All the polls had it as a draw, Google Trends have a thumping Labour win but turned out they were all wrong as we wake up this morning to a Conservative majority Government and five years of Tory rule.
The absolute collapse of the Liberal Democrats was no surprise, they died 5 years ago when Clegg took them into the coalition but this was the first opportunity to get around to the funeral today.
Scotland and the Scottish National Party did for the Labour Party, the gains in England were never going to make up the deficit if they lost the fifty seats north of the border which they did.
Enough people obviously looked at this Conservative government and thought, 'I fancy five more years of that' so that is where we are until 2020 whether we like it or not.
It will be a shock if Scotland doesn't hold another referendum on its independence now that the party pushing for it has almost complete control of the country and we have the question of the in-out referendum on Europe to be concerned about which could see us removing ourselves from the largest economic block on the planet.
The privatisation of what's left of the public service will be pick up pace unconstrained by the Liberal Democrats as will the dismantling of the welfare state so by 2020 we could find ourselves in a very different Britain to the one we have today.
6 comments:
I don't understand the Scots. Eight months ago they voted to stay a part of the UK, and now they have voted out almost every pro-unionist. What happened over the past eight months to cause this dramatic change?
After the SNP promised to rely heavily on oil money to pay for their new country, and right after the referendum oil prices tanked, I would have thought the Scots would have said something like "phew, glad we didn't go for that, or we'd really be in a bind right now." But instead, in the fact of the wipeout in oil prices, the Scots seem more determined to break away. I must admit to being quite perplexed by their voting behavior.
What i know, admittedly very little, is that the SNP made much of the arrogant way the Conservatives acted after the independence referendum. The 'English only votes' particularly annoyed them and Nicola Sturgeon was very persuasive.
My own view is that the SNP gambled that Labour would pick up the seats needed in England to offset the losses in Scotland and then they could join forces and the SNP would have a seat in power. What actually happened was the SNP was too successful and instead of the 25 seats they expected, took 50 from Labour
and left them too much to do and so both lost out.
Lucy, do MP candidates just get to run for whatever random constituency they get selected to run for even if they're not from that area? For instance, David Cameron is MP for Witney, but as far as I can tell he's lived in London his whole life. So do the parties just pick someone to run for every constituency without much regard for whether the candidate is actually from that constituency?
They do E-wadda which is a bone of contention with many. The parties (and they all do it) parachute in the top members of the party into safer seats. Cameron was the candidate for several 'safe' constituencies before he was elected to Witney. Strangely, most voters don't seem fazed by it but the politicians who are from the area, do try and make it a selling point that they know the people and the area but as i said, they all do it so none of the other parties make a thing of it, mainly because the rest are probably not from the place they are trying to be elected t
Well it will lead to a referendum so it will present the opportunity to leave, none of the other parties were offering it, but although the anti-EU mob shout louder, i think sense will prevail and we won't be leaving. Up to us pro-EU to make the argument.
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