CON lead CON seats LAB seats LD seats OTH seats – 2.7% 239 326 59 26 0.0% 255 306 61 28 4.1% 282 281 59 28 7.3% 307 258 57 28 11.2% 327 233 62 28 What do these seat projections mean for next time? The table above features the new commons seat projections for the next election prepared by Professor John Curtice for Friday’s general election post-mortem at the University of Nottingham. As can be seen the Tories need…
Telegraph The Telegraph has a story that I’m sure will be referred to time and time again when historians come to assess the Brown years. The report goes “…one of Brown’s final acts in the Downing Street bunker was quietly to organise a pay cut for his successor which he must have known would leave him out of pocket to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds…On Brown’s orders, the Prime Minister’s remuneration package was cut from £194,000 to…
General Election May 6th 2010 CON LAB Average electorate of seats won 72,435 68,612 Average turnout in seats won 68.4% 61.1% Average total votes in seat won 49,436 41,842 Seats won with small majorities 60 81 Votes in seats where party was third 28.4% 16.6% Will equalising seats sizes make much difference? This is the first of several posts I will be doing following the general election post mortem that took place at the University of Nottingham on Friday. I…
Why Weren’t Labour Routed? In common with, I suspect, most readers of this website, I expected Labour to suffer a defeat every bit as bad as 1983, if not worse, on May 6th. This was based partly on Labour’s dire poll ratings, but also on the utter despair that was emanating from the Party. Anonymous Cabinet Ministers were briefing newspapers that they were in trouble in seats like Harrow West, Stretford and Urmston, Streatham, and Wrexham, all of which they…
Does parliament need more youngsters? The 2010 parliament differs from its predecessor in many ways: 35% of its members are newly elected, there are a lot more Conservatives and there are nearly twice as many ethnic minority MP’s as before, to list three. In other ways, it’s more of the same: over three-quarters are men, an overwhelming majority have a white-collar occupational background and the average age of MP’s is about fifty. That average age is representative of adults in…
Has he been the only one campaigning seriously The big news tonight in the Labour race is a statement by Douglas Alexander, who was previously a strong Mili-Ed supporter, on why he has come out backing Mili-D. This follows the endorsement from Alistair Darling and it looks as though Alexander, a key figure, has worked out where this race is going and wants to be on the DM band-wagon. There have also been strong reports reports of how much more…
Remember the 2007 Labour deputy election? It’s a good political trivia question. Can you name the six prominent Labour figures who fought for the deputy leadership of the party in June 2007? They are lined up above for the deputy TV debate. They were, of course from left to right, Hilary Benn, Hazel Blears, Harriet Harman, Alan Johnson, Peter Hain and John Cruddas. All of them were returned to the commons on May 6 2010 and yet not one of…
How long can the coalition go on? There are two big questions in British politics at the moment – who is going to win the Labour leadership and how long can the coalition survive? Both, in a way, are interwoven because as we get closer to September’s voting in Labour’s election we’ll be four months on from the creation of the coalition and the key criteria for the movement will be which of the candidates is best placed to be…