In a fit of election enthusiasm I took a look at the polls for the projected seats rather than the total percentages:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11544897/Election-polls-Labour-take-one-point-lead.html

First thing that struck me was how utterly insignificant the Green/UKIP/Liberals share of seats is. (15pc support for UKIP equates to 2 seats!)

Second thing, how close is this race? In percentage terms the big parties are neck and neck but when you look at the seats and who could form a government it’s a different story.

Looks to me like if the red party are likely to be the biggest party they can easily from a Government with the SNP.

If the blue party is the biggest party it’s not clear what they do. Even with the Liberals *and* UKIP it’s hard to imagine the combined seats being greater than Labour/SNP combined.

This feels a bit like the last US election when the media pretended it was close to keep people watching but when you looked at how the votes were distributed it was clear Obama was going to win.

Am I misunderstanding something? (Obviously I accept that polls can often be utterly wrong.)

Gerry’s final thought: Red and Blue Parties are both centre parties these days so a Lab/Con coalition would work fine IMHO. That would be funny. 😀

Maybe, let’s just get it over with and then we can move on like we’re all supposed to.

Remember what happened last time the SNP supported a minority labour government…..do not speak her name.

Obviously I accept that polls can often be utterly wrong.

It’s rare for the polls to be significantly wrong, they are never utterly wrong.

Looks to me like if the red party are likely to be the biggest party they can easily from a Government with the SNP.

It’s not going to be that easy to form a government with a party that you have said you will never form a coalition with.

And it is close, it’s not a scam by the media “to keep people watching”, your link shows a 9 seat difference between Labour and the Conservatives – that’s close.

The conservatives are ****. That’s true btw..

If the blue party is the biggest party it’s not clear what they do

if the red party are likely to be the biggest party

is that biggest on number of seats or share of the vote?

tories need about 3% more national share of the vote than labour to get the same number of seats, just due to demographics and the boundaries etc.

ca. 33% each could be interesting. Could come down to the negotiating skills of Milliband trying to negotiate Cameron out of a job (who remains PM until he goes to see her Maj). Merkel did it in Germany, with only 8 seats more than the incumbent. Brown jumped much earlier than I expected last time.

All I’ll say is that if UKIP have anything to do with the next government then I will officially seek asylum in another country and hand in my passport on the way out.

^ tempting ^

And it is close, it’s not a scam by the media “to keep people watching”, your link shows a 9 seat difference between Labour and the Conservatives – that’s close.

I’m not sure it is close in reality for the reasons I stated: To put it more clearly, if the Blue Party sneak it they need a coalation with more votes than Lab+SNP becasue the SNP will never form a coalition with the Blue party.

That looks to me like a near impossibilty if the polls are fairly close to the truth because only UKIP or the Liberals will form a coalition with them and they have hardly any seats.

I wondered if I’d misread the chart. Looks like I didn’t.

All I’ll say is that if UKIP have anything to do with the next government then I will officially seek asylum in another country

Relax, if they get the expected two seats UKIP aren’t going to be in coalition with anyone.

Relax, if they get the expected two seats UKIP aren’t going to be in coalition with anyone.

Really? Dammit!! I’ve been looking for an excuse to leave

Honing in on some details, Jim Murphy the Scottish Branch office manager, is trailing by 9 points, bit of an embarrasment for Labour were always been strong in Scotland till they turned into red tie wearing tories.

I’m not sure it is close in reality for the reasons I stated: To put it more clearly, if the Blue Party sneak it they need a coalation with more votes than Lab+SNP becasue the SNP will never form a coalition with the Blue party.

Well if you want to interpret the current opinion poll predictions as an easy win for Labour and not close then fair enough, but that’s not how most people see it.

Your easy win for Labour is based on the assumption that they will form a coalition with the SNP. Firstly as I pointed out Labour has ruled out a formal coalition with the SNP.

And secondly, Labour’s inability to form a majority government will almost certainly be due to the collapse of the Labour vote in Scotland at the hands of the SNP.

This is because, rightly or wrongly, traditional Labour voters in Scotland now believe that they have a credible alternative to Labour (those sentiments aren’t yet shared by traditional Labour voters in England)

The SNP whatever you might think of them are shrewd operators – they haven’t got to where they are today by not being so. They are not going to pay back traditional Labour voters in Scotland for making the possibly heart wrenching decision of not voting Labour for the first time in their lives by simply propping up a Labour government.

