10 predictions for UK General Election

[Blackleaf]

I'm surprised the little people would have voted for continuing the austerity path......

As opposed to what? More spending of other people's money to push us further into debt, as Labour and SNP wanted?

Labour ruined the British economy the last time they were in power between 1997 and 2010, whereas the Tories are doing a fine job with the economy, giving us the fastest growing major economy in the West, and we've just overtaken France to become the fifth biggest economy in the world.

The British people have decided fairly comprehensively to keep the Tories in power (as a majority this time rather than being propped up by the Lib Dems, who have been decimated) and to keep George Osborne as our Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister). It's no wonder that Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls, a big player in the Labour Party for the last twenty years, has received what is being called his "Portillo moment" by losing his seat in Morley and Outwood in Leeds to Andrea Jenkyns of the Conservative Party. His was probably the biggest scalp of the night. People were worried about him becoming Chancellor and wrecking our booming economy - but now he isn't even an MP!

Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls, a big hitter on the Labour Party, is no longer an MP after losing his seat in Morley and Outwood in Leeds.....

Cameron and his wife have now left Buckingham Palace after twenty five minutes or so and he is once again PM. He now has to set up his new administration, of course.

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At the age of just 20, Mhairi Black, the new SNP MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, is the youngest elected British MP since Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, who was elected as an MP in Devon in 1667 at the age of...... 13!

Meet the SNP's Mhairi Black, the youngest MP elected since 1667

Election 2015
BBC
8 May 2015

New MP Mhairi Black is now the youngest elected politician in Britain.

If the 20-year-old wants to get advice from the last holder of the record, it may be tricky as he died 300 years ago.

Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, was 13 when he was elected as an MP in Devon in 1667.

Speaking after her victory Ms Black said: "Whatever you're views are on Scotland's future, I will seek to represent you to the best of my ability."

She has unseated one of Labour's big names, the former shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander, bringing an end to 70 years of Labour rule in the area.

Newsbeat met Ms Black in Paisley before her election victory.

There have been a lot of words used to describe her in the last few weeks: fresh-faced, impressive, articulate and a firebrand.

She certainly seems to be all those things but she's also a keen musician.

A die-hard supporter of Partick Thistle FC (she thinks Celtic are "scum"), she can play the drums and piano and when we asked her to name her favourite song, she grinned.

"Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changing! I think that sums it up for me at the moment," she said.

One of those big changes are her clothes. Gone are the jeans and instead she's got used to the smart trousers, shirts and jumpers that go with the role.

"Running for MP is the longest job interview of my life and you wouldn't wear jeans to a job interview," she says.

Her office in Paisley is modest and ordinary; one of the doors is missing a handle and several posters of her hang on the plain walls.

Her dad Alan, who is also her election campaign manager, sits on one of the chairs and smiles as Ms Black tells us how life seems to have changed in the last few months.

"The New York Times did a piece on me. It's so mad," she says.

Mhairi Black smiles after beating Labour's then Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander during the night in Paisley and Renfrewshire South

"There have been some people going '20, that's a bit unusual' but once you start talking to them, they realise it's more about the quality of your argument and the quality of what you're saying.

"They can see past political spin, aesthetic, ages, gender - I can't help what I am. They see it more as a breath of fresh air."

Ms Black is also being seen as part of the political hurricane that seems to have swept through Scotland in the last few years.

"The Scottish referendum changed everything for me. Once it came about, we thought this is a real chance to kind of change things," she said.

Ms Black was born in 1994 - the year that Oasis released What's the Story (Morning Glory).

By that time, former MP Douglas Alexander had already spent time working for former Labour PM Gordon Brown.

She was three years old when he entered the House of Commons.

Ms Black has seen him in the area a few times, she is a child of the Labour years, but like many in her area, she says she felt abandoned by the party.

"You've got ordinary people being told to tighten their belts and all the while MPs are considering giving themselves a wage rise.

"Look at bankers - some of them getting paid more than they were before the crash."

Ms Black thinks more and more people in the area have been looking for change.

"Westminster should be ashamed of the policies it's forced on so many people here. The way the axe is falling, it's very unequal.

"After I did the Newsbeat debate in Leeds, people came up to me, people from England, who were interested in me and the SNP. I think this desire for change is right across the country."

We return to her age again. She turns 21 later this year and has yet to finish her exams.

"I may be young but I'm running for everyone. The thing is, issues that affect young people, actually they're the same issues affecting everyone across the board.

How do her friends react to her new success and fame?

She laughs: "My mates think what I'm doing is a bit mental but they think it's great.

"They're excited about the prospect of change, it's just an added bonus their friend may be a part of it."


Meet the SNP's Mhairi Black, the youngest MP elected since 1667 - BBC Newsbeat

Letters: Joy and relief from Telegraph readers as Conservatives triumph in general election

SIR - THANK GOD!

Neville Shermer
Woodburn Common, Buckinghamshire


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SIR – My faith in the electorate is restored. They recognised that, while Ed Miliband stood for working people, David Cameron stood for people working. Well done, Britain, and may it soon again be Great Britain.

Chris Sparrow
Oxford

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SIR - A very inspiring and uplifting speech by David Cameron at Witney focusing on our United Kingdom and our "One nation". This was David Cameron at his best.

On occasion, the further one looks back the further one can look forward. An offer should be made to the Northern Ireland Unionists to participate in government. Their loyal and pragmatic qualities are excellent qualifications. And at one time, they were integral factors within Conservative and Unionist governments.

We need a latter-day version of this.

John Barstow
Fittleworth, West Sussex

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SIR - The "working people" have spoken.

