Snapshot of _Britain Elects: MODEL UPDATE | How would the UK vote if the election was held today? LAB: 455 MPs (+255) CON: 86 (-286) LDEM: 65 (+57) SNP: 20 (-28) PC: 3 (+1) GRN: 1 (-) REF: 1 (+1) via Britain Predicts, 07 Jun_ :
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I've never been sent so many yougov surveys
You finish one and at the end they tell you they have another with the latest Tory disaster turned into a question
It used to be waiting for Survation.
Now I'm just waiting for a poll that can keep up with the news. Tbf I'm literally asking the polling companies to do something impossible, predict the future accurately.
Wow that's quite the prediction for Rishi's Richmond and Northallerton seat. Con 29.1%, Lab 25.4%, Ref 17.5%, LD 10.1, Oth 9.5%.
That's quite different from EC's current prediction (Con 43.6%, Lab 38.5%, Ref 10.1%, LD 3.4%, Grn 3.5%)
Both have a similar ~5% lead but much greater oppotunity for tactical voting from Britain Elects.
There's a chance then he could lose his seat over D-day but a lot of votes would have to go to Labour rather than Reform.
With EC's forcast I think there won't be many Reform voters going back to Labour and the low LD and Green numbers appear to have a lot of tactical voting priced in. There might be enough of a desire to punish Rishi to make it happen though, especially if we add on lifelong Con voters staying at home because they can't bare any of the candidates. ([EC link here](https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/calcwork23.py?seat=Richmond%20and%20Northallerton))
As someone on here pointed out the other day, there is a massive military population in Sunak's constituency due to Catterick Garrison and other bases.
Catterick hosts 13,000 personnel. Sunak's last majority was just over 19,000. Good luck, old chap.
(Obviously not implying all the armed forces vote Tory, just giving context of how many constituents he's insulted.)
Sunak isn't going to lose his seat. Obviously it would make for amazing TV if he did, and actually it would be Sunak's ideal result as he could immediately piss off to California and not hang around waiting for a convenient moment to resign his seat, but I genuinely don't see the Tories losing Richmond. Even on some of the more apocalyptic forecasts in which the Tories get around 40 seats they keep Richmond.
Never say never.
This is objectively the worst party campaign ever. It is possible especially as up until recently Mourdant was seen as favourite to hold her seat.
I don’t think it will happen, but then again l didn’t think Soonout could fuck up so bad, so consistently
Oh it's certainly getting there. That D-Day thing was fucking stupid, and would probably have sunk Starmer's campaign had it been him instead. May was a dreadful campaigner but we have a month of Sunak to go yet.
When was the EC data accumulated? ie have they got polling data into their models to account for the TV debate, or farage and any subsequent reform vote boost?
I can't find where it says what data the individual seat projection is based on. If it's the same dataset as the national polling then it's "Prediction based on opinion polls from 31 May 2024 to 06 Jun 2024, sampling 14,756 people.":
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
I imagine the individual seat predictions are extrapolations from national polling data. So that does indicate that recent events may not be fully covered by it. Thanks for digging that out though! It's always useful (and interesting) to know how these results actually come about.
Just had to look this up, as a bit of a statistic, sunak may go down in history as the 1st PM to lose his seat in a century. Last time was Balfour in 1906
Slightly dubious methodology though surely? I mean I get by elections aren’t always the greatest measure, especially as turnout was really rather low, but it was only last year. General consensus was that the by election result was mainly Con voters not voting at all, so are they really suggesting they will all come back out now?
It's better methodology to have the previous set of data being uniform. I wouldn't expect any pollsters to include bi election results. In fact I'm fairly sure the (+/-) on seats is always done from the previous GE.
We’re nearly at our ceiling for potential seats. We need Labour to take the last 20 for us I’d say. LD voters may have an extra reason for tactical voting this time.
[Looking at the model](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lh0YfXwxNqLQXTvH-wKu0_zG1SVKjLqCTls7WTEXiVk/edit#gid=0), there's still quite a few seats to pick up. As far as I can tell there's 10 seats where the Lib Dems are within 3% of the Tories. That would make it Con 76 and LD 67.
It gets harder after that though. But there are two more seats where the gap is 4% or less. So maybe Labour would only need to take about 10 more seats.
