The Official UK Election Thread! 6th May it is!

[Architect]

The first past the post system really is insane. With 641/650 seats declared, the results so far are Conservative - 302, Labour - 256, Lib Dem - 56. However, the proportion of actual votes is 36.2%, 29.1%, 23.0%. The Lib Dems should have 40 seats less than Labour, instead they have 200 less. Seems pretty clear that the whole electoral system needs some serious sorting out. At the moment who the public vote for has very little to do with who actually ends up in power. Those of the public who are actually allowed to vote rather than being sent home by the police.

And that's we use a variation on PR in the Scottish Parliament....

 

[Ashles]

And still some results are coming in (although no-one really cares now).

Those candidates must be knackered.

 

[Ashles]

Wow, Fermanagh and South Tyrone - a majority of... 4

And people think their individual vote is pointless?

 

[JihadJane]

Wow, Fermanagh and South Tyrone - a majority of... 4

And people think their individual vote is pointless?

Individual votes are pointless in the current system.

 

[Ashles]

Oh look - It's The Standing At The Back Dressed Stupidly and Looking Stupid Party

 

[Ashles]

Individual votes are pointless in the current system.

Well clearly they aren't.

 

[Architect]

Individual votes are pointless in the current system.

Then explain Fermanagh & Tyrone.

 

[Debaser]

...someone not elected by us...

Aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!!
This is a PARLIAMENTARY democracy. We do not, and never have, voted for our Prime Minister. It's up to the members of the party or group of MPs who form a government to decide their leader in Parliament, and thereby our PM.



Anyway, woke up this morning and re-enacted the opening scene from Four Weddings... Not good.

Do people have that short a memory that they think a party with many of its likely cabinet members ex-public schoolboys, financially insulated from birth from the cuts they will by necessity have to make, will be somehow empathetic to the majority of citizens?

I am surrounded by a sea of blue

IMO the one good bit of the BBC's production was showing each constituency as a uniform hexagon. It showed London a bright red island, assailed on all sides by a sea of blue, and forlornly waiting to be liberated by those swathes of red in the north of England and Scotland who unfortunately can't break through the home counties.

(Pity it wasn't like the old strategy game Theatre Europe, then someone could have just typed in 'Midnight Sun' and used the nuclear option).

 

[JihadJane]

Then explain Fermanagh & Tyrone.

Individual votes only count in marginal seats and if you want to vote for one of the big guys. What's the point of that?

 

[Ashles]

Aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!!
This is a PARLIAMENTARY democracy. We do not, and never have, voted for our Prime Minister. It's up to the members of the party or group of MPs who form a government to decide their leader in Parliament, and thereby our PM.

Uh yes I know. Everyone knows this. That was actually part of the point.
I was making a point about the number of steps distance between us as voters (and how we actually voted) and the potential Prime Minster in one possible outcome.

 

[Debaser]

Uh yes I know. Everyone knows this. That was actually part of the point.
I was making a point about the number of steps distance between us as voters (and how we actually voted) and the potential Prime Minster in one possible outcome.

Sorry, I didn't pick up on the irony. Probably because I watched Ed Vaizey (Con.) making that point in all seriousness on the BBC this morning.

Unfortunately it's only when we get input from the 'constitutional experts' on occasions like these that we get to see that parliamentary democracy is possibly the weirdest form of democracy you could devise.

 

[jimbob]

Anyone else find it hilarious that the thin, balding man on TV right now is Lord Adonis?

To quote Sandy Toksvig: "His name writes a cheque that his face can't cash"

 

[Ashles]

Individual votes only count in marginal seats and if you want to vote for one of the big guys. What's the point of that?

Well if you want to vote for 'one of the big guys' in a marginal seat then, er, every point.

(And anything's potentially a marginal if people vote that way)

 

[Undesired Walrus]

George Galloway did not even turn up for his result. Pathetic cretin.

Forget him now. His deeply unpleasent character is out of the house, and his party has been decimated.

He's gone.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

Forget him now. His deeply unpleasent character is out of the house, and his party has been decimated.

He's gone.

Thank god for that.

 

[Undesired Walrus]

So happy Labour took back Bethnal Green and Bow. Hope the £100 I donated to their campaign helped.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

I'm still shocked at the loss of Lemsip.

I mean I know he's a bit of a tit, but how the hell did he manage that?

 

[Matthew Best]

Well, here's a pretty kettle of fish. Did any party have a good night? The Greens perhaps.

Yes. And who knew the Brighton Pavilion was a constituency?

 

[Debaser]

I'm still shocked at the loss of Lemsip.

I mean I know he's a bit of a tit, but how the hell did he manage that?

Obviously a major guess, but could it be that in between getting his mug onto and in various media his constituents thought he was ignoring them?

 

[P.J. Denyer]

It seems to me that the 'Labour, but not Gordon Brown' option is rather a difficult one. At the moment, Brown is the PM, and if he feels that he can continue as such then he isn't required to resign. What happens if his party wants to continue in government, but he personally has to resign as PM? Does that mean that the party currently in government gets first crack at forming a new government, or are all bets off from the moment Brown resigns?

Dave

By tradition outgoing Prime Minister 'recommends' his successor to the Queen, who then accepts that recommendation. In theory Brown could hang on in a coalition for a new Labour leader who he would then recommend to the Queen.

Or at least that is how I understand it.


Of course by now he may have barrackaded the door to number 10 and be shouting 'I'm not coming out, you can't make me' through the letterbox.......