Ken Culley
Marlborough, Wiltshire
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Ed Miliband reacts to the results of the count of his seat in Doncaster (PHOTO: REUTERS/Darren Staples)

SIR - Perhaps Mr Miliband can store his "Manifesto Tablet" in his second kitchen.

Barbara Bethell-Fox
New Malden, Surrey

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SIR - Words of comfort for Labour supporters: from rich to poor, virtually everyone will be better off.

Pamela Wheeler
Shrewsbury, Shropshire

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SIR - First past the post voting has some benefits. If we had adopted PR, then Ed Balls would still be an MP.


Chris Millington
Long Sutton, Hampshire

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SIR - Alex Salmond is quoted as saying that the SNP election result means that the SNP cannot now be ignored.

This is, of course, completely wrong. The number of SNP MPs now in Parliament is irrelevant, as is the number of Liberal Democrats.

The Scots have voted against independence. They can be ignored in the House of Commons for the next five years.

Mr Cameron should concentrate on the United Kingdom.

John Southall
Pinner, Middlesex

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SIR - May I be among the first to congratulate Nicola Sturgeon on having worked so hard to achieve an outstanding result for David Cameron. Thank you, Nicola.

John A Campbell
Dublin


Letters: Joy and relief from readers as Conservatives triumph in general election - Telegraph

 

[Ludlow]

I don't care who's running I'm voting for Alfred Hitchcock

 

[Kreskin]

How did Ayatollah Elizabeth fair?

 

[gore0bsessed]

hahahahahahahahahahaha ukip barely won a seat... what happened blackleaf, i thought it was bbc that only made farage look unpopular but in reality he was beloved by most of the country????? hahahahahahahahaahhahahaahahhahaah

uk wants nothing to do with farage or ukip, good riddance to farage and maybe the entire party should be abolished at this point.

 

[coldstream]

Honestly.. we've run into an era now where we have these governments in Britain, U.S., Canada led by soft, nodescript, amorphous and malleable plutocrats.

They seem just to fill in the voids left by the collapse of moral structure. They are without vision or character of any discernable quality. They provide no propulsion, they just drift in the current, providing the appearance of a hand on the tiller with no input as to direction.. (leaving all of that to the 'invisible' hand of the market). Inevitably, of course, there is the brink of a Niagara looming.

In one generation we have moved from dull witted, petty libertarian ideologues of manic energy (Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney).. to these political eunuchs in thrall of Free Markets in economics, morals and sovereignty (Cameron, Obama, Harper).. controlled by pools of capital.

I thought some sense would emerge, as the economies stagger from crisis to crisis (none more so than Europe), wealth becomes radically polarized, nations drown in debt and 'austerity' becomes the governing priniciple.. but we seem beyond common sense.

 

[gore0bsessed]

Until the education system is eradicated of capitalist propaganda sense will be difficult.

 

[DaSleeper]

I'd like to see your resume
Under job expectation...: Well...I want a job where I make as much as the owner, but only do work that I think is appropriate for me!


No wonder you can't get a job!

 

[Blackleaf]

The Final Score

Number of votes for each party (top 12 parties)

Conservatives - 11,334,920
Labour - 9,347,326
Ukip - 3,881,129
Liberal Democrats - 2,415,888
SNP - 1,454,436
Green Party - 1,157,613
Democratic Unionist Party - 184,260
Plaid Cymru - 181,694
Sinn Fein - 176,232
Ulster Unionist Party - 114,935
Social Democratic & Labour Party - 99,809
Alliance Party - 61,556


Vote Share % - top six parties

Conservatives - 36.9 (+0.8 )
Labour - 30.4 (+1.5)
Ukip - 12.6 (+9.5)
Liberal Democrats - 7.9 (-15.2)
SNP - 4.7 (+3.1)
Green Party - 3.8 (+2.8 )


Commons Seats - all 650

Conservatives - 331 (+24)
Labour - 232 (-26)
SNP - 56 (+50)
Democratic Unionist Party - 8 (0)
Liberal Democrats - 8 (-49)
Sinn Fein - 4 (-1)
Plaid Cymru - 3 (0)
Ulster Unionist Party - 2 (+2)
Green Party - 1 (0)
Ukip - 1 (+1)
Independent - 1 (0)



Ukip - 3,881,129 votes and a 9.5% increase in vote share. 1 seat
SNP - 1,454,436 votes (and just 50% of all Scottish votes) and a 3.1% increase in vote share. 56 seats (out of 59 Scottish seats).

A glaring democratic deficiency which needs to be fixed.

UKIP AREN'T GOING AWAY......


Nigel Farage attacks 'bankrupt' electoral system that saw 4m voters elect 1 Ukip MP

Former Ukip leader 'appalled' that 3.9 million voted Ukip on Thursday – yet the party was left with a single MP

Ukip leader Nigel Farage celebrates St George's Day with a pint in the Northwood Club in Ramsgate (Getty Images)


By Christopher Hope, Chief Political Correspondent
08 May 2015
The Telegraph

Nigel Farage has attacked a “bankrupt” electoral system that left the party with a single MP despite more people supporting the UK Independence Party as supported the Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrats put together.

The former Ukip leader said he was appalled that 3.9million voted Ukip on Thursday – yet the party was left with a single MP. In comparison, almost the same number of people elected 64 SNP or LibDem MPs.

Ukip is now set to make electoral reform a key plank in the party’s campaigning strategy over the next five years, with one plan including a march through London.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage may run for the leadership again in September

Mr Farage pointed out that Douglas Carswell, the party’s single MP, was a passionate advocate of electoral reform.