Nor would a Labour Prime Minister be overly keen to reward the SNP for destroying their core vote in Scotland by offering them an easy coalition.

Furthermore there are some quite fundamental policy differences between Labour and the SNP, the SNP has vowed to make any support for a Labour Prime Minister dependent on some fairly serious concessions.

In contrast the Liberal Democrats under Clegg’s leadership had become right-wing neo-liberal and shared many of the Conservative Party’s economic priorities, their policy differences were fairly cosmic and inconsequential. Jumping into bed with the Tories was fairly easy for Nick Clegg.

A Labour-SNP coalition would not be easy imo, although possible of course.

Cosmic policy differences? Far out, man….

Ernie: Have a look at the numbers and see if you can construct a blue party coalition with a majority by adding the liberals and ukip-ers.

Looks to me like there aren’t likely to be enough, if this poll proved to be anywhere near correct. Is my maths wrong?

Cosmic policy differences? Far out, man….

Damn spellcheck 🙂

Ernie: Have a look at the numbers and see if you can construct a blue party coalition with a majority by adding the liberals and ukip-ers.

Yes I agree that under the current prediction it doesn’t look like the Tories, Libdems, UKIP, and the Unionists, could form a majority government. This doesn’t however translate into an easy victory for Labour.

There are still several weeks to go and things could quite easily change, but at the moment both Labour and the Conservatives are pretty much neck and neck with Labour having a very slight advantage..

Yes I agree that under the current prediction idoesn’t look like the Tories, Libdems, UKIP, and the Unionists, could form a majority

That’s it, got there, in the end.

Labour having a very slight advantage..

The ‘slight’ advantage being that on anything like current numbers their opponent couldn’t possibly form a government.:D

Its odd that they want the best for the country and we’re a supposed democracy. Yet our glorious leaders squabble and won’t work with each other no matter what. Shows they’re just there for the power and money.

http://www.theweek.co.uk/general-election-2015

That’s it, got there, in the end.

Thank you so much for helping me. It’s clear now to me that this general election is going to be an easy victory for the Labour Party.

I expect the Milibands have already started packing their best crockery and cutlery in preparation for their move to Downing Street.

I want a gorram rainbow coalition.

Humpf.

Thank you so much for helping me.

No problem.

I expect the Milibands have already started packing their best crockery and cutlery in preparation for their move to Downing Street.

Miliband? I wouldn’t be so sure of that. If Labour don’t win enough seats to maintain a majority with the Liberals, Miliband might feel he has to resign so another labour leader can work with the SNP. Or he might be completely unable to form a government. However, the important thing is you’ve grasped the fundamental point, which is that without a dramatic change there will not certainly not be a government involving the Blue Party.

The more I think about it the more I like the idea of a Lab/Con alliance. I don’t see any idealogical differences big enough to prevent that. But politically I guess it’s an impossibility.

I think Ed’s ruled himself out of co-operating with the SNP. The only thing he hasn’t said is ‘Over my dead body’. Which would make it all easier once the mess is cleared up.

But that might leave Mr Balls in the top job: what a frightening thought.

Are we really going to have Miliband leading the country?

Good lord

Doesn’t Cameron get first refusal to form a minority government if the current polls play out?

In his arrogance would expect him to try even if obviously unworkable. Few months in and the whole election circus begins again… Just possibly without Dave and Ed?

The whole thing is intriguing in it’s awfulness. Probably would be the least worst solution to have labour/conservative as it’s obvious what needs to be done and they could get on without the petty politics of the moment. But you would undoubetdly suffer from the lack of an effective opposition

Conservatives to win the most seats but a minority – might well have a crack on their own.
Most likely coalition is Lab/SNP by a country mile and the mirage of we won’t do that will evaporate as fast as a puddle in the Sahara. The bargaining will be awful if amusing to watch.

But the intrigue is hilarious as for all the rhetorical BS, the SNP need the Tory bogey men in power so they have someone to blame. If the SNP consolidate in Scotland, Lab are in trouble for some while and hopefully UKIP will dissolve into puddles of hate and xenophobia. A right royal mess – but on that point that goodness we are not a republic!

Meanwhile, business will carry on regardless….Europe will have to deal with grexit and geopolitics will get messier with greater chance of serious conflict. Good job we can still defend ourselves….

