Just asking like…

Hire Lutfur Rahman as election coordinator.

You could get a report of all the recently deceased who are still registered and have agents that go and vote for you. Also intercept all the postal votes!

Or just accept that Britain (unfortunately) is and always has been a right-leaning conservative country.

It would help if you held control over several dominant media streams. Newspapers, TV channels, that kind of thing…

IIRC, if 5000 votes had been changed in the most marginal constituencies in 1992, Neil Kinnock would have won.

So wurdling the result may not be that difficult…

Yes, there is a predominant right-wing tint to UK politics, and I expected the lid-dems to be slaughtered, ‘Labour’ to underachieve, as well as struggle to escape the Blair-Brown legacy, and UKIP to be more or less irrelevant; but even so, the results don’t ring true to me. We’ve been – yet again – the victims of an electoral coup.

Lizards 1 – Hope 0 (as ever)

Awhiles+1
Also,
1) fob off your coalition ‘partner’ with a totally half-assed and doomed-to-fail electoral reform referendum, thus keeping fptp for another generation. No sense these meddlesome little parties with their pissy 6% vote shares actually having any seats off the big boys.
2) pass some legislation capping and monitoring what non-political organisations are able to do in the name of ‘lobbying’ for issues they represent eg charities, churches, volonteer organisations. You don’t want them messing things up for the nasty parties now do you?
3) Then sneak in a change allowing your party to spend much more than the opposition could possibly afford on campaigning.
4) circumvent any laws about money spent on political campaigning by getting your donors and chums in the press (some of whom may not even live in the uk or be uk nationals, bien sur) to spend as much as they see fit on doing your campaigning for you as “news”

Yay democracy!

Encourage a nationalist party to thrive in one part of the country and use it to deliver a killing blow to your main rival.
SNP = the Tories “secret weapon” 😆

hd – that still doesnt work. Even if Labour held all the SNP seats, they would not have a majority.

I think one issue is, everyone who hates the tories does so with such a vicious passion it just spouts out their mouth (or keyboard) like frothing gibberish, so no-one who is ‘marginal’ understands them and just writes them off as loonies. Er-go, they vote conservative as they have a clearer message (from their trained pet-monkey media apparently?)

Amazed you don’t need photo ID to vote in the UK. That opens a huge hole to pass dodgy votes through.

…Even if Labour held all the SNP seats, they would not have a majority

Ah yes, my mistake – makes the SNP less relevant to the result than I first thought 😳

I think one issue is, everyone who hates the tories does so with such a vicious passion it just spouts out their mouth (or keyboard) like frothing gibberish, so no-one who is ‘marginal’ understands them and just writes them off as loonies. Er-go, they vote conservative as they have a clearer message (from their trained pet-monkey media apparently?)

Alternatively, the conservatives are just really good at apealing to poorly-educated people as well. Although a quick tootle through our local ge and council results suggests thatlocally ukip sem to have had a few of the really slow voters off the conservatives.

Even if Labour held all the SNP seats, they would not have a majority.

That’s true, but the prospect of a Labour/SNP coalition seems to have been a pretty important factor in shifting undecideds towards the Conservatives in England, so the rise of the party is important beyond a straight matter of taking seats from Labour in Scotland.

Election results have been rigged since they set out the electoral wards. I have nothing against snp, and a lot against ukip, but I heard snp got 1.5 mill votes, ukip 3.5 mill and yet ukip have 1 seat and snp 50+

Our constituency was taken from labour to the Tories by 25 votes, that would be easy to fiddle!

IIRC, if 5000 votes had been changed in the most marginal constituencies in 1992, Neil Kinnock would have won.

Phew. That was a close shave then. Thank god he didn’t. 5000 very sensible people!

It appears many in England really dislike & mistrust the SNP. A reaction to the perceived anti-English slant to the SNP’s indyref campaign?
That’s how I see the swing from Lab to Con this morning.

ohnohesback – Member
IIRC, if 5000 votes had been changed in the most marginal constituencies in 1992, Neil Kinnock would have won.

So wurdling the result may not be that difficult…

julianwilson – Member
Alternatively, the conservatives are just really good at appealing to poorly-educated people as well.

PeterPoddy – Member
Phew. That was a close shave then. Thank god he didn’t. 5000 very sensible people!

Remember the 1992 election day Sun headline ?

“In his resignation speech, Kinnock blamed the light bulb front page for his defeat.”

