Wow! If the exit poll is right, Independence is a nailed on certainty. New Labour a total busted flush, and a Scotland firmly behind the SNP being ruled by David Cameron and a Tory, UKIP and Democratic Unionist coalition. Get down the bookies tomorrow and put your house on independence within five years. We won’t need a referendum. Put your mum’s house on UDI.
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Net swing Tory to Labour of 3.9% in first Sunderland seat. Are Labour piing p votes uselessly in safe seats, or is the exit poll wrong?
Clark 11.04pm : “What a total fucking mess UK politics is. Antiquated system. Not fit for purpose. Idiotic establishment. Useless corporate media.”
Depends on your point of view.
“What a total fucking mess UK politics is.”
It is efficiently doing exactly what it was designed to do.
“Antiquated system.”
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
“Not fit for purpose.”
It’s worked flawlessly since the Napoleonic Wars.
“Idiotic establishment.”
…or from the establishment perspective: Idiotic populace
“Useless corporate media.”
Very effective corporate media
Paddy Ashdown said that if the exit poll were right, he would eat his hat; he is certain that the LibDems will have won many more seats than 10. I hope he’s right, but we’ll have to wait and see.
We used to do exit polls where workers for the party (Labour Party for me then) would have representatives outside the polling station perhaps wearing a rosette or some indication of which party they represented. Most voters would let somebody know by telling them. There were always those who preferred to keep their voting to themselves, which was fair enough, but probably evened out across the spectrum. It was done on a shift basis where the party faithful took turns in recording votes. By and large nobody knew the party workers so it did not matter revealing how they had voted.
That seems to have gone. These were very accurate, unlike modern exit polls where reporters seem to interview people who have just voted.
Sunderland Central now also in:
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@John Goss “We used to do exit polls .. representatives outside the polling station perhaps wearing a rosette or some indication of which party they represented.” That sounds sensible psychologically. I can see voters for a party being naturally readier to tell a fellow-supporter wearing the party’s rosette that they voted for them. But are such methods legal now?
Washington Sunderland West also in:
Are Labour piing p votes uselessly in safe seats, or is the exit poll wrong?
Postal voters presumably don’t feature in exit polls- so the poll could be an accurate summary of those voters who voted in person. Also, Sunderland’s small Bangladeshi population could have voted predominantly by post- for the Labour candidates in each case, thereby explaining the underestimated Labour vote in the exit poll.
The exit polls seem to have got the collapse of the LibDem vote spot on- the Beeb are (gleefully ?) reporting now that Norman Baker will lose to the Tories in Lewes.
Craig
I’ve been a lurker for a while now, but Wings and the election have brought me here to ‘out’ myself and say hello and thank you for the thought provoking reads. I very much enjoy reading all the different perspectives.
I’m not wanting another Conservative government, but think it would work in our favour.
When would the next indy ref be under these circumstances, I wonder. Five years, like you say? I’m hoping sooner.
Abe Rene, I don’t know whether there has been a law to prevent voters letting the party they voted for know who they voted for. There does not seem to be anything stopping reporters doing exit polls. My suspicion is that parties today do not have the personnel, or the personnel thinks such a job is boring, when we used to do things like that for no personal gain.
@MáireÓCiaragain
7 May, 2015 – 11:50 pm
If the tories get in again there will be large scale civil unrest and the United Kingdom will split asunder.
Scotland, under these circumstances, will be independent within a few years.
Hope to see more of your posts.
If the tories get in again there will be large scale civil unrest and the United Kingdom will split asunder.
If Sturgeon holds a grudge against the Beeb for their coverage of Scotland over the past year she could of course endorse a countrywide boycott of the Licence fee
RobG
Yes. MPs are great but the next phase is extra-parliamentary and extra-legal non-violent resistance
Node, 11:34 pm: I think the establishment did not want the sort of results that seem to be emerging. From the Indyref campaign onwards, the various powers have concentrated on action; trying to push the result in their preferred direction. Reaction has been ignored – as I’ve been trying to tell Fred for eighteen months.
What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object? I don’t know, but it’s generally best not to find out empirically, and if collision is inevitable it’s prudent to anticipate and attempt mitigation in advance. Well they didn’t.
“SNP- Zero influence in Westminster, and the seats taken from Labour guarantees another Tory led Government.” (11:15)
Exactly, Lance Vance. Accordingly, SNP effort in Westminster ought to be focused on articulating policies unacceptable to the UK regime: human rights, rule of law, peace, nuclear disarmament, and an end to impunity, at home and abroad. When the UK parliament squelches them, take them to Holyrood and enact them there – since all of the above are binding on all levels of government – and enforce them till the UK spits you out. Sinn Féin does a lot of that. You don’t hear much about it because it’s so exquisitely sensitive, and so effective.
