Why the Tories Won

antrobus

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

When considering this, the number of seats in Scotland is representative of the UK population.
...

No, Scotland is slightly over represented. They have 59 seats, they should have something more like 55.

IveSeenTheLight

antrobus wrote: »

No, Scotland is slightly over represented. They have 59 seats, they should have something more like 55.

So you believe that these 4 seats make a difference to the "cheapness" of the electorate vote.

Maybe it was more representative before the mass immigration to the ROUK that UKIP were voting against.

P.S. Looks like Wales is even more over represented, whilst NI is the worst represented

Generali

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

Indeed, very little if truth be told, although the slim majority seats that the Conservatives have may still lead to an interesting parliament

The power the SNP will have is to engage with other parties through the select committee system to review legislation and put amendments to the committee to potentially be put to the House.

Clearly that could go one of two ways. The SNP as an institution has experience of running a minority Government and so working with other parties to make stuff work. However, AIUI, many (most?) of the SNP MPs have political experience which amounts to putting leaflets through letterboxes and not much more. Whether they treat everyone else as the enemy and destroy any influence they might have had or engage in a positive way, understanding that you win some and lose some remains to be seen.

My understanding is that as the third largest party they get on all the Select Committees. The chances are that it'll be amateur hour for a few months while they work out the rules. After that they'll make or break themselves.

antrobus

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

So you believe that these 4 seats make a difference to the "cheapness" of the electorate vote.....

I believe it makes about a 7% difference to the "cheapness" of the electorate vote.

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

...Maybe it was more representative before the mass immigration to the ROUK that UKIP were voting against....

Probably not. It was only reduced to 59 seats in 2005, before that Scotland had 73 seats.

(Why am I telling you this? How come you don't already know?:))

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

...P.S. Looks like Wales is even more over represented, whilst NI is the worst represented

Wales is massively over-represented by at least 8 seats. Northern Ireland is about right; it should have 18 seats, and it does have 18 seats.

antrobus

Why the Tories didn't win by even more.

Alan Sugar delayed the announcement of his resignation from the Labour Party, citing their "negative business policies and the general anti-enterprise concepts".

http://www.amshold.com/social_media/LabourParty_11-05-2015.JPG

Jason74

I’m coming to this late, so the debate might have passed by now, but I thought I’d add my 2p worth anyway. When looking at the reasons for the Tory win, I think it comes primarily down to four largely unrelated factors. These are

1) The coalition Government was pretty successful – Given the situation when it to over, it’s hard to argue against the idea that the outgoing coalition was pretty successful (and I say that as someone who has never voted Tory in my life). The economy is growing, the deficit has been dramatically reduced, and we haven’t seen a collapse in public services. Even as someone who is quite left leaning, the list of policies that the coalition has enacted that I’ve been strongly opposed to is a short one (Tuition fees, the bedroom tax, FLS for Mortgages / HTB2, and abolishing the 50p tax rate while also enacting expenditure cuts that impact the poorest, but that’s about it). By any account, that’s not a bad record.

Now my personal view is that the government has been a success precisely because it’s been a coalition, and as a result has included a broader range of views while marginalising the more extreme elements of the Tory right. But nonetheless, the Tories benefited from the record of the Government, even though the Lib Dems didn’t

2) The “Miliband factor” . I personally don’t buy the idea that Labour was too far to the left to be electable. While the Labour ticket was more to the left than recent campaigns, we’re hardly talking Michael Foot territory, and I think there was little there to scare most people (others will disagree with this and that’s fair enough, this probably isn’t the thread to go down that road). But I do think that Miliband was considered a liability for image reasons. Much like Kinnock before him, he just didn’t seem a credible Prime Minister,. Nothing to do with his policies, it was just that he wasn’t convincing, and nothing hhe could do policy wise would change that. I don’t doubt for a minute that a fair few people who might well have voted for a different leader (even one with the same Policies) just couldn’t vote for Miliband.

When starting from that position, his refusal to acknowledge the overspend of the previous Labour Government can’t have helped him either. When you already have a credibility problem, a gaffe like that doesn’t help. What’s more, tacitly saying that running deficits in a boom is OK doesn’t exactly help deal with your credibility problem relating to the economy. I decided not to vote Labour at that moment, having previously been convinced I would do so. I very much doubt I was alone on that score.

3) The Lib Dem collapse – Perhaps a surprising one (and perhaps the biggest thing the polls got wrong imho), but the Lib Dem collapse actually helped the Tories win a number of seats. This was crucial in making the difference between another Tory / Lib Dem coalition (or a Tory Minority Government) and an outright Tory majority. This is of course somewhat ironic given the extent to which the collapse in the Lib Dem vote was in large part due to them being in coalition with the Tories.