Classic Headlines

but the prospect of a Labour/SNP coalition seems to have been a pretty important factor in shifting undecideds towards the Conservatives in England

I think that’s overstating the labour potential in (SW) England. The bulk of the rise in tory seats was at the expense of Lib Dems

I’d hold a Scottish referendum to wipe out a traditional majority of seats from the competition.

Dead easy, pander to a right-wing media mogul-cum-complete bastard of course.

Worked for Fatcha, worked for Blair and it’s worked for the ladle-faced bell who’s on his way to meet the Queen in a bit.

ladle-faced bell

😆

I’d kill everyone and then vote for me.

Or just accept that Britain England (unfortunately) is and always has been a right-leaning conservative country.

ftfy

Set up an anti-Europe party for all the dissidents in your own party. Build a bit of lowest common denominator support that is against immigration and appeals to workers marginalised by zero hours contracts, insecurity and lower living standards. Stir with a bit of Daily Mail and Daily Express paranoia. Sucks 12% of the vote for the cost of one seat, biggest growth in those seats with insecure workers.
No rigging, just good long term management of the population.

as they say in Tower Hamlets “vote early and vote frequently”

Tpt cruiser, i have long maintained that Farage is actually working under deep cover for the lizard people as a vote-splitter and a way to make the most right wing tory government for ages look a bit more centre-ist and less unappealing.

Where I used to live in the far east the use of phantom voters is the normal way of life for the ruling party. 🙄

The ruling party would:

1. Give out citizenship if they vote for the ruling party.

2. Drive bus load of unknown people to vote in a particular region.

3. Compulsory postal voting from the army to vote for the ruling party.

4. Change the boundary of the seat i.e. you can have 10k with one MP or 10 people with one MP in a remote village where folks have no idea of the world.

5. Buy votes … you give them half the money first then if they win you give them another half.

6. You intimidate with local paramilitary …

7. You buy the opposition winning MP … they joined the ruling party without having to be re-elected. You can earn millions by auctioning yourself to the highest bidder.

8. You simply deregistered certain community from voting citing computer errors …

9. Giving the govt servants 50% pay rise if they vote for the ruling party.

10. You threaten to withdraw funding for the region if they vote against the ruling party.

etc …

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/377883.html

the results don’t ring true to me

Its the ‘shy Tory’ syndrome. Tory voters don’t broadly admit to being tory voters. So there isn’t a Tory ‘noise’ in your social and family life, in your work place, on your social media. In elections like this and back when Major was re-elected the Tory result exceeded the the opinion and even the exit polls because even in those situations Tory voters either don’t participate in those polls or don’t answer them honestly.

There was a discussion on Cougar’s thread about social media being left wing/liberal and it sort of is if you look at media where the participants make themselves known to each other – on Facebook for instance- Facebook, as a world where your friends,colleagues and family are all watching isn’t really the place where people (knowingly) voice Tory thoughts. I’ve always thought one of the most interesting things about STW is as a broadly anonymous social network its the only place where I hear Tory voters thoughts. In the same way that you’ll get threads on here about people’s relationship woes, workplace worries, salary top trumps, sexual peccadilloes and anywhere they’ve had a endoscope poked theres a more candid aspect to this forum compared to the sites you think of as ‘social media’.

4. Change the boundary of the seat

As it stands the First Past the Post system best suits the two major parties – they both punch above their weight in terms of votes to seat ratio. Looking at the rest of the parties there are huge variances in votes to seats ratio. Thats not so much to say FFP suits them as the boundaries suit them. Theres alway a tory appetite to change those boundaries. After the last election they tried to change the boundaries in the name of ‘austerity’ so that we could all be in it together by having 50 fewer MPs. The boundaries re-drafted at they had intended would have moved the tories from being 19 short of a majority to one short of a majority based on the 2010 poll. Although all parties would have lost seats as a result of culling from 650 to 600 80% of the the seats that would have disappeared as a result of that re-draw would have been Labour ones.

However they failed to get that through, blocked by the Lib Dems. So expect boundary changes to be back on the agenda again now

I’d get hold of the votes from those that didn’t show up, should be enough to give even the most unelectable party a majority.

Macruiskeen has it.