“What’s the point of me going to sleep tonight when I’ll only have nightmares and wake up in the morning to discover they’re perfectly true and the Tories get a second term. All because some schmucks (who shall remain nameless) decided to vote Tory by proxy via Greens, SNP and Plaid, thereby denying the only credible challenge to the Conservatives that is known as Labour just because these aforementioned haters’ vile, irrational anti-Semitic hatred meant that they could not bring themselves to vote for an atheist Ed Miliband purely because of as random and incidental a fact as his Jewish heritage.”
Your antisemitosis has spread to your brain. I live in the constituency of Golders Green and Finchley and many within the Jewish community here are NOT voting for the local candidate, Sarah Sackman, on the basis that Miliband isn’t, in their minds, “Jewish enough.”
Electoral Calculus Exit Poll puts Con at 280, followed by Lab at 274 and SNP at 52
I wouldn’t listen to the BBC.
YouGov put it at 289 260 and 48 respectively? (from a smaller sample; re-asking those queried at opinion polls)
I wouldn’t take the exit polls to be of value either.
All of this is academic anyway; its an irrelevancy- just as the whole pompous,stomach-churning bourgeoisie electoral competition amounts to in actuality; it being a competition exclusively between parties espousing virtues of evisceration, obliteration and immiseration against another party (or parties; just not in the UK) with slightly better sounding espousal of immiseration, evisceration and obliteration.
It will see Lab being in the unenviable position of being neither able to form majority nor eclipse the Con with no. of seats: Con will win the media war at the juncture of the latter; the media hysteria conforms to this outcome. The following discontent (already ripe; as pointed out by this blog and others) seen over the next few years immediate will mean collapse for the union…or at least the popular support of…in Scotland anyway.
Incidentally, I voted for the said Labour candidate, Sarah Sackman, because I want to get rid of the Tory.
O/T – while we wait – There are some disturbing mortality rates in patients prescribed with tiotropium mist inhalers.
It is I suggest a rather elegant way in the minds of some to cause heart failure.
Here is a rather attenuated caution from the BMJ.
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d3215
AND HERE:
http://www.mims.co.uk/tiotropium-consider-cardiovascular-risk-when-prescribing/respiratory-system/article/1335016
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/133505/huge-majority-british-jews-will-vote-tory-jc-poll-reveals
@ Becky Cohen .
Great rant against us anti-Semites voting Green etc due to our hatred of Miliband being Jewish .
Seems like you’re spitting your venom at the wrong target . According
to the Jewish Chronicle Poll nearly 70% of British Jews will be voting
Conservative , no doubt as they view him as ‘ a self-hating Jew ‘
I suppose you consider British Jews now as anti-Semites following your logic ?
“Node, 11:34 pm: I think the establishment did not want the sort of results that seem to be emerging. From the Indyref campaign onwards, the various powers have concentrated on action; trying to push the result in their preferred direction. Reaction has been ignored – as I’ve been trying to tell Fred for eighteen months.”
Let’s see what happens when the Nats find out they’ve been had. From what I’ve seen nothing has changed, the SNP don’t look likely to have enough of the electorate to claim a mandate. They built their hopes up to get their votes, could well put the Conservatives into power for another five years, what happens when they don’t deliver?
“@ Becky Cohen .
Great rant against us anti-Semites voting Green etc due to our hatred of Miliband being Jewish .
Seems like you’re spitting your venom at the wrong target . According
to the Jewish Chronicle Poll nearly 70% of British Jews will be voting
Conservative , no doubt as they view him as ‘ a self-hating Jew ‘
I suppose you consider British Jews now as anti-Semites following your logic ?”
Well said and you echo my point brilliantly.
I hope Scotland does become an independent country, and you, Craig, become its Foreign Minister!
The rumour is George Galloway has lost Bradford West
“Looks like the Jewish community has kicked Ed out into the cold . It’s irrelevant he’s Jewish , he just doesn’t love Israel enough . The word ‘ traitor ‘ is heard often around North London dinner parties I guess !”
67 per cent of the Jewish community in my constituency are Tory voters. The truth is, Jewishness for the vast majority of this 67 per cent is regarded as being synonymous with neoZionism and Ed just didn’t fit the bill.
I look forward to Paddy Pantsdown eating his marzipan hat.
It doesn’t look good for the LibDems so far. They seem to have lost votes to other parties and lost their deposit in some cases. The next 3 hours should reveal whether Ashdown was wrong.
Ajockalypse Now!
Brown (SNP) won Kilmarnock with exactly 30,000 votes. Am I unique in thinking that such a round number is fishy?
Abe Rene: every number is fishy – do a course in statistics.