He said: “I think the First Past The Post system is bankrupt, it is bankrupt because one party (SNP) can get 50 per cent of the vote in Scotland and nearly 100 per cent of the (Scottish) seats, and our party can get four million votes and just one seat.

"For those reasons there are a lot of angry Ukip people out there. They're not giving up on Ukip, but absolutely determined that we get a fairer, more reflective system.

Ukip's Nigel Farage (left); comedian All Murray, the Pub Landlord, who stood as the candidate for his Free United Kingdom Party (FUKP) (centre); and the Conservative Party's Craig Mackinlay (right) at the South Thanet count. Mackinley took the seat

“Electoral reform wouldn't just make our politics fairer, I think it would make it more open, more honest, and we would see some real, real debate.

“This result leaves millions of people unrepresented and the current system leads to negative campaign in general elections – this needs to change.”

Key Ukip policies

Rapid referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union

Control immigration with points-based system, cap of 50,000 skilled migrant workers per year and five year ban on unskilled immigration

Meet Nato target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence and even look at increasing it

Extra £3 billion for the NHS per year

No tax on the minimum wage

However, Mr Farage hinted he could run again for the leadership in September and said he wanted to play an active role in the ‘out’ campaign in the 2017 referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

Ukip remained well placed to push on at the next election in 2020 at the expense of the Labour party, after Ukip came second in scores of seats in northern England, he said.

Minutes later he delivered on a promise to resign as Ukip leader if he failed to be elected as an MP.He said: “There will be a leadership election for the next leader of Ukip in September and I will consider over the course of this summer whether to put my name forward to do that job again.”

Mr Farage was looking forward to his first long holiday since 1993. “I intend to take the summer off, enjoy myself a bit.”

Mr Farage forecast that Labour would now “face an existential crisis”, with figures showing that Ukip was second in 120 seats and third in 364 seats. The party had no second places in 2010.

The party’s long term strategy to make a major challenge in 2020 remained on track.

He said: “Ukip’s future is going to be with working people and Ukip's growth from here will be with Labour voters and non-voters. No question about that.

“Ukip is now the party that represents working people – these are blokes running glaziers, self-employed people, young couples with small kids who work, wonder why they bother when they see some of the neighbours.

“Across the rest of the country if you take London out the Ukip share of the English vote is about 17 per cent and you’re talking vast swathes of north, south, east and west. It’s middle England.”

Mr Farage said he wanted to lead the campaign to leave the EU at the 2017 referendum, because he suspected the leaders of the main parties would campaign to stay in the EU.

He said: “I would not trust David Cameron as far as I could throw Ted Heath. I don’t trust him at all. There will be a role in that referendum for me to play.

“I am very fearful we are going to the wrong referendum with the wrong question, the wrong spending limits, not having an ombudsman to make sure the BBC behaves and who votes is crucial.

“If the no campaign is led by the posh boys it will not connect.”


Nigel Farage attacks 'bankrupt' electoral system that saw 4m voters elect 1 Ukip MP - Telegraph

 

[coldstream]

Britain AND Canada should revamp its electoral system to replace the 'first past the post' system with a weighted system.. where electors set in order a preference of 3 choices... 1st.. 2nd.. 3rd.. of listed candidates. As the lowest vote getter is eliminated on each count, his votes are re-allocated the second place on the ballots. and so on.. until a majority for one candiate is reached or all third place votes are allocated.

It would be much fairer than seeing a party like the Conservatives achieving a large majority of seats with a little over a third of the vote.

 

[Corduroy]

The system is meant to elect MPs based on the majority preference of a small community's electorate. It's not designed to elect them based on the aggregate preferences of the entire electorate. Comparing the results of a FPTP election to the popular vote is comparing unlike things, and assumes that the popular vote is the way MPs should be decided. Is that they way MPs should be decided? Certainly there's a disparity in the system where 3.8 million racist clowns are only represented by one member of the UK racist clown party, but is England's racist clown population are community?

 

[DaSleeper]

Spoken like a true....cough cough..progressive....:roll:

 

[tay]

Anti-Conservative protests erupt outside Downing Street






Downing Street was the scene of protests and promotions as the warm glow of victory gave way to hard work and noisy opposition.
Michael Gove moved from chief whip to running the Justice Department and there were arrests and violence as anti-austerity voices were raised at the gates, just yards from Number Ten, as ITV News Political Correspondent Libby Wiener reports.




Anti-Conservative protests erupt outside Downing Street - ITV News

 

[IdRatherBeSkiing]

Anti-Conservative protests erupt outside Downing Street






Downing Street was the scene of protests and promotions as the warm glow of victory gave way to hard work and noisy opposition.
Michael Gove moved from chief whip to running the Justice Department and there were arrests and violence as anti-austerity voices were raised at the gates, just yards from Number Ten, as ITV News Political Correspondent Libby Wiener reports.




Anti-Conservative protests erupt outside Downing Street - ITV News

Sore losers. Some people cannot accept the will of the people.

 

[Blackleaf]

It would be much fairer than seeing a party like the Conservatives achieving a large majority of seats with a little over a third of the vote.

Or the SNP winning 95% of Scotland's 59 seats despite getting only 50% of the Scottish vote.

Sore losers. Some people cannot accept the will of the people.

The Left certainly can't.

They were protesting at the gates of Downing Streets waving placards saying "Get The Tories out", just after the Conservatives were re-elected in a democratic election. I think some police officers were injured.

And on the day in which Britain was celebrating the 70th anniversary of VE Day, with a concert being held right nearby on Horse Guards Parade, they also daubed grafitti saying "F*ck Tory Scum" on the The Women Of World War II memorial.

