blair, by claiming the ideological center and massively expanding to almost 36 MP's, close to the Lib Dems.

With only a Labour government being remotely feasible, Livingstone sent for Hughes and began to discuss the possibility of a coalition government, making significant progress before finding trouble again on electoral reform. Even if Livingstone and many of his allies believed in voting reform, a large part, if not the majority of the party opposed it, making it impossible to sail through parliament. Hughes, on the other hand, had to contend with the right of his party informing him that he would face a leadership challenge, making a coalition unsustainable. A couple of days before a vote of no confidence ousted Iain Duncan Smith as Conservative Leader and Nick Clegg challenged Hughes for the Lib Dem leadership, Labour and the Lib Dems signed onto a basic Supply and Confidence arrangement, allowing Livingstone to pass a Queen's Speech and a Budget before facing the country again by the end of the year.

Many wondered whether the political crisis was ever to end.

[Lumine]

For the record, results were calculated by taking almost half of the New Deal voteshare (but leaving the seats they would have won had they polled 20% across the country), and by giving Labour a penalty of 4% against the Conservatives (1% per election victory).