General Election '24

[bagpuss]

Ok, going to bed now.

A lovely way to end the night.

6:50, off to bed.

Lightweights!

Steve Baker lost Wycombe to Lab.

Hooray, well done Wycombe

[dyqik]

f.cking get in, Truss out!

With the biggest Tory - Labour swing ever in any election.

[philbo]

Wow, Aylesbury has gone red. Non Tory for the first time in about 100 years, iirc. If gerrymandering us out is what tipped the balance, then I'm happy to have helped, even if I do still have a Tory MP. Hopefully he'll be marginally less useless than Rob Butler, I can but hope.

Greg Smith? I suspect you will be hoping in vain

If you ordered Matt Hancock from Wish

Though reports of 25% Lab were slightly over-egged

But Aylesbury is a little amusing. I'm crossing fingers for Wycombe, though there are reports that Baker might hold on by the skin of his teeth

Wycombe declared Labour a little while ago

I checked just before starting to reply.. but got distracted by a purring kitten

[philbo]

The kitten (just to use the interwebs for what they should be used for)
Spoiler:

Messenger_creation_32a803f7-4d04-4fb3-9f6c-5437e6e6aa38.jpeg (131.61 KiB) Viewed 2406 times

[FlammableFlower]

Had fun looking at the Guardian map set to 'Con vote share gains'... it's blank.

[Fishnut]

FISHNUT!!

Liam Fox gone

I can't quite believe it. He's been my MP for so long. It's surreal

[monkey]

Yay!

The far right delivered a big majority for Labour.

That's a good thing, right?

[TimW]

It works for me!

[Martin Y]

Cor. I dozed off for 3 or 4 hours and the Lib Dems stole the Tories lunch money. They were expected 140+ when I nodded off and now they're far below even the exit poll. Amazing.

[discovolante]

FISHNUT!!

Liam Fox gone

Oh I'm so glad. About time.

I wish I didn't have to work today too much to digest and I'm so so tired.

[Grumble]

Cor. I dozed off for 3 or 4 hours and the Lib Dems stole the Tories lunch money. They were expected 140+ when I nodded off and now they're far below even the exit poll. Amazing.

Yeah, exit poll was spot on for Labour though.

[discovolante]

Tories don't seem to have done as well in Scotland as predicted, am I right?

[Opti]

Hey Opti, Labour has won Stroud, kicking out the Tory.

It was hardly a difficult prediction ... but f.ck YEAH!!!

[headshot]

I can also now walk from Bournemouth to Berwick without crossing a Tory constituency!

[nekomatic]

Morning all

I had ambitions to stay up and enjoy the fun but it wasn’t to be. Glad those of you who did enjoyed it, and good work, those who helped make it happen.

[Grumble]

Point made on Twitter, Reform vote share only 2% up on UKIP vote in 2015. Not a massive swing.

https://x.com/jneill/status/1809142711519207866

[IvanV]

I was predicting that I would wake up to find Sunak had resigned as leader of the party. But he has sadly kept his seat - with a large majority - and though accepting responsibility for the outcome, hasn't resigned yet. Maybe he thinks that's the kind of thing you do at a civilised hour of the day.

So a good thing I didn't believe the numerous sub-100 Tory forecasts, and the late FT forecasts clustering around 120-130 turned out to be about right. Shy Tories there were. But 71 for the LDs is probably beyond their dreams.

Surprisingly many of my least favourite Tories survived. I really don't get that anyone could actually vote for some of these people, even if they are the candidate for your party. Jenrick, Braverman, Badenoch, Sunak, Hunt, Cleverly, McVey, Francois, turn out to be quite a large fraction of the ones I was particularly hoping to see no more. Some notable moderates survived - Mitchell, Norman, Bradley. But I suspect the remaining party remains very much in the hands of the right, as the Economist said it would be.

George Galloway failed to be returned, somewhat to my surprise. But even more surprising, and in contrast to that, are the 4 pro-Gaza independent MPs voted in - Blackburn, Dewsbury, Leicester South, Birmingham Perry Barr. Those 4 are one of the more surprising features of this result, I hadn't seen that predicted. I have a work colleague from Dewsbury, so I'm a bit surprised he didn't remark on such things.

