{"id":17249,"date":"2015-05-08T16:14:07","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T15:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=17249"},"modified":"2015-05-08T16:52:47","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T15:52:47","slug":"british-general-election-16-i-officially-resign-as-an-election-pundit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=17249","title":{"rendered":"British general election (16): I officially resign as an election pundit"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK – I’ve now caught up with my sleep, having gone to bed in the early hours when the broad thrust of the General Election result was clear and I could take no more blueness. When I went to bed, I hoped that I would wake up to find that it was just a bad dream. But, when I did wake up, I found it was not just a dream – it was a nightmare.<\/p>\n

And I did not see it coming. I broadly believed the polls. Indeed I thought that Labour would do a bit better than the polls in its key marginals and it was on that basis that I forecast a minority Labour Government<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The front page article in the “Guardian” newspaper this morning states that: “The result probably represents the biggest shock in a general election since 1945<\/em>“. But 70 years ago, we did not have a whole succession of opinion polls forecasting such a consistent result and a world war, with mass mobilisation of citizens and deployment around the world, might have been expected to change social attitudes profoundly. This result in 2015 is utterly amazing. Another “Guardian” writer has written: “It is the biggest electoral revolution in the British Isles since Sinn Fein obliterated the Irish home rulers in 1918”<\/em>. In 1945, the revolution was one of class; in 1918 and again in 2015, the explosion is one of nationalism.<\/p>\n

It’s no wonder that, when the BBC and then YouGov announced their exit polls last night, so many politicians and commentators could not believe them. Famously Paddy Ashdown even promised to eat his hat if the BBC poll was correct – a rare flash of humour on a depressing night. How could the polls have got it so wrong? Either the methodology is massively flawed (although they had Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland correct) or voters lied to the pollsters or there was a huge and very last-minute swing to the Conservatives or some combination.<\/p>\n

Let’s just remind ourselves how seismic the result has been:<\/p>\n

\n
The Conservatives were all ready to experience another failure to secure a majority of seats since 1992. I was a teller for Labour on my local polling station and even my opposite number for the Tories seemed to accept that this would be the case. Instead the Conservatives won an overall majority of seats for the first time in 23 years.<\/li>\n
Labour was not expecting to win a majority or even necessarily the largest number of seats, but it was confident that it would win enough seats that, together with the Scottish National Party, it could block a return to No 10 by David Cameron. Last Saturday, I was at an election rally in London addressed by Ed Miliband and this was clearly the mood of the activists there. Instead Labour lost 26 seats compared to its tally last election.<\/li>\n
At the last General Election, the SNP took a mere six seats – the same as they did in 2005. \u00a0Just eight months ago, the SNP lost a referendum on Scottish independence. Yet last night they took 56 out of 59 seats.<\/li>\n
Five years ago, the Liberal Democrats won 56 seats and for the last five years have been in a coalition government for the first time since the Second World War. Today they barely exist with a mere eight seats at Westminster.<\/li>\n
The blood is all over the walls. Three party leaders – Ed Miliband of Labour, Nick Clegg of the Lib Dems and Nigel Farage of UKIP – have resigned their roles. Labour has lost a succession of big names from the Commons including Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy. The Lib Dems have seen an electoral massacre losing Danny Alexander, Vince Cable, Ed Davey, Simon Hughes, Charles Kennedy and David Laws.<\/li>\n

UKIP and the Green Party have each won just one seat in spite of polling almost 4M and over 1M votes respectively – compared to the SNP’s 56 seats for under 1.5M votes. I have long been interested in electoral reform and voted for the Alternative Vote (AV) in the referendum in 2011. I guess that some version of proportional representation \u00a0for Westminster elections will not be on the agenda of the newly triumphant Conservatives, but our present first-past-the-post (FPTP) system was designed for a very different political situation and needs serious change.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
What happens now?\u00a0Sky News has produced a list of nine things we can expect in the next five years<\/a>.<\/p>\n
At the economic and social level, we will see more austerity, more public expenditure cuts, more reductions in welfare, a weakened National Health Service, and more food banks. At the constitutional level, we will have an referendum on UK membership of the\u00a0<\/span>European Union and great pressure for even further devolution to Scotland. The worst case scenario is Britain out of Europe and Scotland out of Britain and a smaller, weaker, more divided nation. On the other hand, it might just be that the Conservatives implode over the EU referendum …<\/span><\/p>\n
This has been the 12th General Election in which I have participated. I have never known anything like it. I am still shocked and bewildered and very sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK – I’ve now caught up with my sleep, having gone to bed in the early hours when the broad thrust of the General Election result was clear and I could take no more blueness. When I went to bed, I hoped that I would wake up to find that it was just a bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17249"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17276,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17249\/revisions\/17276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}