On one hand, I want to hide away for the next month and pretend that the election isn’t happening. However I will not be able to get away from the news, and I do want to stay awake on election night to see the Alexander Moment (He is so fucked according to the polls)
So, is having a thread to discuss UK politics over the next 40 days a good idea?
What a British question.
Should you? Well, you bloody well have, haven’t you? Here it is. Have fun! 
Regarding Alexander, it reminded me that the title Shadow Secretary sound incredibly sinister. Do they melt faces like shadow priests?
(Derailin’ threads like a Snowpiercer express)
A Clegg moment too?
Depressingly, I don’t think there’ll be a Farage moment.
Maybe, but Lord Ashcroft polls thinks it will be close. It’s certainly not going to be like turning a comfortable LibDem majority into an SNP safe seat.
You never know, he might try flying an aeroplane again.
So, what after?
A Labour minority gov’t? For 5 years?
A grand coalition would kil the Labour vote, but relying on oppostion support to get anything through on an issue by issue basis? It’llbe an interesting experiment.
What chance a no confidence vote soon and another election?
I think it will be Labour minority with some support from the SNP, in return for devo-max, but not a coalition. I can’t see a minority govenment holding on to power for long if they don’t do that.
Maybe Plaid Cymru will get something out of it too. I don’t know what part the Green Party will play, if any.
It’s time for the daily Ukip scandal.
I have honestly lost count of how many Ukip politicians have been resigned, been replaced or kicked out of the party so far this year.
In the US certain right wing parties are embarrassing, but Ukip is downright bizarre. Don’t ratio am people.know that militant xenophobia is… Well… Irrational?
Not just the UK. Have you seen how FN are doing in France (again)? Le Pen Jr might be on course to Jospin Hollande, letting Sarko back in by default.
I don’t understand the ex-labour voters who think that Ukip is left wing. They’re pro-privatization, anti-union, anti-welfare and Nigel Farage is about as genuinely working class as Prince Philip.
As for the embarrassing candidates, it took the Greens 20 years to recover from David Icke claiming he was the son of God, back when he was an important member of the party (he was thought to be sane before this claim). Why are Ukip being tolerated?
I just wish that the main parties wouldn’t try to out-Ukip the kippers.
What is this ludicrous bullshit? What fuckwit signed off on this?
British politics need these guys back. At least we could laugh at their policies.
Wait, is that the lizard David Icke?
Well, at least Phillip occasionally talks as saucy as a sailor (he may actually be Andy Kaufman in hiding)
Yes.
Back before he was a conspiracy theorist he was a goalkeeper for Coventry City, then a sports journalist for the BBC and finally he was the highest profile of the Green Party’s spokepeople (I think there were four of them and they had no leader). Then he became the son of God and it went downhill from there.
It looks like I will miss the leaders debate tomorrow.
Hey! I do actually have a green candidate I can throw my vote away on.
ETA: I checked that ‘I’ll vote green if you do’ site Cory mentioned, and it has 20 people registered in my constituency.
Oddly, my (like I live there) MP will again be a woman - third different one in as many elections.
Labour will win, but I don’t really like a lawyer from London being parachuted in. The Tory candidate isn’t local either, since the current one is leaving after one term. Bit of a shame, really, she seemed pretty good on local issues. Previous one was a whip and consequently fucking useless as an MP.
At least UKIP won’t win there, although I expect a depressingly high vote for them.
At the moment, I’m barely paying attention to the campaign.
The real action is in all the data crunching, the polls and predictions (yes, I’m a bit weird like that. If Peter Snow has the 'flu on the big night, I’m ready to go)
Links:
http://www.electionforecast.co.uk/ -Also being used as the basis for fivethirtyeight’s predictions
Electoral Calculus
http://may2015.com/category/seat-calculator/
http://catalogue.alchemyanalysis.co.uk/BasicMap.html
These are all showing the result hanging on the razor’s edge of uncertainty, with small, local shifts capable of sending the result into any one of a dozen chaotic directions.
So let’s take a look at a few different scenarios. I’m not saying that the result will end up anything like this, it’s just a bit of fun:
Scenario 1- the boring baseline.
Enough Tories and Lib dems hang on in marginal seats to continue the pact of the ConDemned.
Things continue as they are with ever harsher austerity and ever thinner excuses as to why a nominally social liberal party is propping it up. Everyone is unhappy at not winning, but nobody does badly enough to be ousted or replaced. The country continues is long, slow trudge to a grey, soulless corporate feudal future. If you want a picture of the future, imagine David Cameron’s scuffed Oxford Brogues stamping on a human face- forever. While Nick mournfully explains that it’s all for the best
Or for the more fanciful approach, if you find the two parties with the closest ideological alignment, who haven’t ruled out working together and assume that they will form a government together:
Scenario 2- Mein Gott, hilf mir diese todliche libe zu uberleben
Labour and the Tories finally drop the pretence that they represent anything other than their own power and self-aggrandizement, come to the obvious conclusion that there is no actual real difference between two branches of the pro-business managerialist party, and lock the status quo in place by shutting out the other parties in a massive grand coalition. In other words, a replay of the national government of the 1930’s and its consensus on ignoring contemporary problems and lengthening the great depression.
Or for a possible suicidal backstabbing:
Scenario 3- “Anyone can Rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.”
This time it’s Labour and the Lib Dems that form a Government. Again, nobody is happy. Labour voters and MPs dislike relying on a group of collaborators who have been bad-mouthing them for the past five years, and the Lib Dems betrey their few reaming voters who actually wanted them in alliance with the Tories. The Tories fume at being betrayed, start fighting about Europe, and everyone looks meaningfully at the eventual fate of the German FDP, for next time.
The one that I not so secretly actually want to happen:
Scenario 4- “People assume that government is a straight line from voting to power. But actually, from a hung parliament, multi-party viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly coalition-y stuff”
Nobody wins an overall majority and since all the obvious coalitions have been ruled out we end up with the Labour party as the government, pulling together support vote by vote from the combined forces of the SNP, Plaid and the Greens. This forces Labour leftward, away from the grip of the Austerian consensus, and ensures that any wild Blairite ideas , like starting wars in the middle east, or privatising bits of the NHS get stamped upon fairly quickly.
And finally, just because it would be funny to see the reaction:
Scenario 4- Schadenfreude- Pleasure out of someone else’s pain.
In an unusual twist of circumstances, the Tories gain the most votes, but because of electoral geography, Labour gain the most seats in a hung parliament. Labour manage to form a government with the support of the SNP. Together, they come up just short of 630 seats but just manage to form a government because of the abstentionism of the four or five Sinn Fein MPs. In response to this state of affairs, the Tory party and their supporters in the press absolutely lose the fucking plot, denounce the entire situation as undemocratic, but still don’t actually start supporting proportional representation. A massive blamestorm erupts, as everything from the UKippers, to Dave, to the weather, to space lizards are blamed for the inabilaty of the tory party to win an election since 1992.
No Con-LD-UKIP-DUP coalition?
Wouldn’t that be ‘fun’?
I can’t see beyond a minority Labour government which I think would lead to another election before too long (with a Johnson-led Conservative party? Shudder).
And I remain quietly amused that the Great British electorate roundly rejected AV, but are going to get stuck with another hung parliament. Almost as funny as the SNP dominating in Scotland with an electoral system specifically designed to prevent majorities.
