Britain's next government

Am thinking Labour+SNP+Greens might happen, and that this could lead to Labour coming to their senses somewhat and moving leftwards when they realise that this what they've been forced into.

Maybe that is wishful thinking, my brain doesn't want to face up to the reality of 10 years of Tory wrecking-balling the public sector.

Other: A sufficient number of Blairite MPs splinter from Labour to prop up a Tory minority government.

SNP and Labour would seem the most plausible on paper but idk if the former would be put off by the Lib Dem experience.

I think the plan would be not to go into full-blown coalition, but a confidence and supply type arrangement- which would, in fact, give them more power and less ownership of unpopular shit (That's what the Lib Dems should have gone for last time out, but they were intimidated by the threat of another election, which would have wiped them out financially).

just hoping the no-government period lasts a bit longer than 5 days this time

^

minority Labour gov with some kind of confidence and supply backing from the smaller parties, followed by a second election before the end of the year

whatever the govt it probably won't survive a full-term.

Boris may get to be PM even sooner.

just discovered that the labour candidate in my constituency is an ex-investment banker, of course

Encouraging - good to hear they're no all policy wonks with no experience.

bitter, bitter lol

Tory / Lib Dem coalition

My guess is that:

- No way is anyone winning a majority right now.
- There's basically zero appetite, public or otherwise, for another coalition and I'm not sure either main party will go for one unless they absolutely have to.
- A lot of voters haven't really thought about how bad a minority government could be.
- The SNP are the only party likely to be big enough to be kingmakers in any case.
- If Labour are the largest party, they'll be able to get by without forming a coalition, given that voting with the Tories would be suicidal for the SNP
- A Tory minority govt is probably the most likely, and they'll find it very difficult to get legislation through, given that virtually everyone else will vote against them. Unless a rump of LibDems want to make the jump from irrelevance into oblivion.
- Fixed-term Parliaments are starting to look like a really short-sighted idea.

when did they look like a good one??

... i never realised the 2011 act still allowed for a motion of no confidence. precisely what was the point, then?

you know that bit in Midnight Run where Robert de Niro handcuffs himself to Charles Grodin?

Not sure what's meant to happen if a government loses a vote of no confidence but 55% of house doesn't vote for a dissolution.

Rainbow coalition of some type, I would guess.

The talk of SNP king making still has a whiff of SDP-Liberal Alliance about it to me, those of us that remember that election should recall they were being talked of as potential winners but ended up with (adjusted for sitting MPs defecting between elections) pretty much exactly the same representation.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Judging by the George Osborne interview I've just watched, he's given up using the term, 'Labour government' and is using 'Miliband/ SNP government' instead. Or, if you prefer, Backstabbing Jew/ Grasping Ungrateful Jocks government.

lol political debate

This whole campaign suggests that the Tories are not as far ahead on the economy as has been widely assumed and/or polled for most of the last few years. The problem with continual austerity is that no one believes you when you say things are getting better and they certainly don't feel it, which is why Cameron whacking out stat after stat on TV isn't actually working.

Also you can't continually whack the opposition over the head with "more borrowing" and then casually throw up an extra £8bn a year and expect people not to twig that maybe the money is easier to come by than you've been letting on all this time.

I don't think this election is dispiriting because I think that there's a good chance the Tories will be replaced by a bunch of lefty liberal types, ie Labour with support from Lib Dems/SNP/Plaid Cymru/maybe a green or two

(xp) indeed, the Tories have been much more panicky much earlier than I thought they'd be, Christ knows what they'll be like two weeks then three weeks from now.

I also suspect that if you picked a bus queue or pub table at random in almost any part of the country and asked them to explain the UK's budget deficit, the majority of people would get it wrong. People get in the abstract that it's a bad thing but it doesn't compare to the visceral horror of lying in pain on a stretcher in a tent in an overworked hospital car park.

I'm feeling relatively positive about this election. It's the first one where people online are really picking apart what the parties are saying. That happened a bit in 2010 but this time it's really ramped up. Cameron's "oh look vote for us and we'll find an extra £8bn for the NHS" has been torn to pieces really quickly. He waited to see what the other parties were going to say and then pulled a figure out of thin air that was bigger, and people have seen through that straight away. Of course there's going to be a low turnout because a lot of people are apathetic about the current state of British politics, but the people who are going to vote are much more engaged. There's going to be fewer people going "I'll be voting Labour because I'm from Yorkshire" or "I'll be voting Conservative because I'm from the Home Counties". There'll still be safe seats, but the whole idea of a safe seat is going to get shaky, which is good because the parties will actually have to work to get votes, in other words properly put across their policies. Also there's a real possibility that the result is either going to be a hapless Tory minority or a patchwork coalition, both of which could put PR or at least an alt vote back on the agenda.