I suspect a Conservative minority government will be the outcome

Of course that works well for Cameron as he doesn’t have to hold an EU referendum…

Cameron doesn’t have Balls to go it alone (IGMC)

The lastest polls indicate that Labour might fall short of a single party majority but hold one with the SNP, technically meaning that they can form a government. However, others have pointed out that the Tories would have a field day with the left – that it would be a political disaster that would lead to a second general election.

Why couldn’t labour instead refuse to enter government and then sit on the sidelines with the SNP, introducing their own bills and voting down anything that the Tories put fourth?

Why couldn’t labour instead refuse to enter government and then sit on the sidelines with the SNP, introducing their own bills and voting down anything that the Tories put fourth?

So how does that work exactly…. 😉

They don’t have to enter cabinet/downing street do they? I can’t remember anything that says that a minority party has to form a coalition to enter government if they have the opportunity, surely they could just informally arrange a deal with the SNP to hang the government and cause wanton mischief.

A grand coalition would be good. They could stop pretending they’re different and just got on with dealing with the reality of the situation. It’s not like whoever is in charge has any real choices.

mikey74 – Member

All I’ll say is that if UKIP have anything to do with the next government then I will officially seek asylum in another country and hand in my passport on the way out.

Ya, Cuba will be good but hang on they are going capitalist in the near future or North Korean then …

I am afraid you have no place to go as you will just be a burden to other country.

surely they could just informally arrange a deal with the SNP to hang the government and cause wanton mischief.

There’s a genuinely good way to become unelectable.

Why would you go to all that bother and NOT form a government?

the Tories would have a field day with the left

So? What are they gonna do if they’re the minority? Not a whole lot…

There’s a genuinely good way to become unelectable.

Why would you go to all that bother and NOT form a government?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/17/general-election-2015-if-this-deadlock-holds-a-battle-is-coming-over-ed-milibands-legitimacy

As horseraces go, this one should be thrilling. At the midpoint in the campaign, with three weeks gone and three weeks to go, the two favourites – though that’s an improbable way to describe politicians in the current era – are still neck and neck. Each night brings another poll projection showing Labour and the Conservatives separated by just a few seats – sometimes a single seat – in the next House of Commons. Allow for the margin of error and a photofinish on the night seems a certainty. Unless of course there’s a breakout moment, the one spectators and players alike are still waiting for.

The Tories could go into studied panic this weekend as they realise that lift-off is eluding them. They are lagging behind the 36.1% share of the vote they notched up in 2010 – and they didn’t win then either. They know they need to be three or four points ahead in the polls to feel confident, and that advance is stubbornly refusing to come.

Indeed, many of the usually reliable features of a British general election campaign have failed to materialise. It’s not just the morning press conferences that have been banished to history. There’s been no random act of violence involving a politician, no John Prescott punch. There’s not even been the requisite bruising encounter with an ordinary voter of the non-violent kind. We’re still waiting for the Sharon Storer or Gillian Duffy of 2015. We’ve not had the open mic gaffe, the candidate falling over or even the mocked-up tabloid front-page depiction of a party leader as a root vegetable. Not yet anyway.

Instead, the campaign has been relatively substantive. Sure, the Tories have tried to make it about Ed Miliband’s ex-lovers, his multiple kitchens, his brother or his loyalty to Britain. But proper issues keep intruding. Tax avoiding non-doms, the right of housing association tenants to buy their homes, the funding of the NHS and the state of our public finances – these have been the dominant notes. It’s not exactly been a high-level seminar in public policy, more like an exercise in political transvestism – the Tories posing as warm-hearted, open-walleted splashers of cash, Labour recasting itself as the hard-faced wearer of a kinkily tight fiscal corset. It may all be a pose, but the pose is on issues of substance.

Still, for all their efforts – the Tories going negative last week, then suddenly talking sunshine and the good life this week – the polls refuse to shift. Slowly the Westminster classes are beginning to contemplate what might happen if the current numbers hold up and where that would lead the governance of the country.

The focus is not on the parties so much as the likely ruling blocs. Looked at like that, Miliband is on course to become prime minister, elevated to that position courtesy of Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, a grouping that looks set to have more seats in the next House of Commons than the alternative bloc: the Tories, the Lib Dems and, say, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists.