Looking at other social media channels and the news, where we see conservative MP’s houses and cars being vandalised, there was a huge amount of “anger” from the vocal left towards anyone with conservative leanings. That ranged from the stupid “I have to unfriend you as you are a Tory supporter”, through vicious posts on anyone who dared have a more right than left bias, right through to inexcusable acts of vandalism.

Who in their right mind would open themselves up to that?

I think this “anger” issue has been extremely harmful to labour thus time out, as it disenfranchised the moderates who may have swung round, but seeing such irrational anger and frothing made them think twice about associating with “anarchist” types.

Why should the anger of those wronged directed against those who have wronged them be described as ‘irrational’ and ‘frothing’? Justified and smouldering would be a more apt description. But that’s drawing slightly off topic.

‘irrational and frothing’ because an election has been held….the general consensus among the most vocal media, my colleagues, forumites (on here and elesewhere), facebook groups etc was that Labour were going to win or form a socialist coalition with the SNP….that didnt happen….so people who didnt get the result they deem as ‘correct’ have started riots, suggested a rigged election etc….it smacks of sore losers.

Lots of people like me sat at home, watched Russell Brand enter politics in the most clumsy and amateurish way with his 6th former idealistic mentality, laughed as seemingly sensible people sided with him….then rolled our eyes when Ed Balls (who has no place anywhere near a budget) was wheeled out for another go at wrecking the economy….i got a little bit bored of being called mean, uncaring, thick, racist etc by people who dont know me and who dont vote Tory and proceeded to the ballot box and voted Tory with a great deal of satisfaction at that point….my vote was a ‘f@@k you’ as much as anything to the left leaning who have been unbearable for the last few months….probably not the best reason to vote Tory but there were obviously other factors too.

Certain things are cast in stone in this country and with the economy we have in the western world.

The private sector generates wealth that can then be spent on public services….if the private sector isnt working then there is reduced tax revenue to spend on the NHS, education etc….you need a healthy private sector in order to maintain a healthy public sector….this is basic stuff.

And yet there are still some adults that think you can tax the arse out of anybody earning more than the average wage and create ‘social equality’…you cant, because funnily enough when someone has worked a 40hr week (and the rest!) they dont take kindly to a government helping themselves to a higher and higher percentage of their money….likewise the genuinely ‘rich’ are usually mobile enough that if a socialist government takes the p@@s with taxation they can usually move abroad and at a stroke deny the UK any of their money whatsoever.

There is a fine balance between taxing enough that you can fund public services but not going so far that you get voted out, encourage tax evasion, create more tax exiles, stifle industry….or a combination of the lot!

The classic one trotted out is that Vodafone owe billions in tax in this country and should be forced to pay up….i agree….but HMRC are stuffed with this scenario, if pressed for the cash Vodafone could work out that its cheaper to relocate its UK operations and jobs abroad rather than cough up its tax bill here and then the government gets nothing except a load of ex Vodafone employees now signing on to the dole….the lesser of two evils is to allow the status quo and accept that Vodafone are a large company who employ in the private sector and their employees are on PAYE and so (some) tax can be collected indirectly that way instead….like i said earlier, there is more to real politics than Brand’s idealistic, unrealistic sixth former nonsense.

Enough people this time round obviously felt that the economy needs sorting before any government can go on a spending spree again….these things are cyclical anyway, in five years time when (hopefully) the deficit is non existent the electorate may have a change of heart and be ready to vote Labour again.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth in papers like the Guardian at the moment are hilarious, it would seem a general election is only OK if Labour wins, ditto the planks in London fighting with the Police at the moment over the result.

Democracy eh?….its only OK if a socialist party wins!

Make sure the electorate use a pencil to vote.

deviant – Member
….these things are cyclical anyway, in five years time when (hopefully) the deficit is non existent the electorate may have a change of heart and be ready to vote Labour again.

Stone him for trying to make sense! I am frothing now you know … 😆

Labour should not be back, as I said before, for at least 4 terms until we sort out the In or Out of EU issue first. Labour will not, do not, cannot sort out the In or Out of EU issue so they cannot be let in to wreck the place up. We are now beginning the second term so about 15 years to go.

Leadership is also cyclical and only once in a while will you get a leader that is worthy of being elected regardless of which party s/he comes from. Most “strong” leader will stay for 3 terms others are just pseudo leader who pretend to be one simply because of “career” progression.

The Labour party with their Dear Leader idea is only good if you want to have a career as politician.

There should be new parties emerging as the current ones have not really evolved that much …

😀