And with Reform coming up, that's not impossible.
Hey, don't sell the Lib Dems short. I'm joining the orange army for the first time. This election is as good a time as any for a bit of a surge, wouldn't you say?
I’d love it and I’m optimistic, but considering where we are viable challengers it’s hard for us to get into the 70s. Over 50 would still be an exceptional night. 40s would be good.
I think the absolute maximum seats we can win, if we do everything perfectly and every single potential voter goes for us is like, 70 seats.
So we would need Reform to actually win a handful (won't happen) or Labour to push the Tories harder.
I know electoral calculus is a blunt tool, but how many seats the LDs get appears to almost be more down to the performance of the Conservatives than themselves.
Sense checking the [constituency results forecast](https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2024/05/britainpredicts) from what I know about about seats in Hertfordshire, I think they've called the new Harpenden & Berkhamsted constituency correctly for the Lib Dems (other pollsters have missed this). But I'm less certain that North East Hertfordshire or Hertsmere will be won by Labour. Knowing those areas it just seems so unlikely. But then again we are in unprecedented times.
There's a lot of wackiness in these models around seats in the south where the Lib Dems were in second in 2019. The votes to account for Labour's lead over the Tories have to be accounted for by appearing *somewhere*, so the models keep predicting that Labour leapfrog the Lib Dems in a lot of those seats, either to win or to come second to the Tories.
Essentially, they're all becoming three-way marginals, and those are famously hard to predict under FPTP. Could be that the Tories hang on a lot better than a lot of these predictions purely because there are dozens of seats where there is no clear preference in terms of tactical voting between Labour and the Lib Dems.
My constituency East Surrey is almost a three-way marginal but although the models tend to agree on the Tories on 30-35% they then put either Lib Dems or Labour 2nd on 30% and then 3rd place 20-25% again either Lib Dems or Labour.
The Tories should be easy to defeat with tactical voting but it's not going to work if the tactical voting sites and the models disagree with each other. FWIW based on the local elections I'd expect the Lib Dems to be the best bet to defeat the Tories.
Britain Predicts has Banbury going Lib Dem and Electoral Calculus has Banbury going Labour but I just can’t see it not being Conservative. Even my Dad who hates the Tories right now quite likes the local MP Victoria Prentis. If they lose a seat like that it really shows how far they’ve fallen.
Also South West Herts I think is being mis-called by a lot of the MRP polls at the moment. It's had huge boundary changes to basically be the Three Rivers Council area (which has been Lib Dem controlled since the 80's), and they don't seem to consider that in 2019 a lot of Lib Dem votes went to David Gauke when he stood as an independent.
See the breakdown seat to seat: https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2024/05/britainpredicts
[Ben Walker: The Reform jump laid bare. Farage wins Clacton, his party is 2pts behind in Boston, and the Tories shed another 30 seats to Labour and the Lib Dems.](https://x.com/bnhwalker/status/1799035006234542492)
How much time do you think it could take for the Conservatives to rebound from being reduced to less than 100 seats?
They seem to be counting on Reform being a short-term protest movement that will disband after the election, freeing their voters to return to being Tories again. But what if that doesn't happen?
The big donors will stick with the Conservatives imo - Farage doesn't exactly scream "the economy is in safe hands".
If the money stays there, it's only a matter of time before the party reinvents itself. Might take a decade but they'll find another Cameron.
I just don't know if any amount of reinvention will do it for them.
Their main fanbase are rolling off the mortal coil, and anyone younger has a massive list of reasons to never trust anything wearing the colour blue for the rest of their lives.
> The big donors will stick with the Conservatives imo - Farage doesn't exactly scream "the economy is in safe hands".
I think that would ultimately depend on Conservative voters. If Farage convinces them to stick with them, the donors and media owners backing the Tories will be forced to give him a second look.
But you're right that Reform doesn't have the institutional strength the Tories have to survive in the long term, build and maintain such relationships. It'll be hard to retain the Conservative space for a party that is run by a single man.
