Exit polls paint bleak picture in UK for anti-Conservative bloc

According to current exit polling from the UK, the Conservatives surged way ahead of pre-election polling and will finish just 10 seats short of a majority. With Lib Dems, far-right UKIP, and conservative unionist Northern Irish parties supporting, they would be able to form a government. The Lib Dems got crushed but still are kingmakers — which is toxic for them since so many LD voters bailed because of their role in the coalition government last time, which would be even less powerful this time around. In fact, the Conservatives seem well positioned to just form a minority government, though I don’t know how long it could last even under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

Labour got all but swept in Scotland by the SNP (i.e. maybe one seat remains) and lost in England to add insult to desperation. They ended up finishing worse than in 2010, contrary to all pre-election polling.

Bottom line from the current exit polling: Conservatives outperformed expectations by quite a lot and will probably lead the next government. Labour screwed up badly on top of their Scotland problems.

The ironclad unkeepable promises of the UK elections

UK party leaders making firm promises about coalition arrangements (or rejected arrangements) that they mathematically can’t possibly keep are one way voters lose all trust in their public officials. I get that they’re trying to discourage splinter/protest voting by taking a hard line without wiggle room before the election, but the math just isn’t there to be saying stuff like this, and at a certain point it’s just pure misrepresentation of reality.

Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders in the past couple weeks have been painting themselves into a corner on coalition promises, wherein they’ll either force a 2nd election or have to dynamite the corner to escape the foolish pre-election promises.

If the Labour Party will not make any kind of deal with the SNP (which is their latest position) and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats won’t either, how exactly is anyone supposed to form a government? Excluding the fairly astronomically unlikely possibility of a Conservative-Labour grand coalition, no two parties (or even three!) will have enough seats for a majority without involving the SNP. Everyone will be 20-50 seats short.

Projected number of seats to each party and combinations of various parties via The Guardian.

Projected number of seats to each party and combinations of various parties via The Guardian. Click to enlarge.

Are you going to throw this over to Northern Ireland to pick the PM? (Is that really better than letting Scotland do it?) Are you going to force new elections? What’s the realistic game-plan here?

In UK, everything now rests on the final campaign

The campaign for the May 2015 general elections is officially under way now in the United Kingdom. And barring a huge swing between now and the election, the results are going to be chaos.

Below are the March 30th projections from The Guardian’s election center (updated daily at the link)

https://twitter.com/GdnPolitics/status/582452523950321664

Labour are campaigning hard against the SNP (to try to regain marginally SNP-leaning constituencies in Scotland), but that will make it harder to work together after the election. Which is an important consideration, seeing as they’re basically the only two parties that will collectively have anywhere near a majority.

And the Lib Dems seem pretty averse to working with Labour and the SNP, but they can’t easily go back to the Conservatives either.

The Conservatives may well finish first but (under current polling) have basically no shot of leading a government anyway, even with UKIP and the Lib Dems and the DUP. I mean…unless they’re planning to go into coalition with Labour or the SNP, which is beyond unlikely.

So that means…a big swing in favor of either Labour or the Conservatives is probably the only thing now that can prevent a totally bananas outcome or an irredeemably hung parliament.

Guest Post: Our hung parliament

Matt is currently a university student in Britain, but he attended high school in the US with the co-editors of Starboard Broadside*, and he has provided us with his reaction to the inconclusive results of yesterday’s general election.

Well, Nick Clegg has said he won’t be giving any more speeches today, and after those of us who weren’t shut out of the poll station at 10 p.m (which wouldn’t have been a problem but for the bloody Labour government having all pubs shut at 11p.m.), there’s a prevailing feeling that our votes were denied a definite result. One generally expects when they go out to vote to know who’s running the country the following day. However, as exciting (read: worrying) as the results are, they were far from unpredictable. The “yellow tide” of Cleggmania may have fell short of a tsunami, but that’s only because of the very electoral system which Clegg has been critiquing from the start.

The system in the UK is confusing even to us, but to put it simply for American readers, the Lib Dems did do well for a third party, achieving 23% of the national vote (only 6% less than Labour), but the only thing that matters is the amount of seats that are won. In this “First Past the Post” system, whoever gets the most votes in each particular constituency goes to Parliament and the rest of the votes are thrown away. This is how the Liberal Democrats have only 2 million less votes than Labour but 200 less seats in the House of Commons, and this is why Clegg has been demanding electoral reform from the start. The reason this election is so exciting is because of the very issue of electoral reform which it has brought to the forefront, and which will play a decisive role in how the new government is formed.

Indeed, the chairwoman of the Electoral Commission has described the current system as “Victorian” and demanded an overhaul. While we claim with great pride that the voter turnout increased massively, the country was unable to handle this, and polling stations shut voters out after 10 p.m., leading to sit-ins at polling stations around the country, and even demands for another vote to be held.

The anxiety over the current state (or non-state, rather) of the UK government has negatively affected the British economy, with sterling falling from $1.4732 to $1.4678 during Cameron’s speech – this could not have been more badly timed given the current economic happenings. The fact of the matter is that while this country is currently in need of a strong government, we are now left with a minority one that will rely on either small-scale policy compromises between two parties who’s manifestos are on polar opposites, or something even scarier and more revolution-worthy such as a Labour coalition (and we grow tired of Mr. Brown) or a defunct parliamentary minority. While we may wonder who it was that the country really voted for, we can guarantee it was not a Conservative-Lib Dem quasi-coalition. This election’s most defining aspect is that it has disproved the reliability of our current system, and Britons are demanding change.

From his speech given this afternoon, Cameron is in no way proposing an official coalition, but rather, to use his own words, a government which will “try to find new ways in which Liberal Democrats can contribute” – i.e. making the coffee. Expect a cartoon to surface on the internet within a few days of (forgive the cheeky British banter) Clegg with a big “57” painted on his chest kneeling down and doing rude things to a wryly grinning Cameron sporting an even larger “305,” with a caption somewhere along the lines of “Cameron spurns coalition, opts for ‘special arrangement’ instead.” No one expects this government to last for more than a year (in the UK elections can be called at any time, there are no fixed terms). Cameron has, however, said that he will sate the appetite for electoral reform with an all-party Electoral Inquiry Committee, but anyone who has been following Conservative agenda knows that his only desire is to have constituency borders proportional to population size, which – while still progressive – does not address the issues posed by this election.

And if that prospect doesn’t seem uninspiring enough, we are all faced with the fact that Gordon Brown is still in office! In the situation where there is no clear majority, it is up to the prime minister to tender his resignation to HM the Queen and it is Her role to then invite a new prime minister to form a government. This might mean that if the politicians can’t sort it out themselves, then Buckingham Palace will have to make its own decision.

All in all, between a resurgent monarchy and a weak coalition, the results (or, as of yet, lack there-of) of this election have confirmed our anger with the electoral system and lead the way to a United Kingdom that is even less able to deal with either the ongoing or the impending financial crises.
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