David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results

by jjar • 11 years ago

27 47 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

thret• 11 years ago

This makes no sense to me.

Ulster Unionist Party had 114,935 votes and got two seats. UKIP had 3,841,346 votes and got one seat. Conservative had 11,207,547 votes and received 326 seats.

luxpir• 11 years ago

It's broked. The party in power rarely see it as broked. Ergo, no proportional representation.

mechazawa• 11 years ago

It still does not make any sense though. How is it possible that the amount of seats a party get seem so pseudo random?

jgrahamc2• 11 years ago

We had a referendum on changing the voting system in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...

The change was rejected 68% to 32%.

th0br0• 11 years ago

That's the 'first-past-the-post' system at work here. Sadly it's unlikely to change anytime soon :(

M8• 11 years ago

Well, at least there won't be too much overspending. So it worked out well this time.

Any democratic system is flawed - e.g. letting both tax-generators and tax-consumers vote.

petercooper2• 11 years ago

Unionists are in the majority in the geographical areas of those two seats (the Northern Irish population is still a little segregated). UKIPpers are not in the majority anywhere (except Clacton, maybe!) but are spread across the entire country.

Sherlock• 11 years ago

What's interesting from a game theory point of view is to have so many different parties with a FPTP electoral system.

You would expect a two party system.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

It was, until this election, essentially a two and a half party system, with some other parties in Northern Ireland.

protomyth• 11 years ago

Its a matter of what exactly you want to represent in your government.

If you want to represent political parties then First Past the Post is horrible and seats by percentage is what you want. That would mean that their is really no reason to represent local needs since you really need to run a full country campaign and will probably pick dense packed areas to spend advertising.

If you want the geographic region (however you define it) to have a representative then the opposite is true. First Past the Post means they have to campaign locally if they want to get in. Percentage of seats by party means local campaigning is just a bit of nostalgia and a waste of campaign money.

It comes down to what do you value and what relationship you want between the voter and national government.

fulafel• 11 years ago

Interesting that Liberal Democrats still have larger % of votes than Green Party after all that happened.

_petronius• 11 years ago

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I get the sense that many left-wing Labour voters who might support them avoid voting Green (especially in the last two elections) for fear of "wasting" their vote.

It would be interesting to see if that ever changed under a different electoral system (like the buried AV, or PR), but I'm not sure that we're going to see such a change any time soon. A party that got a real majority on just under 40% of votes cast isn't likely to wipe away that victory with electoral reform.

But considering how high UKIP's vote was, despite returning only one MP, there may be more pressure to explore that idea again.

madaxe_again• 11 years ago

Many here voted lib dem in a bid to keep the Tories out, but would rather have voted green. We're a Tory seat for the first time in decades. Ho hum.

yarper2• 11 years ago

This also happened in my constituency

adamc2• 11 years ago

As an American, I wonder what the dominance of SNP in Scotland will mean.

GordonS• 11 years ago

What's the significance of being an American in your wondering?

aaardvark2• 11 years ago

"As an American" has apparently become a euphemism for "I know nothing about the subject, so explain this to me like you would to a small child".

Aushin• 11 years ago

I think he's indicating that he might have as nuanced an understanding of what that may mean as someone from say, the UK or Scotland.

mseebach4• 11 years ago

It seems they went all in on becoming king-maker to a Labour minority government. That didn't work out.

I see two possibilities:

1: They try to keep up the energy kick and scream bloody murder at every turn, but never achieve anything, as they have exactly zero leverage to affect anything in Westminster. They fizzle out, and nothing much happens and things return to normal. Their big shot, independence referendum, has been fired and can't credibly be reloaded and re-fired anytime soon. Even Nicola Sturgeon admits this.

2: They get down to business and negotiates as a serious counterpart for actual regional political influence. This means getting their hands dirty on actual politics and compromise and at least toning down the Tory-hate-rhetorics, which could prove a very bitter pill to swallow for their base. See: Liberal Democrats, 2010-2015.

ZeroGravitas8• 11 years ago

They got "their hands dirty on actual politics and compromise" as (intially a minority) government in Scotland, and have continued to gain support ever since. I believe Alex Salmond was one of few political leaders ever to leave with a higher approval rating than when he started.

Apologies if you already knew that, but there's a lot of commentary about recently that seems utterly ignorant of those facts.

It's probably worth reflecting on your words here too: "never achieve anything, as they have exactly zero leverage to affect anything in Westminster". That's a double edged sword for people who want to keep the union together for the benefit of all.

ZeroGravitas8• 11 years ago

Optimistically it will mean a prompt for the UK as a whole to have a constitutional shake-up, with the House of Lords abolished and replaced with some kind of regional assembly, more devolution within England, federalism, and some kind of PR system introduced mostly to undermine the SNP but accidentally making the voting system better. It may make leaving the EU less likely, as the knock-on effect may be the break up of the UK so that Scotland can remain in the EU.

Pessimistically, it means an acrimonious break-up of the UK to the detriment of both sides, though that depends as much on what the Conservatives have planned as what the SNP wants and is able to do.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

Devolution within England will be disasterous for the NHS, thus likely to happen.

MattJ100• 11 years ago

Relevant to some here (and really every internet user), Cameron started his election campaign with a pledge to "ban encryption" if he was re-elected:

  - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30778424

  - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/david_camerons_.html

  - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/16/obama-sides-with-cameron-in-encryption-fight/

jblok• 11 years ago

I for one, will fight passionately against this, if he has the stupidity to bring it up again.

staticelf• 11 years ago

As a Swede without any insight into UK politics other than recent surveillance reports and internet censorships from the UK I can only say that this is disappointing for me.

Ntrails• 11 years ago

It may be a shock, but surveillance played approximately zero part in these elections. They were fought primarily on the economy, with side orders of social security etc.

I get that you consider those to be important, but they were waaaaaaaay down the list in importance.

yarper2• 11 years ago

I posted on HN a while ago saying that there was no chance of this happening. Obviously it did and I was wrong, but I still don't think it's a big win for the conservatives.

Two or three things happened that undermined the competition and swung it imo;

1) SNP won big in Scotland

Although the SNP has pretty much pulled the policy sheet from labour and added a few Scotland specific things in, the vast majority of seats they took were from labour. Fears of the SNP deciding politics in Westminster also diminished labour support in England. For example, I vote labour but am pro-union so could never support the SNP directly or indirectly. Therefore I can't vote labour.

In a sense they were damaged by their own success, their whole plan was hinged on being the kingmaker for labour which actually instead of hooking onto labour support, actually cut labour support (drastically).

2) The crushing of libdems.

The lib dems lost 50 or so seats, a crushing defeat but a big loss was expected. The thing is, most of those seats flipped conservative, so we voted to punish libdems and the conservative party profited the most from it.

3) UKIP leveler

At the outset, Labour was set to be split by the SNP, and the conservatives split by UKIP. While the first happened (SNP won a lot of seats), the latter did not. UKIP did not make a lot of headway (for good reason probably). FPTP while it does have its flaws, does tend to keep "hated" parties out. Given the choice between conservative and UKIP most people vote conservative (tactically).

tl;dr scotland voted conservative, and we hated libdems more than tories

David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

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