Someone Has To Win: UK General Election 2015

As it stands with 100 seats still to declare, Tories need just 1 more switch in their favour for an overall majority. This was supposed to be a nailed on hung parliament.

Galloway has gone. Whilst I admire a few things about him, his conduct during this election was disgraceful. I didn’t see it tho, i was following both him and Naz Shah it looked as if he was far more popular. I guess he’s just a smarter user of social media and it was all smoke and mirrors.

As for Labour loss, probably a rejection of limp wristed wet blanket Islington SJW/Guardianista Labour by their traditional voters. Can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve come across hordes of disaffected old lefties in recent times.

This. I live in a North Wales seat that has just turned Tory. And I’ve had the same conversation with Labour voters I know over and over again this week. The traditional white working class Labour core vote.

They would never vote Tory, but they feel betrayed by Labour. And now UKIP offer them an alternative, and a large number of them have switched.

Yup you don’t get working class votes/traditional intellectual voters by acting as if white van drivers are Satan and turning your main paper into clickbait identity politics bullshit and endless personal attacks against people in the left.

Yep, in my seat Labour are being abandoned by their core vote, while the large pensioner population has stuck with the Tories.

So what should be a Labour heartland has become Tory overnight. Amazing.

Yet if you look at the figures for anywhere North of London but South of Scotland, this pattern seems to be happening everywhere. Miliband is seen as a joke outside of London.

So, for the UK I residents… Will the EU referendum happen or will Cameron back out?

I am always taken aback by these shocking results, re; SNP/Labour in Scotland and the LibDems everywhere, similarly the party wipeouts in Canada.

I count myself as an Anglophile, and enjoy watching its politics in particular. Right now watching Ed Balls’ concession speech; although surely diametrically in opposition to his policies, he seems eminently likable.

I’m hoping his corporate masters will make him back out.

I can’t think of anyone in the City/global megacorps that will gain from an EU exit.

Also, on the cards: Internet censorship.

All sites with adult content (tumblr, reddit etc) must introduce age verification or the ISPs will be forced to block access.

One of the Tory pledges.

tbh i spent far too much time (social media etc) focusing on anti-UKIP campaigns rather than countering Labour loss/Tory gains and it seems UKIP were never contenders.

One other thing to remember here is - even a majority Tory government is going to be operating with a tiny majority.

It isn’t like the last 5 years where the Tory/Lib coalition between them had a chunky majority to work with.

This time, even if the Tories work with the DUP/Libs, it will only take a tiny number of Tory rebels to torpedo any vote.

Under the UK system, governments with small majorities tend to be pretty chaotic and unstable.

I’m sure they’ll inject a big dose of fear and nationalism to counter that.

Pre election polling in the US, Israel and now UK turned out to be wildly off the mark. Wonder how the hell that happened?
And I don’t know if this question can answered, but was SNP’s clean sweep in Scotland more a function of being a nationalist party or progressive?

IOW had the Labour party been less “Conservative-lite” (which is my take on it, I could be wrong) would they have done better? Or is is simply Miliband is that disliked? I mean Cameron doesn’t seem especially dynamic or anything.

Sturgeon winning all the debates would have helped, she was outstanding. The pack of lies/promises the anti-independence liblabcon side churned out but didnt keep cant have helped either.

Over the years (decades maybe) we’ve seen an interesting situation develop in UK politics. Probably the first real sign of this was the huge success of Labour under Tony Blair, the numbers were astounding. And a major factor (if not the defining factor) was The Sun newspaper (and it’s smaller brethren like News of the World).

You only had to read a few of the front pages in the run up to this election to see that the common working man (van driver, cabbie, plumber etc) was NOT going to be voting for Ed Miliband (so Labour).

Also Milibands slightly too strong put-down about doing a deal with Scotland (SNP) cost them a huge number of seats from Scotland. And that was all it took really. The Sun against you and a single strategic mistake. That is politics in the UK post Tony Blair pretty much.

It will be interesting to see if the Tories will go ahead with their ‘secret’ (outed by the Lib Dems a few days ago) plan to slash benefit payments to the poorest. If so i suspect that even white van man will finally understand the reality vs what The Sun has been telling him to think. I hope.

I’d voted for the Tories before (last time was Labour, as was this time), and would again depending on the running overall situation, but this time it does not look like ‘moderate’ Cameron is in control, so it will be interesting.

I suspect the calculus for the people who voted Con was, “we don’t want a coalition again, especially not a Lab-whatever coalition”.

In that context, the conservatives were the strongest horse to back, even if people had to hold their noses (hence the difference between polls and outcome - some too ashamed to admit who they’d really vote for).

If Lab get a good leader in place, I’m sure they’ll have a Blair-like landslide next time round. I actually liked Milliband, but you can’t have a leader who’s just so singularly uncharismatic these days.

