Wow, that's a heck of a thing!

OT: Election day in the UK by Huinesoron on 2024-07-04 08:04:05 UTC Reply

Last night I looked at the Electoral Calculus website's predicted outcome "if there was an election tomorrow":

Well, tomorrow has become today, and wouldn't you know it, there IS an election! Personally I'm hoping it goes just as badly for the Tories as the polling predicts.

Quick and dirty primer on UK politics: the Conservatives/Tories (blue) are the current government, and the main right-wing party. Labour (red) are the main opposition party, theoretically on the left but in practice pushing at the centre. The Liberal Democrats (orange) are the national third party, ostensibly centrist but currently left of Labour. That's the big three.

Reform are the current incarnation of the far-right racist fascist party, led by the man who caused our national stab-the-economy-in-the-face shambles which is Brexit. The Green party are a left-wing environmentalist party. Then there's the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, the local parties for Scotland and Wales; they tend to the left but don't stand for election outside their nations. There are a handful of other minor parties, but those are the big ones.

At this point, Labour will be the next government. The Tories have made a cataclysmic shambles of both the country and the election; you may have noticed they called the election on Independence Day, at a time they were already trailing badly in the polls, which is the biggest own-goal I can imagine handing the opposition. From my side, there's 5 questions I'm excited to see the answer to.

How badly will the Tories lose? That Electoral Calculus pic has them losing not only to Labour but to the Lib Dems, which would be amazing. The idea of the Tories no longer even being His Majesty's Loyal Opposition is music to my teeth. I'm hoping for as few Tory MPs as possible, and multiple big names losing their seats.
Will the Greens finally pick up another seat? The Green party have had a single seat for what seems like forever. This would be a really nice time for them to finally gain a second: with the Tories in full collapse, people in left-wing seats are more free to vote for who they actually want, rather than needing to be tactical about it.
Will the fascists get any seats? Back in 2015, under the name UKIP, the Reform party were polling about as high as they are now and didn't pick up a single seat. I'm hoping that continues. I specifically don't want their leader, Nigel Farage, to win a seat. I also want him to fall into a vat of banana milkshake please.
What will happen in Northern Ireland? Northern Ireland has completely different parties to the rest of the UK. Their main issue is whether they should be in the UK or Ireland, so their biggest parties are the DUP (pro-UK) and Sinn Féin (pro-Ireland). Northern Ireland is very angry about Brexit, so a big swing to Sinn Féin could significantly increase the chances of Star Trek being right.
Will I still be under a freaking Tory MP? My constituency has been gerrymandered into a safe Tory seat, but nothing is completely safe this time around. I will (have to be) voting tactically to try and boot them out, and I'd really like it if, for once, the person I voted for actually won.

Results will start coming in overnight; given the expected scale of the landslide, we may well know by this time tomorrow who won. But for today, if you're in the UK: whoever you support, please make sure you go out and vote.

Unless it's Nigel.

[Manic giggling ensues] by Huinesoron on 2024-07-05 10:07:23 UTC Reply
(The lower table is the Northern Ireland results, which don't really link into the rest of the country.)

Once again, it turns out numbers are the best system for determining which of two things is larger. The Electoral Calculus predictions gave the correct broad overview, and the exit poll last night (a poll carried out on people as they left the polling stations, and posted as soon as the polls closed) was mostly spot-on. There are two seats still to declare (I've marked the most likely results on the right), but the new UK government will be an enormous Labour majority.