The Left are just scumbags. I've noticed how most of the protestors were your typical left-wing student type. They can protest all they like. The Tories are going nowhere. They have a mandate from the British people to run Britain for at least the next five years. And I'm sure they will only make the necessary cuts ever deeper and get Britain back on track.

Someone said on Sky News on Friday that's Britain's standing in the world has been elevated after this election. We could have gone the way of the Greeks and French by electing a Far-Left government which will do untold damage to the economy and society in general, but the British people, especially the English, are mainly small-c conservatives and don't like revolution and we have opted for the current painful but necessary austerity measures to get our economy back on track by voting the Conservatives back in.

I'm also glad the Tories are back in because it means that in 2017 we will (thanks to pressure from Ukip) get a referendum on whether or not Britain should leave the EU. Had Labour got in, probably propped up by the SNP, there would have been no EU in/out referendum, but there is to be one now the Tories are back in. So I'm looking forward to a huge campaign and plenty of debate between Europhobes and Europhiles over the next two years. Let's hope the British people do the right think and vote to leave the EU in 2017.

By the way, this election saw Labour winning their least number of seats in the Commons since 1987, when they were trounced for the third time by Thatcher's Conservative hordes. Neil Kinnock's party won just 229 seats in that election compared to 376 seats for Thatcher's Conservatives. In this election, Ed Miliband's Labour won 232 seats, just three more than 1987.

Also, this was the first time that an incumbent party increased their number of seats in the Commons since Thatcher's Tories in 1983. Cameron's Conservatives won 306 seats in the 2010 election, which is why they had no overtall majority and went into coalition with the Liberal Democrats, but won 331 seats this time around. In 1983, Thatcher won by the biggest landslide seen in a UK General Election since that of Labour in 1945. Her party won a whopping 397 seats in that election, up from the 339 seats her party won in 1979 when she was first elected PM. On Friday night the Conservatives celebrated becoming the first incumbent party to increase their number of seats since 1983 by holding a Club Tropicana themed party. Club Tropicana was a big hit for Wham! in 1983.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=WYX0sjP6Za8

Suicide by socialism: When will Labour learn the lesson of history that the British people don't like hectoring left-wing politicians telling us how to run our lives

By Dominic Sandbrook for the Daily Mail
9 May 2015
Daily Mail

Tony Blair, of all people, saw it coming. As long ago as January, he told The Economist magazine that the 2015 election campaign would be one ‘in which a traditional Left-wing party competes with a traditional Right-wing party, with the traditional result’.

‘A Tory win?’ asked his interviewer.

‘Yes,’ Mr Blair replied. ‘That is what happens.’

Whatever you might think of Mr Blair, he proved a much better soothsayer than the vast majority of pollsters and pundits.

Thursday's election was not merely a disappointment for Ed Miliband and Labour but a disaster and a catastrophe, an utter debacle to rank with the very worst defeats of the Eighties

Ed Miliband had failed to learn from the previous defeats suffered by Neil Kinnock in 1987 and 1992

Left-wing Michael Foot, pictured, Labour leader between 1980 and until he was trounced by Thatcher in the 1983 General Election, was a highly intelligent and principled man but a preposterous candidate for PM

For Thursday’s election was not merely a disappointment for Ed Miliband and the Labour Party. It was a disaster, a catastrophe, an utter debacle to rank with the very worst defeats of the Eighties.

The seeds of Labour’s defeat were, I think, sown at the very moment when, on September 25, 2010, Ed Miliband was announced as the party’s new leader. As I wrote at the time, the problem was not so much his goofy manner and geeky personality, but the fact he had so comprehensively refused to learn from those previous defeats.

Mr Miliband’s appeal to Labour activists, and especially to his patrons and paymasters in the giant trades unions, can be put very simply.

He stood for the leadership on the basis that he was not Tony Blair, that New Labour was dead and that he would rekindle the Left-wing spirit of the Seventies and Eighties.

The fact that Mr Miliband does not appear to have understood why he lost so heavily is enormously telling

Ed Miliband in his resignation speech retreated to the empty waffle of 'progress and social justice'

Moments after Mr Miliband’s shock victory over his more moderate brother David, the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who led his party to crushing defeats in 1987 and 1992, was heard to exult: ‘We’ve got our party back.’

Well, Mr Kinnock certainly got his party back on Thursday night — an unashamedly Left-wing party, suspicious of business, hostile to the free market economy and dedicated to the principle of state intervention in business and the biggest utility companies.

And the reaction from the British people was exactly the same as it was in the Eighties: crushing rejection.

To an outside observer, it simply beggars belief that Mr Miliband failed to learn the lessons of history. Indeed, right from the moment he became Labour leader and proclaimed his fealty to the old-time Left-wing faith, Blairities were queueing up to warn that he was leading his party back to the dark ages of defeat.

Yvette Cooper, the right-wing Andy Burnham, and Chuka Umunna are the frontrunners to replace Miliband as Labour leader

‘Economic competence counts, leadership matters and you cannot win from the Left,’ Tony Blair’s old speechwriter Philip Collins remarked yesterday. ‘These things are rules in politics, carved in stone.’

Almost incredibly, however, Mr Miliband believed that he could rip up the rulebook. For reasons that seem to me utterly unfathomable, he believed — and still believes — that Britain is crying out for old-fashioned Left-wing policies, and that fate had chosen him to lead us into a socialist, redistributive future.

Yet even a cursory glance at the history books would have told him that no Labour government has won a majority on an overtly Left-wing platform for decades. Indeed, the last Labour leader to do so was Harold Wilson in October 1974 — and his majority was just three seats.

