Saturday 8 May 2010

Hang the MP


So it's a hung parliament the Tories leading with 306, Labour 258, Lib Dems 57, Others 28 with 1 still to come.
Percentage wise the Tories (36%) actually beat "none of the above" who only had 35% this time whose share was bolstered by thousands of people who couldn't vote due to being locked out of polling stations after queueing for hours, or by some polling stations running out of voting slips?
OK I'm depressed by this as I don't beleive there are over 10 million millionaires in this country (which would be my only reason for voting Tory), so I assume the Tory biased newspaper and TV coverage have again influenced the result.
"We want change" they kept saying, forgetting that change doesn't always mean "change for the better", this could be as good as it gets and the only way is downhill.
How can "change" mean electing the party who fucked up the country in the Eighties and Nineties and you kicked out with a vengance in 1997, it's the same party with the same ideals only with a new figurehead. They will do the same again and we'll be back here in 5 years saying we want change again.
Of course we could be doing this all over again in 6 months as I still don't think Clegg can possibly support Cameron and expect to keep the support of his party, surely it's commiting political suicide to side with the Tories for the short term gain of a few years in the limelight, I believe a large chunk of the Liberal support are former Labour supporters who would not stand for a leader supporting the Conservatives.
A lot of us fell for the hype that the Liberals were actually a credible third party after Clegg's X-factor win, but the voters when it came down to it ignored him and they did worse than the last election, supporting the Tories now could pretty much wipe them out as a political force in future elections, as the Tories would use that support to point out that there wasn't a credible reason to vote Lib/Dem anymore.

On a different note, as I like playing with figures here is the number of seats that would have been won using proportional representation (figures in brackets are actual seats), assuming 650 seats to play for.
I've used the top ten parties with all others grouped as "others" obviously.

Conservative - 235 (306)
Labour - 189 (258)
Lib/Dem - 150 (57)
UKIP - 20 (0)
BNP - 12 (0)
SNP - 11 (6)
Green - 6 (1)
DUP - 4 (8)
Sinn Fein - 4 (5)
Plaid Cymru - 3 (3)
Others - 16 (5)

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