Jeremy Corbyn got practically 50% of the vote in his constituency, huge local popularity. I thought Islington was a place of people with brains, but apparently not.

4 MPs each for Reform and the Greens.

Another curiosity lies in Northern Ireland, where a couple of Unionist MPs not from the usual parties have been elected. I think they are the NI equivalent of Reform, beyond-the-DUP type unionists. DUP reduced to 5 seats, I suppose lucky to keep those having had their leader and his wife arrested for sexual offences.

[shpalman]

Sleaford and North Hykeham held by the Conservatives despite a lot of their votes going across to Reform.

Point made on Twitter, Reform vote share only 2% up on UKIP vote in 2015. Not a massive swing.

https://x.com/jneill/status/1809142711519207866

Well thank f.ck for FPTP or else they'd have MPs in parliament in proportion to that vote share and the Conservatives would have to have them in its opposition coalition.

[nekomatic]

Yay!

The far right delivered a big majority for Labour.

That's a good thing, right?

No, you’re right, it’s terrible that the Tories have had their arses handed to them by the FPTP system they’ve enjoyed the benefit of for so long. If only they’d had an opportunity to do something about it during the last fourteen years.

[TimW]

Lab just took Poole by 18 votes, previous Con majority of 19k.

[IvanV]

Sleaford and North Hykeham held by the Conservatives despite a lot of their votes going across to Reform.

Point made on Twitter, Reform vote share only 2% up on UKIP vote in 2015. Not a massive swing.

https://x.com/jneill/status/1809142711519207866

Well thank f.ck for FPTP or else they'd have MPs in parliament in proportion to that vote share and the Conservatives would have to have them in its opposition coalition.

And indeed
Reform 14.3 % - 4 seats vs
LD 12.2% - 71 seats

Because Reform gets most of its vote in places where there's a larger conservative vote. Tactical voting is seen as method of keeping the Tories out, not to keep left/centre parties out. Though I have discovered that there is a LD-hate website, libdemwatch.org. It was the source of some dirt on our local LD MP.

[TopBadger]

Jeremy Corbyn got practically 50% of the vote in his constituency, huge local popularity. I thought Islington was a place of people with brains, but apparently not.

The Islington result doesn't shock me... what shocks me is that having had 14 years of chaos and decline, 25% of the voters said "yes please" to the party that gave them that, and ~15% of voters decided they'd prefer something worse.

Farage is great at single issue politics (first Brexit, now Immigration) but I'd bet less than 10% of Reform voters know his position on the NHS (which is to sell it off) and wouldn't want that to happen. Which just shows that a large number of people either aren't really paying attention at all.

And also, so so many people just didn't vote. Which is depressing.

But back to the happy side of the coin, we have a Labour government with a stonking majority who now need to go and deliver, and preferably over-deliver on their pledges.

[lpm]

Lab just took Poole by 18 votes, previous Con majority of 19k.

Lovely stuff.

[IvanV]

Farage is great at single issue politics (first Brexit, now Immigration) but I'd bet less than 10% of Reform voters know his position on the NHS (which is to sell it off) and wouldn't want that to happen. Which just shows that a large number of people either aren't really paying attention at all.

Despite getting so few seats from so much vote, I don't see Nigel Farage calling for PR. I don't think he's interested in having 100 seats in parliament. He's more interested in taking over or replacing the Tories, when he would then himself benefit from the FPTP advantage enjoyed in much of Britain by a single dominant right wing party, as the Tories have tended to be. His party did "benefit" from the more nearly PR-like voting system for the European Parliament, to get several MEPs. But he didn't seem to know what to do with them, except to fiddle the expenses system to get party funding money. Bit harder to do that in Westminster.

[lpm]

I was predicting that I would wake up to find Sunak had resigned as leader of the party. But he has sadly kept his seat - with a large majority - and though accepting responsibility for the outcome, hasn't resigned yet. Maybe he thinks that's the kind of thing you do at a civilised hour of the day.

Traditionally it is done from outside Number 10.

John Major did it with style: "When the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage" and then he went off to watch cricket at The Oval.