In fact, even that Wilson victory was a pretty poor model for Mr Miliband to follow. It is true that Labour at the time espoused some hair-raisingly socialist policies, from 83 per cent income tax to the nationalisation of land.

In reality, Wilson did not believe in his party’s Left-wing wheezes and many were quietly abandoned over the next five years. Indeed, by the time Labour faced the electorate in 1979, his admirably pragmatic successor, the more conservative Jim Callaghan, had started dragging the party back to the centre ground.

Yet such was public exhaustion with the endless strikes, inflation and economic chaos that the British people turned instead to Margaret Thatcher’s gospel of individual aspiration, hard work and self-improvement.

It is a mystery to me why, for so long, so many Labour politicians stubbornly refused to learn appropriate lessons. Instead, in Opposition after 1979, the party lurched crazily to the Left.

By 1983, when Ed Miliband was a politics-obsessed teenager, the Labour Party had lost its mind. Led by the veteran Left-wing activist Michael Foot — a highly intelligent, principled and decent man, but a preposterous candidate to be prime minister — it had become a national laughing stock.

Mocked by one of Foot’s own frontbenchers as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, the Labour manifesto promised to scrap nuclear weapons, pull out of the European Union (something which was supported by the Left at the time rather than the Right as now), re-nationalise British Telecom and British Aerospace, reverse council house sales and even create hundreds of Labour peers — ironically enough, to vote through the abolition of the House of Lords.

The result was a total disaster. Across England in particular, voters recoiled from the prospect of full-blown state Socialism. Even with unemployment running at more than three million, Mrs Thatcher coasted to re-election while Labour slumped to a pitiful 209 seats — only 23 fewer than Mr Miliband’s dismal total on Thursday.

Then as now, ordinary people were not interested in Miliband-style classroom tirades about inequality and injustice. They just wanted a decent job, a steady wage and reliable public services.

Read more: When will Labour learn that British people don'l like left-wing politicians | Daily Mail Online
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Guardianista Laurie Penny defends war memorial vandalism at anti-Tory march

520 comments
9 May 2015
Steerpike
The Spectator

A WW2 memorial was vandalised during an anti-Tory protest

After David Cameron won a surprise Conservative majority in the general election, angry anti-austerity protesters gathered near Parliament Square today to let their outrage be known. During the demonstration, a war memorial, honouring the women of the Second World War, was vandalised with ‘F— Tory scum’ graffiti.

While the crime was greeted with outrage by both the left and right, Laurie Penny, the Guardian feminist, appears to have defended the vandalism on Twitter, saying she doesn’t ‘have a problem with this’:

Laurie Penny ✔ @PennyRed
I don't have a problem with this. The bravery of past generations does not oblige us to be cowed today. https://twitter.com/little_g2/status/597113821388513280 …
8:04 PM - 9 May 2015
375 194


Laurie Penny ✔ @PennyRed
No, what's disgusting is that some people are more worried about a war memorial than the destruction of the welfare state.
8:11 PM - 9 May 2015
461 501

Although most users were quick to suggest that she ought to show more respect, Penny has at least managed to find one kindred spirit. Charlie Gilmour, who was jailed for his behaviour at the student riots during which he swang from the Union Jack on the Cenotaph, claims that the women the memorial is for would agree with the anti-Tory sentiment:



Follow
Charlie Gilmour @charliegilmour

Can see why people upset by this but the women of WWII - who saw the birth of the welfare state - would probs agree
8:15 PM - 9 May 2015
5 5 10

He went on to respond to Penny’s comments with a ‘high-five’ emoticon. Well, they do say two’s company.

Left-wing prat: Student Charlie Gilmour, the son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, was sentenced to 16 months in prison after he swung from the Cenotaph during the 2010 student riots


Laurie Penny defends war memorial vandalism at anti-Tory march - Spectator Blogs

 

[Ludlow]

If I was an Anglander I'd vote for Alfred Hitchcock

 

[Blackleaf]

Phew. My faith in the British people was entirely justified

The pollsters got the election result so wrong because the Left has browbeaten ordinary voters into being reluctant to share their real views

Victory: British Prime Minister David Cameron delivers a speech outside 10 Downing Street on May 8, 2015 Photo: Getty


By Janet Daley, who moved to Britain from the US thirty years ago
09 May 2015
The Telegraph

1553 Comments


I took the kind of punt that professional commentators are not supposed to risk last week. In the face of overwhelming polling data which was even endorsed by the judgment of the American statistical sage Nate Silver, and the virtual unanimity of my brother pundits, I forecast that the electorate would defy all predictions and vote decisively for the Conservatives.

Based on nothing but the conceit of my own intuition, I ventured that so many people would be enraged and alarmed by the absurdity of the Labour leadership combined with the effrontery of the SNP which threatened to impose its will (“lock David Cameron out of Downing Street”, etc) on the vast population which had no say in its election, that they would turn out in force to register their resistance.

Then there was a very long five days in which I nearly lost my nerve: there was a particularly bad wobble around Wednesday when the whole media operation was centred on the mathematics of coalition and the constitutional etiquette of how to avoid involving the Queen in a messy solution. But on Thursday morning I woke up to the thought (sorry, this is really true) that this was all crazy. How many people in their right minds wanted to see as prime minister a man who makes a dead-of-night visit to a comedian whose professional shtick consists of sounding like the sort of lunatic you’d avoid on the bus?

