Take that, frakkers!

[Anonymous]

Well, as you may or may not know (or may or may not care), Labour won yesterday's General Election with a healthy but greatly reduced majority - from 167 seats down to 66. The Conservatives made the most gains and are now sitting at just under 200 seats, and the Liberal Democrats have the best number of seats they've had for something like eighty years with 62. I think the most interesting thing about the whole election though is the numbers of votes that each party got - Labour, despite it's majority, only has a 36% share of the total vote, and the Tories have 33%, so hardly a ringing endosement for either. One reason for that though is because of the Lib Dems - though they only gained ten seats, in quite a few constituencies there was a swing in the number of voters who voted for them compared with the last election. Their 22% share is up something like five points from last time, which is a big jump from their point of view. There were in some places healthy swings towards the Tories too, of course, but the biggest swing of all was in the Welsh constituency of Blenau Gwent (49%!) where there was an independant Labour candidate standing in protest over the fact that the Labour party had foisted on them an all-female shortlist of candidates when the local party already had a list selected. Out of all the minor parties the SNP did the best - they gained two seats (including the Western Isles, interestingly), but their share of the vote actually fell and they are now third behind the Lib Dems in Scotland. The Northern Ireland constituences won't declare for another few hours yet, so how the balance of the parties there plays out is as yet anyone's guess. UKIP and the BNP didn't manage to put in a decent showing anywhere, and nor did the Greens for that matter, though in some places their share of the vote went up a bit. Perhaps the sweetest moment of the night though was seeing Kilroy-Silk's utterly pathetic showing. He failed to make any kind of impact at all, and the expression on his face when he realised how badly he had been beaten was priceless. :lol:

All in all I'd say it's been an interesting election - a great many people are obviously dissatisfied with Tony Blair as a Prime Minister, and it remains to be seen how much of the Conservative and Lib Dem gains were due to either tactical voting or voters who were just fed up with Labour and/or Blair. One interesting result of how the voting percentages have lined up is that there has been a lot of talk about proportional representation bandied about, but whether that will actually amount to anything any time soon is perhaps unlikely. Still, it's nice to know that there is perhaps some more awareness of how our voting system presently works than there was before.

Hooray for democracy!