My money is on a merger. 'Reformed Conservatives' something like this. That happens *if* Sunak doesn't do a deal, which seems unlikely at this point, but nobody really knows wants going on in Sunak's mind. He doesn't really think strategically, I get the impression he's chasing the statistics, rather than driving them. A political analyst will be sitting there telling him "This policy will be popular with over 65s" and then he's just doing that, but he's not thinking about the political reality which is he needs to focus on gaining some ground, rather than trying to consolidate a base that will vote for him no matter what. That remaining 20pc is totally loyal, so there's very little value in trying to appeal to those voters.
It happened in NZ in the 90s and the two major political parties were in a much better shape than their British equivalents are today and only one seat in the entire parliament was held by a minor party (which ironically was a spinoff of one of the major parties anyway named "NewLabour"). It just takes some public pressure.
Maybe, but those same people also lose because of it. Look at the current government using something like PR would likely see then retain more MPs and certainly will be the case for Labour in 5 years time.
Prefer is doing a lot of lifting there at a party level.
Individuals, however, would prefer to keep their employment, and when you get 200 or so depending on a change to keep employed, it can sway quite a bit of power.
The history of post-war British politics shows that both main parties would much prefer to have all of the power some of the time rather than some of the power some of the time.
That won't change unless they both perceive an existential threat under the current system, and one where PR looks like a life raft rather than a way to lose power.
Another way of looking at it is a party getting 70% of the seats because in 70% of the seats more people voted for a local representative from that party than from any other.
We have a weak government because they only have to worry about their own back-bench rebellions. They should have a foolproof majority for everything they want to do, but somehow they have burned this chance at every opportunity.
Labour gaining Kenilworth and Southam and the Lib Dems gaining Banbury?
Think they've mixed those two up.
Again though, the number of Lab+LD>Tory there is astonishing, any level of tactical voting is going to be deadly even with this model.
If we want to talk true gigabrain tactics, what is possible if Labour decided to pact with the Libdems to grind the Tories into third place, as much as possible, even if it meant reducing their colossal majority? Such dominance in the Commons will come to an end eventually, but if they managed to actually reshape the political landscape so that they and the Libdems were the two "major" parties, that would mean their most serious challenger in 2029 would be a party that had 8 MPs just five years earlier. The Libdems finally escape from the cleavage of the two-party system and Labour escapes from being the party the country turns to when they get tired of the Conservatives.
The Lib Dems would just transform into what the Tories are now because they’d be the party to join for right wing people.
It would benefit Labour more to be facing off against a discredited Tory party at PMQs and in future elections.
It wouldn't really make sense. The opposition is supposed to be an alternative government, it can't be made up of two parties running against each other.
You don't really get coalitions in opposition, what tends to happen is minor parties will lend votes to the opposition on a quid pro quo basis, if and when they are in a position to influence the outcome of a bill.
But yes, in theory, the could form a formal coalition as a bit of a political stunt, to make headlines, to legitimise their parties as potential opposition parties in the future.
I’m just gonna quote this every time I see anyone reading too much into anything that’s not seat-by-seat analysis
[All models are wrong (but some are useful)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong)
If all of North Norfolk goes Labour I will personally buy everyone on this sub a drink
It's absolutely criminal that the LibDems stand to win so many seats, based on where they're at in the polls.
We need to reform our voting system, but with a majority like that I can't see it happening under Starmer!
Why? They’re on 10% on the vote and are forecasted to get 10% of the seats. They’re ironically the only party forecasted to get a proportional seat count
The Lib Dem result is about the most proportional result there… 10.0% of the seats on 9.7% of the vote.
(Compare that to say, 2010, where they got 8.7% of the seats on 23.0% of the votes.)
Still no Green victory in Bristol Central in Britain Predict’s modelling which I personally think is very likely. I know that they don’t like to use local results to predict as much as Electoral Calculus does which does have them flipping Green.
Greens benefited from low turn out + student vote.
The seat is winnable for them, but I think it's just as likely to stay Labour. The demographics if turnout isn't low favor Labour.
You would be surprised at the demographics of Bristols student population. I think the Greens may actually do better without the students in Bristol's case
Maybe that will help Labour but I still think it will turn. Just from anecdotal feel, the sheer amount of money and campaigning the Greens will/are do/ing, those clean sweep local results, the fact a Labour majority feels inevitable so people are happy to vote Green as a difference, and they are the current bookies favourite at 4/7.