How many serious voters – and the act of voting means that you are, by definition, serious – could possibly support a party that thought engraving its platitudes (sorry, pledges) on a stone tablet was anything but an insult to the nation’s intelligence? Never mind potential damage to the economic recovery and the dishonesty about the deficit, the Labour political pitch should have been regarded as unfit for grown-up consideration. Could we actually be entertaining the possibility that the most sophisticated, rational electorate in the world was divided neatly into two camps of exactly equal size, one supporting this idiocy and the other in favour of a party that had performed an economic miracle? This had to be – simply had to be – all wrong.

As the leader of a stronger, re-energised Conservative Party that is now able to go through with its policies without the hindrance of the Lib Dems; as the leader of the first incumbent party to increase its number of seats at Westminster since 1983; with the Left in complete disarray; and with the leaders of the other EU nations now knowing they have to listen to his ideas on EU reform rather than ignore him as they did previously, otherwise they'll see him campaign for Britain to leave the EU in the in/out referendum that he will now give the British people in 2017 - something which Labour would have denied us - British Prime Minister David Cameron is now master of all he surveys

So we got to Thursday night and the exit poll. You know the rest. Watching the expressions on the faces of the “experts” in the television studios is a memory which I shall cherish. After it was announced at around 1:50am that the Conservatives had held Nuneaton, which had been a crucial Labour target seat, the whole thing became a bit of a blur – literally, because by that time I was crying with relief.

But what remains of the Great Prediction Mistake of 2015 is a proper analysis of how it could have come to this: all that expertise, all those hours spent questioning and analysing enormous piles of data which was designed to the most foolproof standards – and it was all wrong. It is very important to examine how this terrible error came about because the reason is not methodological, it is political. And the political reason is fundamental to an understanding of what is going wrong with our public discourse.

On Friday, Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov, one of the most highly regarded of those hapless polling organisations, uttered these immortal words by way of explanation: “What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and [then] they did something else in the ballot box.” You don’t say. Mr Kellner sounded as if he had been taken utterly by surprise by the possibility that voters might be sentient beings rather than mathematical entities, and thus capable of deliberate deception or evasion.

But the question that demands an answer is: why did so many voters feel compelled to avoid telling Mr Kellner and his friends their real intentions? Because that is certainly what happened. I am as sure of this as I was of the eventual election result: the four in 10 poll respondents who said they had not yet made up their minds who to vote for (a figure that remained remarkably consistent right to the end) did not, as one Labour spokesman claimed, suddenly decide “when they had the pencils in their hands” that they were going to support the Tories. Most of them knew all along that they were going to do that – but they were not willing to say so.

Somehow we have arrived at a point where the conscientiously held beliefs and values of the majority of the population have become a matter for secret shame. The desire to do as well as you can in life, to develop your potential and expect to be rewarded for it, to provide your family with the greatest possible opportunity for self-improvement and to do that on your own without being dependent on the state – these are the assumptions that seem to have become so unacceptable that identifying with them is beyond the pale, or at least so socially outrageous that it is not worth the ignominy of admitting to them.

The Left has so dominated the conversation and so noisily traduced the “petit bourgeois” values that guide the lives of what used to be called the “respectable working class” that, ironically, it is only the most socially confident who can openly embrace them. The very people whom Labour needs to attract (and which it did attract when it had re-invented itself as New Labour) are once again being bullied into hiding their true attitudes and opinions.

So they prevaricate and evade when asked how they will vote because they are intimidated by the condemnation of the Left-wing mob, or else they just are not self-assured enough to make the moral case (even in their own minds) for their choice. But when they reach the sacred solitude of the voting booth, they do what they know must be done for the sake of their own futures, and that of their families, and even of those the Left insists are being disadvantaged – because they genuinely believe that dependency is a bad thing and that self-determination is a social good.

In the end, what does the Left (and its army of media friends) accomplish by all this activist pressure on public opinion? In a circle of mutually congratulatory agreement, the liberal establishment may demonise the social attitudes of the majority until they are blue in the face. They may succeed – as indeed they obviously have – in making ordinary people afraid to utter their real views. But there is a dreadful price to be paid: if you browbeat people into withdrawing from the debate, then you will never know how robust their convictions are – until it is too late and you have catastrophically lost an election, or staked your professional credibility on unsound predictions.

This is the danger of the activist trap. As I said last week, if you are surrounded by a crowd of people whose opinions are identical to yours then together you can make a great deal of noise. But what you don’t hear is the silence of those outside the crowd. If parties of the Left are ever to become electable again, they will have to stop shouting and listen.

So, as you will have gathered, I am ecstatically relieved at this splendid election result. Not just because it has returned a government – this time with a clear, working majority – which I think the country needs. Not even because the Tory win has saved my professional bacon after that mildly insane journalistic gamble. Much more important, the election of 2015 has reassured me that this is still the country – and these are still the brave, undaunted, principled people – that I have loved and admired since I arrived here half a lifetime ago.


Phew. My faith in the British people was entirely justified - Telegraph

 

[Blackleaf]

David Cameron has been building his new Cabinet, and this time he doesn't have to put some Lib Dems in some posts as he did when we had the Tory/Lib Dem coalition.

The "Big Four" posts have been kept as they were, with George Osborne remaining as Chancellor of the Exchequer; Theresa May as Home Secretary; Philip Hammond as Foreign Secretary; and Michael Fallon as Defence Secretary.

Amber Rudd is Energy and Climate Change Secretary and Priti Patel will attend Cabinet as employment minister.

Sajid Javid moves from the culture department to business, taking over the job that the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, who lost his seat in the election, had.

Priti Patel is the new Employment Secretary.

Former Education Secretary Michael Gove is the new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor.