I live on the south coast, normaly I vote Lib Dem. For the first time ever the wife and I voted for the Conservatives. The lib dems had held our seat for 20 odd years.

Ed Milliband did not seem up to the job of prime minister, weak, not to be trusted and cam over poorly.
Immigration is an issue, something the labour party have an open door policy on or had in the past and cant be trused at present to deal with it.
The EU, I don’t want out but I certainly want a better deal. It should be a trade deal and nothing else instead it’s become a mish mash of ideas and seems to serve no one well in some ways. Trade is trade and should be the easiest thing to keep the rest I have no idea how you can keep 20+ countries happy when most countries can’t keep themselves happy.
The Uk is 1.5 trillion in debt and you have Labour and especially the SNP saying spend billions more we dont have as if it’s a solution for the future.
The conservatives have done an ok job so far, after 13 years of labour damaging the country we really cannot expect anyone to fix it in 1 parliment. I am happy to give them another go, if they screw this then we can vote them out.

Here is a personal example of the issue I have with Labour.

I live in a cul-de-sac of 6 houses. They are 2 and 3 bedroom properties with values between 185k-235k. 5 are privately owned and 1 is a Housing Association house. In the Housing Association house is a family of 6, Mum, Dad and 4 kids aged 10 - 6months. Dad works part time, mum doesn’t work at all. They have 2 cars, Cable Tv, Broadband, iphones and ipad, 50" TV, they also holiday abroad every year and they love to boast they pay very little rent and rates and get shed loads of benefits, working tax credits etc.

Everyone else in the road works full time and most partners also work either full or part time and in some cases can’t afford the stuff these have. They have just had another baby as they are hoping it will get them a move to a bigger house and have stated if that doesnt work they will just have another to force the issue.

It is madness, I have no issue with everyone who is struggling gets support, a roof over their head, food, clothes etc but we are funding life styles far above that and yet the minute anyone mentions dealing with it there is uproar from Labour saying toffs, just for the rich etc. It is joke. We have 3 million workless house holds in the uk. We have people living in million pound houses paid for by the state by us, it’s more beneficial to claim benefit than it is to get a job in many places.

We need immigration because they are willing to work in the industries that the UK feel is below them and because something for nothing is better than working for a living.

Of course not everywhere and everyone is like this but the problem is certainly getting worse and we need to deal with it, labour just created it and continue to do so with their rhetoric.

To add if the other 35% of voters had stood and voted like they did in Scotland they could have made changes from voting for UKIP or Green Party but no they are happy to just complain nothing will change, look at Scotland while they lack power it does look like they will end up running their own country in the main while connected to the UK. Change is there as long as people lose the apathy.

I don’t think this is feasible. Most of the rest of the EU do not want just a trade pact, but political Union (even if it’s slow coming). And I’m not sure FTAs are that easy to negotiate. While I think a non EU UK would be prioritized for a FTA, negotiations can take many years (there are many countries in continental Europe who would benefit of UK tariffs, so there would be blocks).

Also, in case of a Brexit, you would have 2+ million British going back to the UK when their work and residency (for retired individuals) contracts in the EU become no longer valid. While the EU would face a similar problem, the impact would not be nearly as noticeable (bigger manpool to absorb the damage). Plus, a big chunk of your finantial sector (20% of your positive trade surplus, iirc) seems willing to leave for Germany on such an event.

Estimates are of about a 12% GPD decline in the UK in case of a EU exit (and since it could trigger another Scottish referendum, it might be even worse).

I think there will be a referendum (hard to get out of it now) but most likely (and hopefully) the conservatives will call for a stay in the EU vote.

I think no party in total wants to leave the EU outside of UKIP.

The problem is the UK do not want a political union and never will, this issue has to be addressed or we will leave regardless of the issues. It seems the EU and the UK would be better served with the UK in the EU even if it is mainly for trade and allowing the UK to opt out of stuff which annoys the majority.

Once Greece drops out we will have a better indication of what may happen but the EU in it’s current format is certainly not working in the short term and looks like the same in the medium as well.

One of the issues we have here is immigration, immigration of itself is not a problem except most immigrants that come over live in a few places, these areas just cant cope any longer. In Dorset where I live it’s a suburb of Bournemouth and it’s the same all over certain parts of the country and these areas are close to collapse. Not enough school places, not enough doctors surgeries, hospitals groaning under the strain, infasturcture failures, major housing shortages and so on.

It would be fine if immigration was spread out around the country but it isn’t and adding a net 300k people a year to the UK just is not sustainable and as more countries get added to the EU tis problem will get worse not better.

2 million EU based UK citizens who give up their beautiful retirement homes in the Spain or Med, and come back to find all they can buy with their entire lifesavings is a shoebox in a slum. That’s going to go down well.