UK General Election - May 7th 2015

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Stupid law, let's hope it's repealed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well yes and no; it can give the incumbent government unfair advantages of a different sort.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The main issue here is that although Parliaments could last for as long as five years it was often vaguely understood that they 'ought' to last for just four; governments that stuck around for the full five years were generally ones that expected to be defeated. Often governments that try for five rather than four years were accused of stalling, which could be politically damaging. Snap elections have also become very rare, largely due to Ted Heath's woeful miscalculation (i.e. it has become received wisdom that the electorate will punish a Prime Minister who calls an election the moment the political situation seems favourable).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

UKIP have suspended their general secretary. Something to do with candidate selection.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Happily no election campaign (no matter how unedifying) has much resemblance to Question Time.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour can only win Hallam via a vote-split fluke.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I tend to think that a noisy Labour campaign would be counterproductive. Of course activists and resources won't be directed there anyway; as fun as trolling can be, this is a seat where Labour only polled 16% in 2010. If a freak win happens a freak win happens, but its not worth trying for.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

but you have to remember that that 16% was the result of twenty years of a tactical squeeze which the beneficiaries of have pretty explicitly abandoned.

This is true. But the ceiling on the Labour vote there can't be much above 30% (a respectable share, let's not forget) which makes things difficult. My thinking about a noisy campaign was that that kind of thing can bring out latent sympathy votes and may also encourage elements of the Tory rump vote there to vote Clegg.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

How is the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland doing these days?

Quite well.

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Very unlikely. The unique circumstances of 2010 won't be repeated and the Alliance has attracted  much ire in Loyalist districts since then (due to the flegg issue and so on).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Both of the things you wrote are essentially true.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Given how volatile the Scottish electorate is the word 'realistically' is generally an unrealistic word to use usefully

One thing to be aware of is that Clydeside is not the entirety of working class Scotland. Labour will probably hold up better (no matter how large the swing ends up being) in smaller industrial towns - most of which voted No - than in Glasgow et al.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One more thing: recent national polls have mostly had Labour drifting back around 35% or so (a small but notable improvement from late autumn). Given poor showings in Scotland, this likely means good ones in Northern England and also the Great City Babylon.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I've never understood why some polling firms conduct surveys over Christmas.

If Labour Party support crashes in Scotland as the polls presently 'predict' it will be impossible for them to get a majority, and winning the most seats would be difficult as well.

This isn't actually true, although it would make it a lot harder.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In the last hundred years, they have won a working majority that lasted throughout the parliamentary term in only five out of 25 elections. The Conservatives did so ten times, and won overall majorities an extra three times but took smaller parties into government regardless. Labour won three minorities and three unworkably-small majorities that required another election or Liberal support after a few years. The final case is the current government, the first time Conservatives went into government with a minority of seats since the days of their Liberal Unionist allies.

This is true but deceptive. Labour was not a contender for power for the first two decades of its existence (and was not really organised as a national force until Arthur Henderson's overhaul of the Party in 1917/18). It was a serious electoral force during the interwar years but what can be fairly described as bad luck (compounded by problems with factionalism and also an over-reliance on its charismatic and photogenic leader) meant that it only held power for a handful of years. By way of example, had Labour lost the 1929 election (has there ever been a worse year to win an election?) it would likely have won any and all elections in the 1930s.

Moving on to the postwar decades, Labour's majority in 1950 was small but would have been workable for longer than it was had the government not been crippled by factional disputes. Labour was then very unlucky to lose in 1951 (when, famously, it polled the most votes but lost anyway) and would spend the majority of the decade embroiled in factional infighting. The 1955 and 1959 elections, despite substantial Tory majorities, were both closely contested.

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But a monkey in a suit could have led Labour to victory in 1997 and 2001, while Blair was unpopular by 2005.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think that understates the degree to which Blair put to sleep a lot of the British public's insecurities about voting in a Labour government.

Considering that Labour had a massive poll lead under John Smith I doubt that. Labour's landslide in 1997 was mostly down to the fact that the incumbent government was marginally less popular than cancer.

Now, Blair was undoubtedly a very popular leader in the 1990s (and I quite agree that people are wrong to forget this) and I don't dispute that his personal appeal added to the jaw-dropping margin of the landslide (and so thus contributed directly to some of its most memorable moments), but let's not get carried away here...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, it would be inappropriate to include 1910 and so forth. Fortunately, 1918 is the beginning of this data set; Labour were in third place then but the other 24 elections saw them as the main opposition force to the Conservatives. As for bad luck and factional disputes - this is the history of the actually-existing UK Labour Party and it is hardly deceitful to rely on actual events rather than unprovable counter-factuals;

But if we are to discuss structural factors then we have to consider alternative possibilities, don't we? And you can easily turn matters on their head to an extent; i.e. that Labour was constantly in power with only a small break between 1964 and 1979. Which also proves relatively little.

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1931 was an electoral freak event caused by the political crisis - including (of course) the defection of the charismatic and photogenic leader that Labour campaigns in the 1920s had been based around - caused by the panic that followed the collapse of Creditanstalt. I don't think any British government could have survived the Depression.

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Absolutely.

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...no.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Guardian are reporting about the possibility of a "national coalition" - between the Conservatives and Labour to prevent a "full-blown constitutional crisis". (https://archive.today/ww2Yf)

That is not 'the Guardian are reporting...' but 'a particularly silly and out-of-touch commentator who writes a terrible column for the Guardian is pontificating that...' which is a rather different thing.

Future point of reference for everyone: any coalition involving Labour would have to be approved by a Special Conference, which would not necessarily be mere rubber stamping job (it would depend on the circumstances). Note also that a lot of people in Labour - i.e. those on the Left and the more trad. sections of the Right - dislike coalitions because that would involve sharing power with a (this is not the language used, but it is the mentality at work) bourgeois party.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Wrt the other debate, more on that later but for now... um... some people seem to be forgetting what political life was like in the 1990s. The Major government was a slow-motion trainwreck's slow-motion trainwreck...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's also an Opium poll and they're sh!te.

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The Greens currently hold Brighton Pavilion. The MP in question (Caroline Lucas) is personally popular, but the local authority is also run by the Greens and is a walking disaster which may complicate her re-election chances.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is this a recent thing?  I believe most Labour governments were of the majority variety but I'm aware when they were in a minority in the 1970s they formed a government with the support of the precursor of the Liberal Democrats.

They key point there is that a minority government was consistently preferred to a formal coalition (whereas the Tories attempted - unsuccessfully - to hammer out a coalition with the Liberals after February 1974). Should note that a dislike of coalitions in Labour is not a universal tendency, but it is a very common one.

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That was different.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well if you look at the National Assembly, Welsh Labour have generally preferred to run minority administrations than form coalitions; the latter have only been formed when the situation has otherwise been unmanageable.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Didn't stop the Tories trying though. Probably because they still counted the Ulster Unionists as 'theirs' (as they had been until five seconds earlier, of course).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Finally got round to finishing the series of English constituency base maps. Use in whatever way you see fit:





_{(having said that I need to remember to make a small modification to one of the earlier ones uploaded, but whatever).}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Nah, its because the Tories seem themselves as basically non-partisan really and always acting in the best interests of The Nation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Modified Yorkshire/Humber basemap.