As culture secretary John Whittingdale will lead negotiations on the renewal of the BBC's Royal Charter. Mr Whittingdale, a former private secretary to Lady Thatcher, has joined the government for the first time. He was chair of the influential Commons culture committee over the past five years, overseeing its inquiry into phone hacking.

Robert Halfon is the new Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. Grant Shapps was chairman before the election. Will he stay in that role?

London Mayor Boris Johnson, who was elected the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip in west London in the election, will not be made a minister but will attend separate Tory "political cabinet" meetings.

Cabinet reshuffle: Amber Rudd and Sajid Javid promoted

BBC News
11 May 2015

Amber Rudd outside No 10 after becoming climate change secretary

Prime Minister David Cameron is completing his cabinet reshuffle, with a number of leading female ministers being handed big promotions.

Amber Rudd is Energy and Climate Change Secretary and Priti Patel will attend Cabinet as employment minister.

Boris Johnson will not be made a minister but will attend separate Tory "political cabinet" meetings.

Mr Cameron said Mr Johnson "would devote his attention, as promised" to his final year as Mayor of London.

The BBC's Norman Smith said Mr Johnson would be "integral" to Mr Cameron's team although it was an acknowledgement that he could not both "run London and a major government department".

Mr Cameron has been roundly applauded by backbench Conservative MPs as he spoke to the influential 1922 Committee for the first time since winning a majority.

Conservative MPs have been tweeting pictures of their colleagues at the first meeting of the 1922 Committee since the election

A spokesman for Mr Johnson said he had accepted an invitation to attend weekly political cabinets - held after the full cabinet session - but would not take a ministerial role.

"The Mayor has always been clear - he has to fulfil his mandate running London first - and that's exactly what he will be doing until his term ends in May 2016," he said.

As he pieces together his new Cabinet, Mr Cameron is filling a number of top roles previously held by Lib Dems in the former coalition government.

Former energy minister Ms Rudd is promoted to take control of energy policy, a role held before the election by Ed Davey. Mr Javid, a rising star in the party, succeeds Vince Cable as business secretary.

Mr Whittingdale, a former private secretary to Lady Thatcher, has joined the government for the first time. He was chair of the influential Commons culture committee over the past five years, overseeing its inquiry into phone hacking.

The Conservatives won a 12-seat majority in the House of Commons in Thursday's election, taking 331 of the 650 seats. You can see the full results here.

As MPs return to Westminster, Mr Cameron pledged to ensure the "economic recovery reaches all parts of our country".

Mr Cameron told the 1922 Committee his first term was "about repair and recovery", saying it fell to his party to put the economy back on track after "the great Labour recession", and that the next term is about renewal.

"It will be our task to renew a sense of fairness in our society - where those who work hard and do the right thing are able to get on."

On Europe, the prime minister said negotiations on reshaping the UK's membership "would be tough but we have a mandate".

The BBC's James Landale said Mr Cameron had also expressed frustration with pollsters for daily updates during the campaign suggesting the parties were level pegging, saying he was "going to sue them for my ulcers".

Priti Patel takes the employment brief - previously held by Esther McVey, who has lost her Wirral West seat

Mr Johnson did not leave empty-handed - he will attend weekly "political cabinet" sessions

Sajid Javid moves from the culture department to business

As culture secretary John Whittingdale will lead negotiations on the renewal of the BBC's Royal Charter

Robert Halfon is the new Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party

Grant Shapps was chairman before the election. Will he stay in that role?


Cabinet reshuffle: Amber Rudd and Sajid Javid promoted - BBC News

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

 

[Blackleaf]

The system is meant to elect MPs based on the majority preference of a small community's electorate. It's not designed to elect them based on the aggregate preferences of the entire electorate. Comparing the results of a FPTP election to the popular vote is comparing unlike things, and assumes that the popular vote is the way MPs should be decided. Is that they way MPs should be decided? Certainly there's a disparity in the system where 3.8 million racist clowns are only represented by one member of the UK racist clown party, but is England's racist clown population are community?

How are Ukip racist? For wanting the same points-based immigration system that Canada and Australia have?


The juvenile Left needs to stop wasting its time talking exclusively to itself

A Left that loves Britain should try to heal our nation and bring it together

Graffiti pictured on The Women of World War II monument outside of Downing Street, London, following an anti-austerity protest Photo: PA


By Tim Stanley
11 May 2015
The Telegraph

146 Comments

How must Miliband and Clegg have been feeling when they lined up alongside a victorious Cameron on Friday during the VE Day ceremony at the Cenotaph?


How appropriate that the day after the election should be VE Day. It offered an extraordinary visual: Cameron, Clegg and Miliband standing with rosettes, each contemplating battles lost and won. The scene was reminiscent of The Absence of War, a play by David Hare that ends with a defeated Labour leader watching Remembrance Sunday on television. There are tears rolling down his cheeks. He’s crying because his defeat means that he no longer has a part in the theatre of national life. But the title of Hare’s play also hints at a deeper understanding that he’s embraced – Britain doesn’t produce heroes anymore. Without war, without something to fight for, we have to settle for lesser men to lead us.

How ironic that a day later some socialist protestors defaced a war memorial by writing “F––– Tory Scum” across it. Such is the arrogance of the revolutionary young: they think that nothing is more important than themselves, even the dead. Nor do they respect ideological consistency. Why would anarchists oppose welfare cuts that reduce the size of the state? Isn’t that their bag?

Troublingly, some people on Twitter defended their actions on the grounds that what the Tories were doing to the country was even worse (and please remember that the Tories have only been in power for 24 hours at this point). The incident neatly encapsulates psychological defects to be found in some parts of the Left. Not on all of the Left by any means but, sadly, on those bits that tend to shout the loudest and get noticed the most. The serious, quiet Leftists who have not lost their minds need to speak up and drown these crazies out.