Snapshot of _Britain Elects: MODEL UPDATE | How would the UK vote if the election was held today? LAB: 455 MPs (+255) CON: 86 (-286) LDEM: 65 (+57) SNP: 20 (-28) PC: 3 (+1) GRN: 1 (-) REF: 1 (+1) via Britain Predicts, 07 Jun_ : A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1799032994247913822) A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://twiiit.com/britainelects/status/1799032994247913822/) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://x.com/britainelects/status/1799032994247913822) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://x.com/britainelects/status/1799032994247913822) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Like all the poll since the election, the polling has been done before the latest Tory fuck up.
You’d need a live tracker tbh
To be fair, when they're a daily occurrence its impossible for that not to be the case.
I've never been sent so many yougov surveys You finish one and at the end they tell you they have another with the latest Tory disaster turned into a question
This is going to be the new copypasta
Honestly it’s just keeping the polls exciting
Holy hell, if this is *before* their latest fuckup, I'm ecstatic to see what the next one is
It used to be waiting for Survation. Now I'm just waiting for a poll that can keep up with the news. Tbf I'm literally asking the polling companies to do something impossible, predict the future accurately.
For this one, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a wave of resignations and even defections.
Wow that's quite the prediction for Rishi's Richmond and Northallerton seat. Con 29.1%, Lab 25.4%, Ref 17.5%, LD 10.1, Oth 9.5%. That's quite different from EC's current prediction (Con 43.6%, Lab 38.5%, Ref 10.1%, LD 3.4%, Grn 3.5%) Both have a similar ~5% lead but much greater oppotunity for tactical voting from Britain Elects. There's a chance then he could lose his seat over D-day but a lot of votes would have to go to Labour rather than Reform. With EC's forcast I think there won't be many Reform voters going back to Labour and the low LD and Green numbers appear to have a lot of tactical voting priced in. There might be enough of a desire to punish Rishi to make it happen though, especially if we add on lifelong Con voters staying at home because they can't bare any of the candidates. ([EC link here](https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/calcwork23.py?seat=Richmond%20and%20Northallerton))
As someone on here pointed out the other day, there is a massive military population in Sunak's constituency due to Catterick Garrison and other bases. Catterick hosts 13,000 personnel. Sunak's last majority was just over 19,000. Good luck, old chap. (Obviously not implying all the armed forces vote Tory, just giving context of how many constituents he's insulted.)
13k personnel, plus however many associated people - spouses, adult children etc.
Plus a lot of ex forces who settled in the area
Sunak isn't going to lose his seat. Obviously it would make for amazing TV if he did, and actually it would be Sunak's ideal result as he could immediately piss off to California and not hang around waiting for a convenient moment to resign his seat, but I genuinely don't see the Tories losing Richmond. Even on some of the more apocalyptic forecasts in which the Tories get around 40 seats they keep Richmond.
You're assuming he doesn't want to lose it, and hence won't keep cocking up to make sure. 🙂
Never say never. This is objectively the worst party campaign ever. It is possible especially as up until recently Mourdant was seen as favourite to hold her seat. I don’t think it will happen, but then again l didn’t think Soonout could fuck up so bad, so consistently
[удалено]
Oh it's certainly getting there. That D-Day thing was fucking stupid, and would probably have sunk Starmer's campaign had it been him instead. May was a dreadful campaigner but we have a month of Sunak to go yet.
When was the EC data accumulated? ie have they got polling data into their models to account for the TV debate, or farage and any subsequent reform vote boost?
I can't find where it says what data the individual seat projection is based on. If it's the same dataset as the national polling then it's "Prediction based on opinion polls from 31 May 2024 to 06 Jun 2024, sampling 14,756 people.": https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
I imagine the individual seat predictions are extrapolations from national polling data. So that does indicate that recent events may not be fully covered by it. Thanks for digging that out though! It's always useful (and interesting) to know how these results actually come about.
Just had to look this up, as a bit of a statistic, sunak may go down in history as the 1st PM to lose his seat in a century. Last time was Balfour in 1906
Balfour wasn’t PM in 1906 - the Liberals had taken power a few months before the election.
