UK General Election 2019 - Election Day and Results Thread

[DC Al Fine]

The liberal democrats have really hurt Labour in this election.

Serious questions need to asked to why they carried on standing candidates

At the count in Kensington, the voters were horrified (pro-remain) that they have a die-hard leaver representing them because the liberal democrats refused to stand down.

In High Peak, the liberal democrat was sarcastically clapped for letting the Tory in. Even in Blyth Valley (first Tory gain) the Green party were put in the awkward position of trying to explain what the benefit is of splitting the left vote for the tory to win?  

Its totally pointless for the Green Party and Liberal democrats to say that the political system is rotten or broken. You know the rules before the election and if you have zero chance of running and its a swing district then questions need to be asked why are you running in the first place?

Labour candidates do not have a God given right to expect Lib Dem candidates to stand down in their favour and vice versa. The parties fought the election on different platforms and there is little evidence to suggest, especially in the case of Labour-Tory contests, that all of the votes from the third places party would have transferred directly to help the second placed party win. The admittedly unreliable constituency polling done before the election showed large numbers of Lib Dem voters preferred the Tories to Labour, and would have voted in sufficient numbers for the former in a straight fight that them to have won.

The idea that will inevitably be trotted out by sore Labour supporters that the election was really won by the ‘progressive alliance’ is, to be blunt, a load of old bollocks. Generally speaking there was little love lost between Labour and the Liberal Democrats (this is not 1997) who ran with very different policies on leaving the EU and on the budget, taxation and other economic issues. The same is true for Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP (see the SNP reaction to turfing out Swinson!), the latter of whom are on the opposite side to the former two of that central issue in Scottish politics, independence. There is little reason to believe that if every non-Labour and non-Tory candidate had stood down in the election that it would’ve resulted in a Labour victory. This is an excuse deployed by Labour partisans to distract from their party’s general unpopularity and their failure to build a durable, national coalition of support.

"Shame on Labour and Lib Dems not standing down in favour of the Tories. They split the unionist vote and let the SNP win!"

The progressive vote split narrative is only marginally less ridiculous than that.

[DC Al Fine]

There's a fairly recent precedent of the left working with seperatists in the Anglosphere. It didn't exactly go well.

[DC Al Fine]

True, but the SNP were to many something scary and threatening back then - they maybe aren't so much now given that the presence of a substantial bloc of them in Westminster is more established.

The Bloc Quebecois had been a substantial force for 15 years when they attempted to to enter into a coalition to stop the Tories, and the Liberals still paid dearly for playing ball with them. The rest of the country still found them scary.

[DC Al Fine]

Guildford
Conservative Bloc 2015: 65.9
Conservative Bloc 2019: 44.9
Swing: 21.0

Esher and Walton
Conservative Bloc 2015: 72.6
Conservative Bloc 2019: 49.4
Swing: 23.2

Wokingham
Conservative Bloc 2015: 67.6
Conservative Bloc 2019: 49.6
Swing: 18.0

Sevenoaks
Conservative Bloc 2015: 74.8
Conservative Bloc 2019: 60.7
Swing: 14.1

Tunbridge Wells
Conservative Bloc 2015: 71.3
Conservative Bloc 2019: 55.1
Swing: 16.2

Runnymede and Weybridge
Conservative Bloc 2015: 73.6
Conservative Bloc 2019: 55.8
Swing: 17.8

South West Hertfordshire
Conservative Bloc 2015: 68.4
Conservative Bloc 2019: 49.6
Swing: 18.8

Surrey Heath
Conservative Bloc 2015: 74.2
Conservative Bloc 2019: 59.7
Swing: 14.5

Reigate
Conservative Bloc 2015: 70.1
Conservative Bloc 2019: 55.1
Swing: 15.0

Chesham and Amersham
Conservative Bloc 2015: 72.8
Conservative Bloc 2019: 55.4
Swing: 17.4

St Albans
Conservative Bloc 2015: 54.4
Conservative Bloc 2019: 39.2
Swing: 15.2

You really think there's nothing here?

With all due respect you really don't understand British politics at all do you?

A large chunk of the Lib Dem vote especially in posh suburban places like these would prefer the Tories to Labour given the choice (indeed many were Tory voters until the Brexit saga) especially as it seems unlikely that Labour will return to the centre with the next leader likely being Rebecca Long-Bailey. It was Tory fear-mongering about the Lib Dems putting Labour in that stopped many Tory Remainers in places like Esher from voting Lib Dem which cost them a large number of seats. If the Lib Dems were stupid enough to openly associate themselves with Labour the Tory Remainers that they did manage to win over would go scurrying back to their former party leaving the Lib Dems with nothing except a decent second or two in Streatham or Hornsey.  

Similarly a large chunk of Labour's base regard the Lib Dems as little better than the Tories (indeed many Labour activists actually regard them as worse as at least the Tories 'fight fair' apparently) hence the whole '#YellowTories' thing on Twitter. Labour is also very tribal and I believe that it's written into the party's constitution that they're obligated to contest every seat (except those in Northern Ireland which its sister party the SDLP contests as well as the Speaker's seat).

As for the comparison with Canada that I see @DistingFlyer made with the North being Tory and the Home Counties all Labour/Lib Dem: this scenario would only work if the Lib Dems displaced Labour as the main opposition to the Tories which is not going to happen as Labour has a far too loyal base and hence a decent floor. If Canada was like the UK and if instead of rebounding under Trudeau the Liberals had gone into to terminal decline dropping to ~10 seats in 2015 the Tories would dominate the 905 whilst the NDP would hold sway in Northern Ontario.

Labour's path back to government lies through getting back at least the greater part of the seats they just lost, especially the more urban ones like the West Bromwich seats, though some of the more rural ones e.g. Bishop Auckland may indeed be gone. Couple this with expanding into poorer areas in the South such as Cornwall as well as diversifying middle-of-the-road commuter towns like Milton Keynes or High Wycombe and Labour could build a sustainaable coalition with Brexit sorted.

As for the Lib Dems, where I do agree with you is that there is a huge opportunity for the Lib Dems in posh commuterville (where I live) but it is not by allying themselves to Labour, if anything they should be distancing themselves further. If this is the route they want to go down they should re-brand as the 'sensible, pragmatic' party with a solemn duty for putting the breaks on the 'extremism' of the Conservatives and Labour; whilst at the same time pushing the 'party of business' narrative (especially responsible business) and tie this into an internationalist world view. They should be very pro-environment/sustainability though leaving the more extreme sounding anti-growth stuff to the Greens. On social issues be liberal and pro-freedom (obviously) though they should avoid getting dragged into the latest 'woke' obsession e.g. announcing pronouns or self I.D which raises more than a few eyebrows round these parts. This is basically how they'd take the Home Counties from the Tories and establish a very solid base here, though I somewhat doubt they'll go down this route.

Also please don't add Labour and the Lib Dems vote shares together and draw conclusions from it (similarly for the Tory and Brexit Party votes) as the two are not interchangeable. It's as silly as adding the Tory vote to the Labour vote and inferring that huge number means that the vast majority of Britain is illiberal.

Just be glad we didn't get some of the analysis we got in the Canadian thread, where someone assumed 100% perfect transfers between the Trudeau-Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois if "progressives were unified"