Laurie Penny ✔ @PennyRed
No, what's disgusting is that some people are more worried about a war memorial than the destruction of the welfare state.
8:11 PM - 9 May 2015
531 607

One reaction to the Tory win was to suggest that the election was rigged. Who by? The voters? Another response was to say that it was a damning indictment of the electoral system – an indictment that was rarely read out when Labour won just 35 per cent of the vote in 2005 and formed a majority government. Also, if Britain had PR then Nigel Farage would probably be prime minister right now – and I’m sure The Guardian wouldn’t be too happy with that either.

A rather more common reaction was to say “damn you democracy”. Giles Fraser – an intelligent but frustrating Christian socialist who would do better to stick to the Christianity – wrote: “Right now I feel ashamed to be English. Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us.” This is hogwash. It implies that the Tories are far, far more Right-wing than they really are – for David Cameron is the man who legalised gay marriage, poured money into the NHS and ring-fenced foreign aid. It suggests, too, that there’s something fundamentally bad about the millions who voted Tory, which ignores the role that active Tories so often play as civic leaders, charity workers, teachers, doctors etc. Fraser’s attitude might also be why “shy Conservatives” don’t tell pollsters how they intend to vote. Who wants to be called “scum” outside of an S&M convention?

A few on the Left will go as far as to say that they want nothing to do with Conservatives at all. A garden centre-owner said that he would ask Tories to pay an extra tax on their goods and that Ukip voters should shop elsewhere. Had he said the same about Muslims or gay people, the cops would rightly be knocking on his door. And an academic wrote “If you’re a conservative, you’re not my friend.”

She listed a series of Right-wing policies and chastised anyone who supported them: “They are offensive views. They are views that lose you friends and respect.” They are not, however, views that lose you elections – see last Thursday’s result for proof.

To reiterate: these are not the opinions of the average Leftist. But they are the opinions bubbling around the internet and among the punditry. And maybe, just maybe, they’re a good reason for the Left to stop listening to the internet altogether.

In many ways cyberland helps people to reach out, share ideas and discuss. But it also acts as an echo chamber in which a large but limited minority reinforce each other’s views and push each other’s emotions to cult-like levels of fanaticism. The uselessness of this anger was demonstrated in that hideous moment in the 2015 campaign when Ed went to meet Russell Brand and auditioned for his vote. Some people thought this was a smart move because, well, Russell has 12 billion YouTube followers. But it turned out that none of them were swing voters in key marginals – and his endorsement had no effect except to embarrass the Labour Party.

What was Russell’s reaction to the election result? To produce a video saying that he was disappointed with democracy and would now redirect his energies towards other forms of activism. As is so typical with online babble, his conclusions were firmly rooted in a discussion about how he felt personally.

A lot of the online commentary about this election has been about me, me, me. Just read comedian Robert Webb’s juvenile pre-election endorsement. Or, rather, don’t read it. Because one of the lessons of 2015 is surely that the Left has to stop paying attention to unqualified, frankly odd people online who don’t know what they’re talking about. Better a Labour Party where policy is written entirely by the ordinary blokes in the Fire Brigades Union than the fragile, eccentric types waving their hands about in the web-o-sphere.

If the Left sinks into petulance and name-calling and bitterness then it loses reason. That leads, inexorably, to the desecration of war memorials. Why do I call it “desecration”? Because war memorials are sacred. They bond us to the past: everyone in Britain knows someone who fought or died or was evacuated, or is the child or grandchild of people who saw such things and passed their stories down the line like Homeric myths. War memorials tighten us together here and now in the present. And that is what the Left should seek to do, too.

This election revealed that Britain is divided horribly by region and class. We lack solidarity. A Left that loves Britain should try to heal our nation and bring it together.


The juvenile Left needs to stop wasting its time talking exclusively to itself - Telegraph

Britain AND Canada should revamp its electoral system to replace the 'first past the post' system with a weighted system.. where electors set in order a preference of 3 choices... 1st.. 2nd.. 3rd.. of listed candidates. As the lowest vote getter is eliminated on each count, his votes are re-allocated the second place on the ballots. and so on.. until a majority for one candiate is reached or all third place votes are allocated.

It would be much fairer than seeing a party like the Conservatives achieving a large majority of seats with a little over a third of the vote.

On 5th May 2011, the UK held a referendum on whether to change the system for electing the House of Commons.

In the result of a Yes vote, future United Kingdom general elections would have used the "Alternative Vote" (AV); in the event of a No vote, the voting system would remain the same, with the UK continuing to use the "First Past the Post" (FPTP) voting system.

67.9% of Britons voted in that referendum to keep the current FPTP system, with just 32.1% wanting the system changed to AV.

Funnily enough, I'm one of those who voted to keep FPTP, even though I'm now complaining about it.

 

[coldstream]

Left-wing Michael Foot, pictured, Labour leader between 1980 and
until he was trounced by Thatcher in the 1983 General Election, was a highly
intelligent and principled man but a preposterous candidate for PM

There's something wrong with a system that elects an incompetent cackling hag of a candidate like Margaret Thatcher, who brought in the most destructive dissolution of British economic and cultural equity, vigour and potential in British history.. at the behest of her puppet masters in the Global Free Market Oligarchy... over someone with principle and integrity.

Money is part of the problem, the other part is the dumbing down of electorates by the media into dull vassals who buy trite phrases and promises that are never delivered on by Free Market ideologues.. who proceed to move their jobs to subsistence wage colonies offshore... and impose ever more regressive taxation regimes at home.