I don't think this election is dispiriting because I think that there's a good chance the Tories will be replaced by a bunch of lefty liberal types, ie Labour with support from Lib Dems/SNP/Plaid Cymru/maybe a green or two

It's dispiriting because everything Labour have said about policy and spending suggests they lack the will and/or the courage to deal with the most pressing problem ie the hundreds of thousands of people being pushed over the breadline. I suppose you could argue that a coalition or less formal support arrangement would pull Labour leftwards but I have doubts over whether such a group would have to coherence or strength to govern, and there are so many competing vested interests involved that it would lack stability, especially if you chuck the LibDems in there.

Still think a Conservative minority is more likely, and I think they're scared shitless of that prospect because they would really be very weak indeed.

At some point people are going to start wondering what the point of FPTP is if it looks like no one is ever going to get past the post again.

I mean really the only sliver of hope is that Labour are talking tougher on austerity than they actually intend to be in government, which is quite likely, but on the other hand the party is in such a poor state that the RW hawks could quite easily dominate any government in any case.

To be slightly fair to Cameron, the £8Bn figure was produced by the NHS and was out a good couple of days beforehand - I heard it discussed on Tuesday (? Might have been Wednesday) morning on Radio 4. The NHS said they would need that extra each year and at that point only UKIP had come out and said they would meet it to much derision that they were just throwing out unfundable policies to be popular.

I thought that after the LibDems fucked everyone over last time that PR wouldn't even get a mention for another 20 years. But if FPTP increasing looks like a joke that results in a coalition (or a minority which effectively works like a coalition in that the government has to rely on other parties to get things done), then there's a really strong argument for switching to a system that's designed to work that way from the outset. Still a mess, but a mess that voters have more direct control over.

Any sort of transferable vote also good for giving a mandate to the parties as regards who your voters actually also support.

perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the whole show so far - i'll leave aside the media fixation on personality cults and hope it's just a media fixation - is the maddening spectacle of a Labour leader desperately trying to fend off any attempt to draw him into a left-leaning coalition and constantly refuting any claims that he would consider policies that might aim to improve the lives of the poorest people in the country

and the only people that give one fuck about having a nuclear deterrent are scumfucks who shd be thrown to the dogs

Labour has presented itself as so clannish, so self-centred and obsessed with the mere fact of its own existence, that it would rather destroy/deny the screamingly obvious popular coalition waiting to be pulled together with a bit of good will, a coalition that wd probably halt our slide into a monetarist police state for the foreseeable future. it wd rather still tiptoe around that fucking butcher Blair than make friends with any left-leaning party that is ostensibly pulling in the same fucking direction

if i thought these fucks were dead in 97 i was naive as to just how fucking dead they could get

Alliances come after the election and I'm not sure they have done anything so far to completely poison the well wrt the SNP. A coalition still seems viable. They still seem like a party in search of a platform though. Scared to articulate any substantial leftist change and inept at playing right-leaning populism.

I think that if required to Labour probably would enter into that coalition, but actually admitting it would kill off any chance of winning the Tory marginals that their strategists are complacently fixated on at the expense of the support hemorrhaging out the other side.

"let's batter the fuck out of the other teams until we're actually forced to find some common ground with them" is a part of this game that i find particularly infantile and unhelpful now

It's not just the Tory marginals, unless they have given up hope of winning any seats in Scotland the SNP is the biggest opposition threat for a substantial part of the party. Not that the way they have gone about challenging them hasn't been infantile and unhelpful.

I'm still unconvinced the SNP would go for that coalition either, it would make it a lot harder for them to accentuate the differences between themselves and Labour, and they've done well out of those differences so far. The experience of the LibDems suggests that taking joint ownership of unpopular policies is suicidal, even if there are fewer places for that vote to go in this case.

In that sense I suspect there are people in the SNP who probably WOULD prefer to keep Cameron in Number 10 because it presents the clearest blue water between themselves and Westminster.

i can see why the coalition is less attractive to the SNP than to Labour, and i can see why certain Labour dogmatists cling to whatever tactics they believe will gain them the most seats. this gamification of politics is what's truly poisonous tho. the fact that this game is more important to some of these fuckers than whether we live in an even marginally more humane country in future.

and the only people that give one fuck about having a nuclear deterrent are scumfucks who shd be thrown to the dogs

Unfortunately not true in my experience, 40+ years of Cold War propaganda dies hard and the lack of any substantial debate about the issue doesn't help. It's difficult to persuade people who've bought into the idea that without such a deterrent we'd be utterly defenceless, that Putin or someone else really might be the next hitler, after all who saw hitler coming? That terrorism finally, after much careful cultivation and nurturing by the west, seems like the most immediate threat facing us, and one not likely to be deterred by nukes, is the best argument I've found.