What's interesting is that the percentage of the vote doesn't have to shift much for this to happen. Labour are only 0.7% up, but have more than doubled their seats! The Lib Dems have done even better on even less. That's an artefact of the electoral system: it doesn't matter if you have a lot of votes across the country, but if you concentrate them. Labour in 2019 had a big general movement, but no concentration to get first-place finishes.
- How badly did the Tories lose? Crushingly but not cataclysmically. I would have loved them to drop to third party status, but it was never likely. They will remain the Opposition, and probably recover - if they don't tear themselves apart. What's fun is that Tory party rules require a leadership election if 15% of their MPs submit letters demanding one. That means it only takes 19 disgruntled MPs to force the current leader to step down - and there are a lot of disgruntled Tories. I don't think we'll see stability there for some time.
- Did the Greens pick up another seat? They got three! They always had Brighton Pavilion; they've added Bristol Central, North Herefordshire, and Waveney Valley. I hope they get to keep them.
- Did the fascists get any seats? Yes, but far fewer than the polls predicted. Unfortunately Nigel will be squatting in Parliament unless the milkshakes get him. (To be honest this shows how badly broken the voting system is - 14% of the national vote should not give only four seats - but I'm happy with it in this specific case.)
- What happened in Northern Ireland? Sinn Fein didn't pick anything up, but the Unionist vote has splintered, with three other parties taking one vote each from the DUP. Not sure how that will play out.
- Am I still under a freaking Tory? Yes. :( They beat the Lib Dems by about 2000 votes, which is fewer than were thrown away voting for Labour, but also fewer than were leeched from the Tories by the fascists, so it's a bit of a wash. Well, we can't have everything. :-/
Now we just need Kier Starmer to fix the state the Tories left the country in, and prove himself better on some issues (trans rights, as Lily says) than he has signalled. (He is already better than the Tories on that specific point, but that's a really low bar and not good enough.)

hS

We managed to get shot of the Tories here, at least. by Scapegrace on 2024-07-06 10:54:17 UTC Reply

With one of the greener members of the Labour Party to boot.

Our previous MP, Craig Mackinlay, was a hardcore "Leave Means Leave" Brexiteer and a proponent of austerity. He declined to run at this election, however, due to reasons of ill health. See, after definitely not cheating his way into office by not properly declaring electoral expenses (he was cleared of wrongdoing and a minor party member took the fall - I mean, er, was found to have been the guilty party), voting to remove funding for NHS services, and generally being an unrepentant Tory scumbag, he contracted sepsis. This meant both his hands and feet fell off, and since in his opinion the NHS prosthetics were, and I quote, "only good for breaking glass and hitting people", he had to spend over a hundred thousand pounds on custom prostheses. How dreadful. Couldn't have happened to a nicer man. What goes around definitely does not come around.

Anyway, the Tory vote got split almost down the middle by the fascists in Reform, so the Labour candidate got in with a majority of seven thousand. This overturned a Conservative majority of nearly eleven thousand at the previous election, though the district boundaries have since been changed.

Wow, that's a heck of a thing! by Neshomeh on 2024-07-06 21:48:42 UTC Reply

I think of sepsis as something that happens in unsanitary settings, or contrariwise in hospitals because all the nasty, drug-resistant strains of things live there. I guess it's more common than I thought, but still, to get it out of nowhere like that, wow.

I am humble before the gods of poetic natural justice; may they be ever vigilant yet merciful.

(His kid is cute; I feel sorry for her.)

~Neshomeh

Congrats! I hope they make the most of it! (nm) by Neshomeh on 2024-07-05 16:29:07 UTC Reply

Best of luck in the election! by Lily Winterwood on 2024-07-04 15:50:00 UTC Reply

I'm mostly worried about a certain TERF-who-shall-not-be-named getting her fingers into Labour's policies and the flip-flopping Keir Starmer's been doing as a result. Hopefully they won't actually listen to her but I'm not gonna hold my breath. I'm sure there's plenty of other things Labour will do better on... though coming off the absolute nightmare that the Tories have been, the bar is really on the ground there!
Best of luck! by Neshomeh on 2024-07-04 14:54:11 UTC Reply

Frankly, the UK booting its conservatives out of major power would be a better Independence Day treat than anything planned on this side of the pond. It's a glimmer of hope that all is not completely lost in the world.

~Neshomeh thinks fireworks are fine in their place, which is not any of the days surrounding the actual holiday.