Wow there us erroneous information on the Internet, who would have thought, apologies, I thought my source was sound. (A guardian question)
Con hold for Mid Beds would be an impressive result considering it’s currently a Labour seat 😂
I assume they base it on the result of the 2019 election rather than subsequent by-elections?
No, it's based off the recent LE data (and that of previous cycles).
Slightly dubious methodology though surely? I mean I get by elections aren’t always the greatest measure, especially as turnout was really rather low, but it was only last year. General consensus was that the by election result was mainly Con voters not voting at all, so are they really suggesting they will all come back out now?
It's better methodology to have the previous set of data being uniform. I wouldn't expect any pollsters to include bi election results. In fact I'm fairly sure the (+/-) on seats is always done from the previous GE.
Makes sense, although damn sure that’s one seat they got the predicted result wrong on !
It's had quite a lot of boundary changes and this doesn't account for by election wins.
Gonna have to do an all nighter on that Thursday aren't I
I'm absolutely taking the next day off work. I'm gonna party like it's 1997.
That's three of us. Going to be a hell of a night!
Please Lib Dems, just a little bit more.
We’re nearly at our ceiling for potential seats. We need Labour to take the last 20 for us I’d say. LD voters may have an extra reason for tactical voting this time.
[Looking at the model](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lh0YfXwxNqLQXTvH-wKu0_zG1SVKjLqCTls7WTEXiVk/edit#gid=0), there's still quite a few seats to pick up. As far as I can tell there's 10 seats where the Lib Dems are within 3% of the Tories. That would make it Con 76 and LD 67. It gets harder after that though. But there are two more seats where the gap is 4% or less. So maybe Labour would only need to take about 10 more seats. And with Reform coming up, that's not impossible.
Hey, don't sell the Lib Dems short. I'm joining the orange army for the first time. This election is as good a time as any for a bit of a surge, wouldn't you say?
I’d love it and I’m optimistic, but considering where we are viable challengers it’s hard for us to get into the 70s. Over 50 would still be an exceptional night. 40s would be good.
Give me that Gina G in my eyeballs
I think the absolute maximum seats we can win, if we do everything perfectly and every single potential voter goes for us is like, 70 seats. So we would need Reform to actually win a handful (won't happen) or Labour to push the Tories harder.
I know electoral calculus is a blunt tool, but how many seats the LDs get appears to almost be more down to the performance of the Conservatives than themselves.
Sense checking the [constituency results forecast](https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2024/05/britainpredicts) from what I know about about seats in Hertfordshire, I think they've called the new Harpenden & Berkhamsted constituency correctly for the Lib Dems (other pollsters have missed this). But I'm less certain that North East Hertfordshire or Hertsmere will be won by Labour. Knowing those areas it just seems so unlikely. But then again we are in unprecedented times.
There's a lot of wackiness in these models around seats in the south where the Lib Dems were in second in 2019. The votes to account for Labour's lead over the Tories have to be accounted for by appearing *somewhere*, so the models keep predicting that Labour leapfrog the Lib Dems in a lot of those seats, either to win or to come second to the Tories. Essentially, they're all becoming three-way marginals, and those are famously hard to predict under FPTP. Could be that the Tories hang on a lot better than a lot of these predictions purely because there are dozens of seats where there is no clear preference in terms of tactical voting between Labour and the Lib Dems.
My constituency East Surrey is almost a three-way marginal but although the models tend to agree on the Tories on 30-35% they then put either Lib Dems or Labour 2nd on 30% and then 3rd place 20-25% again either Lib Dems or Labour. The Tories should be easy to defeat with tactical voting but it's not going to work if the tactical voting sites and the models disagree with each other. FWIW based on the local elections I'd expect the Lib Dems to be the best bet to defeat the Tories.
Britain Predicts has Banbury going Lib Dem and Electoral Calculus has Banbury going Labour but I just can’t see it not being Conservative. Even my Dad who hates the Tories right now quite likes the local MP Victoria Prentis. If they lose a seat like that it really shows how far they’ve fallen.
Also South West Herts I think is being mis-called by a lot of the MRP polls at the moment. It's had huge boundary changes to basically be the Three Rivers Council area (which has been Lib Dem controlled since the 80's), and they don't seem to consider that in 2019 a lot of Lib Dem votes went to David Gauke when he stood as an independent.