I suppose the most desirable outcome would be a devo-max arrangement with the SNP as the de-facto Scottish government in both Westminster and Holyrood but the SNP still need to win a Scottish Westminster majority first. And even then the Tories in opposition would be absolutely hammering the West Lothian question. In that scenario a strong showing for Plaid Cymru would help because then it really would look like a broad church rather than an awkward marriage of two opposing interests.

I'm still not sure where and how Northern Ireland fits in here.

Also the suspicion that Cameron would dearly love to fuck off back to Chipping Norton and make a boatload of money, and would happily lose this election if it weren't for the fact that being a one-term lamer significantly reduces your market value on the after dinner speaking circuit. As it stands, Boris Johnson could probably command a higher fee, and that must hurt.

Plaid Cymru, fourth most popular party in Wales according to the last polls I saw, so forget them having much of an impact.

If the Greens win 2 seats that will be a good result, so they won't be bringing much to the negotiating table. Lab/ Lib Dem coalition anyone?

This is probably starry-eyed optimism, but I can see a coalition allowing both sides to define themselves against each other while still pulling leftwards - admittedly this depends on the idea that Ed Miliband is a secret lefty faking right because politics, happy to play up "oh it's terrible but they have us over a barrell" to, er, whatever voices in his head are convinced that lurching right is a smart idea.

I'm assuming of course that any deal with the SNP will involve another referendum in the next 5 years - to that extent then yes being visibly dragged right will be a long-term winner for the SNP.

Do the SNP really want another referendum in the next five years? I mean losing it again would, if not settle the issue, then put it back enormously, even if they lose by a narrow margin. They would need to be extremely sure they were going to win in order to take that risk.

conceivably they might feel the tide's running with them and Brown wdn't be able to pull off the same trick twice. the irony of their tango with Labour is that they wdn't have half the support they currently enjoy if the Labour party was still anywhere near the left of centre

Well, that's true but also factor in decades of ineptitude and complacency by the Scottish Labour Party.

Well, I'm largely neutral on The Scottish Question, and I have the impression they'd walk it if it happened now, I can only imagine how it must appear inside the SNP. They were already warning that a No would mean no second chance this generation - how much a tribute to their power that they could bring it forward!

Plus this won't be happening in a vacuum - if they're having this conversation in the context of the slaughter of Scottish Labour that is expected, then you can hardly blame them for fancying their chances.

There is of course the ultra-cynical view that the last thing they want is a referendum, as they'd have to be judged on their platform of policies rather than "referendum now!"

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

phew at least that's decided then

good luck uk

didnt wanna say tbh

'Protesters' at a Nick Clegg event using Labour Party "Lib Dem Attack" material not yet available to the general public.

http://www.itv.com/news/update/2015-04-13/clegg-hospital-visit-overwhelmed-by-angry-protesters/

https://shop.labour.org.uk/products/new-lib-dem-attack-leaflet-two-sides-of-the-same-coin-395/

oh the irony

Would've voted other = general election in 2016.

Britain just looks ungovernable really.

that makes it sound interesting tho

Fucking Hell, did Barry Hogan write the Green Party manifesto?

From Chapter 2, "A decent livelihood, a one-planet economy" i.e. about the economy:

So it's not the economy, stupid.

Britain just looks ungovernable really.

It's a failed state.

A banana republic that doesn't even grow bananas

'Cos Brussels won't allow it.

so the manifesto seems .. disappointingly shrewd

polly toynbee says it "relies on the stupidity of the people." well, yes, well ... yes. well.

Well I'm people and I'm not impressed. <goes and lumps entire savings on labour victory>

His manifesto reprises Margaret Thatcher’s greatest hits – but dusting down old vinyl policy may not play on an electoral iPod 35 years later.

We stream policy these days Polly, keep up!

can u get these manifestoes on cd rom y/n

Aldo's links yesterday display the danger of pirated manifestoes.

http://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles/article_main_half/public/images/15821.jpg?itok=M7DKgCEs

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CCkHRdBXIAME-FU.png

oh no no no no no

they just lost the sub-editors' vote

enjoying that more by imagining 'Your Labour' as an attempt to write 'You're'

here here