4) The SNP surge – I don’t think that there can be any doubt that the SNP success has been a huge benefit to the Tories. Firstly of course, this took away a huge number of historically safe Labour seats and made a Labour majority near impossible. Directly linked to this, it meant that Labour could only hope to govern with at least the consent of the SNP. Given the SNP’s position on the Union as a whole, it was quite logical that people would not want a result that risked putting the SNP in a position where it could influence the whole UK Government.

Of course, in practice, the SNP would have had very limited power anyway given that it’s only “weapon” would have been to bring down a Labour Government, therefore bringing in the Tories (the one thing it was adamant it didn’t want to do, and which would have been electoral suicide). But the Tories played this hand very well, and it’s no surprise that people didn’t want to take the chance of finding out what a minority Labour Government would look like in practice.

In terms of what this means from here, frankly who knows. In terms of the next 5 years, a small Tory majority might ironically prove less stable than the previous coalition with a bigger (combined) majority. There is also now no constraint on the more extreme elements of the Tory party, and having been largely marginalised for five years due to the compromises of coalition and the relatively strong majority that this created, the right wing “head bangers” are now likely to have disproportionate influence. This makes me fearful of the next five years in terms of social cohesion and the prospects for the poorest in our society, as this Government will likely be much less moderate than the last.

For the opposition parties, it’s a difficult scenario from here. The Lib Dems have managed to (unfairly imho) lose 40 odd years of slow progress in a single night, so it might be a very long way back for them from here, if there is one at all. UKIP (and to a lesser extent the Greens) have the age old problem of a big upsurge in votes, but nothing to show for it in seats, and the EU referendum could well render UKIP irrelevant by the next election anyway. There's also the odd scenario that two distinct groups of voters (people who ditched the Lib Dems as "punishment" for joining with the Tories, and SNP voters supporting a party pledging to "lock David Cameron out of Downing Street) got the outcome that their vote suggested was the one they least wanted. What that means for next time is anybody's guess.


As for Labour, I really haven’t a clue if I’m honest. They’ve underperformed in different places for different reasons, and that makes it very hard to determine what might make them stronger next time round. But stronger they need to be, because even those who don’t want to see Labour in power will surely agree that democracy needs a strong and credible opposition to function properly. In the fall out of the last five days, it’s currently hard to see where that will come from.

antrobus

Jason74 wrote: »

...1) The coalition Government was pretty successful –

At least they didn't really c@ck anything up.

Jason74 wrote: »

. 2) The “Miliband factor” . ...

You mean people "didn’t see Ed Miliband as PM material". © N Sturgeon.

Jason74 wrote: »

...3) The Lib Dem collapse – Perhaps a surprising one

Nothing surprising in the slightest about it. If only because I blOOdy well told you all before the election that it was a game-changer.

Jason74 wrote: »

(and perhaps the biggest thing the polls got wrong imho),

Jason74 wrote: »

The polls did not get that wrong. Many of them had the LibDems at 8% which is exactly what they got.

Jason74 wrote: »

...4) The SNP surge – I don’t think that there can be any doubt that the SNP success has been a huge benefit to the Tories.

You'd be wrong in both counts.

The Conservatives succesfully defended their one seat. What happened in the other 58 seats was irrelevant and of no particular consequence.

The only real impact was that it took out 10 Lib Dem seats that might have been useful to someone had their not been a majority.

padington

Labour lost it.

1) Shouldn't have bragged about taxing 'mansions'.
2) Shouldn't have left the 'no money left' note
3) Should have developed a narrative about the future, present and past other than 'we were wrong about the economy but now we need to protect some benefits'
4) Shouldn't have let the unions to decide which brother stands
6) Should have tried to gag Sturgeon from selling the idea just before the election that a labour / SNP result will stuff the English
7) Should have stopped asking people their first name so unnaturally at the debates.
8) Should have made a positive economic arguement towards building more houses to pay off national debt
9) Should not have made the milestone (such bad typography)

thor

antrobus wrote: »

You'd be wrong in both counts.

The Conservatives succesfully defended their one seat. What happened in the other 58 seats was irrelevant and of no particular consequence.

Hardly! The English crapped themselves believing the tory spin that the SNP would hold Labour to ransom if they got together in a coalition even though Milliband had ruled it out. I rate that as the biggest factor in Labour not making any progress south of the border.

antrobus

thor wrote: »

Hardly! The English crapped themselves believing the tory spin that the SNP would hold Labour to ransom if they got together in a coalition even though Milliband had ruled it out. I rate that as the biggest factor in Labour not making any progress south of the border.

The SNP surge of itself, was of no particular significance to Why the Tories Won. The fact that that some of the factors behind that surge provided the Tories with some campaigning tools is another matter altogether.

P.S. It is hardly 'spin', when you have a certain person proclaiming that;

"If you want a Labour government that won’t just be a carbon copy of the Tories but will instead deliver the real change Scotland needs, then you must elect SNP MPs to force Labour’s hand and keep them honest."