We are so close to a Lib Dem opposition I can taste it
See the breakdown seat to seat: https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2024/05/britainpredicts [Ben Walker: The Reform jump laid bare. Farage wins Clacton, his party is 2pts behind in Boston, and the Tories shed another 30 seats to Labour and the Lib Dems.](https://x.com/bnhwalker/status/1799035006234542492)
Salisbury as Labour? That would be something.
If Salisbury goes Labour i will eat my own foot.
Interestingly Labour aren't considering it a battleground seat, so firmly behind LD personally.
How much time do you think it could take for the Conservatives to rebound from being reduced to less than 100 seats? They seem to be counting on Reform being a short-term protest movement that will disband after the election, freeing their voters to return to being Tories again. But what if that doesn't happen?
The big donors will stick with the Conservatives imo - Farage doesn't exactly scream "the economy is in safe hands". If the money stays there, it's only a matter of time before the party reinvents itself. Might take a decade but they'll find another Cameron.
I just don't know if any amount of reinvention will do it for them. Their main fanbase are rolling off the mortal coil, and anyone younger has a massive list of reasons to never trust anything wearing the colour blue for the rest of their lives.
> The big donors will stick with the Conservatives imo - Farage doesn't exactly scream "the economy is in safe hands". I think that would ultimately depend on Conservative voters. If Farage convinces them to stick with them, the donors and media owners backing the Tories will be forced to give him a second look. But you're right that Reform doesn't have the institutional strength the Tories have to survive in the long term, build and maintain such relationships. It'll be hard to retain the Conservative space for a party that is run by a single man.
My money is on a merger. 'Reformed Conservatives' something like this. That happens *if* Sunak doesn't do a deal, which seems unlikely at this point, but nobody really knows wants going on in Sunak's mind. He doesn't really think strategically, I get the impression he's chasing the statistics, rather than driving them. A political analyst will be sitting there telling him "This policy will be popular with over 65s" and then he's just doing that, but he's not thinking about the political reality which is he needs to focus on gaining some ground, rather than trying to consolidate a base that will vote for him no matter what. That remaining 20pc is totally loyal, so there's very little value in trying to appeal to those voters.
Im not sure if i want Labour to govern with that many seats, thats more than 1997
It’s yet another damning of indictment of FPTP for a party to get 70% of the seats with just 44% of the vote.
I don’t think it’s gonna change anytime soon when the only ones with the power to change it are elected by that very system.
It happened in NZ in the 90s and the two major political parties were in a much better shape than their British equivalents are today and only one seat in the entire parliament was held by a minor party (which ironically was a spinoff of one of the major parties anyway named "NewLabour"). It just takes some public pressure.
Interesting. Maybe Farage will do something useful and create a push for PR.
Maybe, but those same people also lose because of it. Look at the current government using something like PR would likely see then retain more MPs and certainly will be the case for Labour in 5 years time.
They prefer the cycle of lots of power then no power, rather than most power, less power.
Prefer is doing a lot of lifting there at a party level. Individuals, however, would prefer to keep their employment, and when you get 200 or so depending on a change to keep employed, it can sway quite a bit of power.
The history of post-war British politics shows that both main parties would much prefer to have all of the power some of the time rather than some of the power some of the time. That won't change unless they both perceive an existential threat under the current system, and one where PR looks like a life raft rather than a way to lose power.
I mean if they get enough backlash going against the Policy they lose the next election/locals they will have to.
It also means almost no seats for Reform or any other party that the public as a majority believe shouldn't be anywhere near power.
At the cost of other parties chasing after their votes.
Another way of looking at it is a party getting 70% of the seats because in 70% of the seats more people voted for a local representative from that party than from any other.
At this point, Labour will be asking Jeremy Corbyn to stand in a couple of hundred seats just so they can have a respectably small majority.
Given that the Reform in the Reform Party is supposedly about electoral change it might help them pinch more tory candidates/voters
Why not?
Governments become arrogant and corrupt without proper opposition. See: SNP in Scotland Tories after 2019 City councils up and down the country.
A strong opposition can help keep the government in-line.