There’s been lots of focus on how exactly these arrangements might work, perhaps a formal coalition between Labour and Nick Clegg’s party – especially if Clegg is no longer its leader – and a loose, “confidence and supply” set-up, even an unagreed one, with the Scottish Nationalists. But regardless of the details, the assumption has been consistent: so long as Labour can muster the numbers, they will form the government.

On this view, the exact tally of MPs Labour notches up is irrelevant; it doesn’t even matter whether Labour is the largest or second largest party. All that counts is that the anti-Tory camp can muster a majority in the House of Commons. It’s this logic which enables Nicola Sturgeon so confidently to urge one-time Labour voters to switch to the SNP. In terms of the government that will come about as a result, she argues, the difference is almost academic. All that matters is building up that camp committed to ousting David Cameron: whether your individual MP wears a red or yellow rosette makes no odds.

The logic is seductive. And rationally, it’s sound. Constitutionally, it is quite true that our system hands the Downing Street keys to whoever can command a majority in the House of Commons. And if the current arithmetic holds, that will be Miliband.

But here’s the problem. This isn’t arithmetic. It’s politics. Other things besides a simple majority in the Commons count – starting with the all-important status of being the largest single party.

If the Conservatives get 10 more seats than Labour, but Labour has the bigger bloc overall, would the Tories retreat quietly into opposition allowing Miliband to head a minority government, tacitly sustained by the SNP? To adapt the phrase of the hour: hell, no.

They would instantly denounce such a government as illegitimate. Backed by a Tory press in full cry, they would say Miliband had no mandate. They would call him a squatter in Downing Street, insisting he had usurped power. Waving aside the precedent of 1923, when the second-placed party last formed a government, cartoons would appear of Red Ed in the silver medal position on an Olympic podium trying to wrench the gold from David Cameron’s grasp. And that drumbeat would continue and would not be stilled except by a second general election.

n some ways, the drumbeat has already begun. Senior Liberal Democrats are hinting that they couldn’t possibly put Miliband in Number 10 unless Labour is the largest party. To do otherwise would be to defy the wishes of the British people, to support the loser over the winner. Of course this is nonsense, the groundless invention of a new and bogus constitutional principle. But that’s the trouble with an unwritten constitution: you can make stuff up. So long as you say it sonorously and with a sufficiently straight face, no one can tell you you’re flat out wrong.

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Labour needs to be ready for this the instant the polls close at 10pm on 7 May. Because if the Tories emerge as the largest single party, they and their cheerleaders will claim at least a partial victory no matter how distant they are from a Commons majority. Their aim will be to make it hard for Miliband to form a government – not numerically hard, but politically hard. The Tory script will say things like: “These are the rules. If you win a test match by one run, it’s still a win. And Labour lost.”

The model here is the Bush v Gore dead heat of 2000. Even though nothing was clear in Florida, Republicans (and Fox News) began referring to George W as the “president-elect” and branding Gore as a sore loser for refusing to accept the fact. They framed a narrative in which for Gore to reach the White House he would have to “overturn” the result – even though the result was uncertain. Logically it made no sense. But politically it proved irreversible. And we all know what followed.

Labour has to halt that narrative before it is even born, which means preparing the ground and making the argument now. But there is also a message here for voters who want to see a Labour government, especially those in Scotland. A large anti-Tory bloc, whose Scottish contingent is made up almost entirely of nationalists, may not be enough. To head off the coming battle over legitimacy, Labour will have to be the largest single party as well. For all the complexity of our current politics, the truth is actually quite simple: the only way to be sure of getting a Labour government is to vote Labour.

Which still doesn’t answer my question:

Why would you go to all that bother and NOT form a government?

We already have a party in power that didn’t gather a majority of the vote, why would a bloc that did be any worse? How do you think PR works?

Why couldn’t labour instead refuse to enter government and then sit on the sidelines with the SNP, introducing their own bills and voting down anything that the Tories put fourth?

That’s the dream scenario for the Tories. They put forward their first budget, it gets voted down by everyone else, the government collapses, and there’s another general election in a few months. Except this time the Tories still have deep pockets to campaign with, and win a majority.

Except this time the Tories still have deep pockets to campaign with, and win a majority.

I’m sure Len has a few £’s tucked under the mattress for his placeman

A grand coalition would be good. They could stop pretending they’re different and just got on with dealing with the reality of the situation. It’s not like whoever is in charge has any real choices.

Amen to every word of that.