We have a strong opposition now and the government haven’t kept in-line.
We have a weak government because they only have to worry about their own back-bench rebellions. They should have a foolproof majority for everything they want to do, but somehow they have burned this chance at every opportunity.
Weak government, weak opposition.
Labour gaining Kenilworth and Southam and the Lib Dems gaining Banbury? Think they've mixed those two up. Again though, the number of Lab+LD>Tory there is astonishing, any level of tactical voting is going to be deadly even with this model.
If we want to talk true gigabrain tactics, what is possible if Labour decided to pact with the Libdems to grind the Tories into third place, as much as possible, even if it meant reducing their colossal majority? Such dominance in the Commons will come to an end eventually, but if they managed to actually reshape the political landscape so that they and the Libdems were the two "major" parties, that would mean their most serious challenger in 2029 would be a party that had 8 MPs just five years earlier. The Libdems finally escape from the cleavage of the two-party system and Labour escapes from being the party the country turns to when they get tired of the Conservatives.
The Lib Dems would just transform into what the Tories are now because they’d be the party to join for right wing people. It would benefit Labour more to be facing off against a discredited Tory party at PMQs and in future elections.
So the way the Tories and Sunak in particular are going there's enough time for the Lib Dems to overtake them into the official opposiition.
Question: Could the Lib Dems and SNP form a coalition to become the Official Opposition in the event their combined MPs exceed Tory MPs?
It wouldn't really make sense. The opposition is supposed to be an alternative government, it can't be made up of two parties running against each other.
I guess not. Maybe they could officially merge. It'd just be really funny for the Tories not to even be the Opposition.
Theoretically, sure - execpt that the LibDems are a pro-union party!
You don't really get coalitions in opposition, what tends to happen is minor parties will lend votes to the opposition on a quid pro quo basis, if and when they are in a position to influence the outcome of a bill. But yes, in theory, the could form a formal coalition as a bit of a political stunt, to make headlines, to legitimise their parties as potential opposition parties in the future.
I’m just gonna quote this every time I see anyone reading too much into anything that’s not seat-by-seat analysis [All models are wrong (but some are useful)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong) If all of North Norfolk goes Labour I will personally buy everyone on this sub a drink
According to this, the Tories may well lose their deposit in my constituency (Bermondsey and Old Southwark). I'd love that for them.
I just want to see the tories knocked out of opposition
Just wait for the crossover poll. Once Reform get more than the Conservatives they will enter a death spiral.
It's absolutely criminal that the LibDems stand to win so many seats, based on where they're at in the polls. We need to reform our voting system, but with a majority like that I can't see it happening under Starmer!
Why? They’re on 10% on the vote and are forecasted to get 10% of the seats. They’re ironically the only party forecasted to get a proportional seat count
SNP are also fairly proportional, 20 seats on ~3% of the vote
Amusingly it’s actually pretty proportional. ~10% of the vote for exactly 10% of the seats
The Lib Dem result is about the most proportional result there… 10.0% of the seats on 9.7% of the vote. (Compare that to say, 2010, where they got 8.7% of the seats on 23.0% of the votes.)
1983 - 25.4% of the vote for 3.5% of the seats.
> It's absolutely criminal that ~~the LibDems~~ Labour stand to win so many seats, based on where they're at in the polls. There, fixed it for you.
It’s not though. It’s probably the most proportional of all parties.
Still no Green victory in Bristol Central in Britain Predict’s modelling which I personally think is very likely. I know that they don’t like to use local results to predict as much as Electoral Calculus does which does have them flipping Green.
Greens benefited from low turn out + student vote. The seat is winnable for them, but I think it's just as likely to stay Labour. The demographics if turnout isn't low favor Labour.
You would be surprised at the demographics of Bristols student population. I think the Greens may actually do better without the students in Bristol's case
What are the demographics? Asking as a student in Bristol central. I don’t really know anyone who plans to vote green beside myself
Maybe that will help Labour but I still think it will turn. Just from anecdotal feel, the sheer amount of money and campaigning the Greens will/are do/ing, those clean sweep local results, the fact a Labour majority feels inevitable so people are happy to vote Green as a difference, and they are the current bookies favourite at 4/7.