Courtesy of Mish.
Early this morning in UK National Elections Underway: Expected Outcome is Hung Parliament I noted the dysfunctional nature of the election.
To recap, the expected outcome for the Scottish National Party (SNP) is 51 seats on 4-5% of the vote, while the expected outcome for Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP) is one seat on as much as 16% of the vote. UKIP could win 25% of the vote and still potentially not win any seats.
I expect UKIP to do a bit better than one seat, but I could easily be wrong. Indeed it is conceivable that not even Farage wins.
This morning I said “What matters is how concentrated the votes are, not how many you get.”
Actually both matter, but concentration is the key to winning seats. SNP is likely to win nearly every Scottish seat because SNP dominates Scotland. It will get no votes elsewhere.
Recall the platform of SNP was to break away from the UK. And 51 votes taken away from the Tories (Cameron’s party – Conservatives) or Labour (Ed Milliband) is sufficient to result in a hung parliament.
The UK The Labour Party is a full member of the Party of European Socialists and Progressive Alliance. They favor taxation as a means to achieve a “major redistribution of wealth and income”. Lovely.
Had Cameron simply granted UKIP the promised up-down vote on the UK remaining in the EU, the Tories would have had a better outcome.
Where is British Politics Headed?
Stratfor has a nice writeup today that explains Where British Politics Is Headed.
For the second election in a row, the Labour Party and the Conservatives (or “Tories”), the two traditional heavyweights, probably will not muster the 323 seats needed to form a majority government. Whereas in 2010 the Tories were able to form a reasonably stable coalition government with the centrist Liberal Democrats, this time the numbers do not seem to support a two-party coalition.
The person most likely to be smiling after the election results are revealed is Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the secessionist Scottish National Party — not just because disorder in Westminster strengthens her party, but also because her party looks set to increase its seat count from six to 53, with pollsters predicting a landslide in Scotland. By contrast, UKIP, another newly influential insurgent party with ambitions to extract the United Kingdom from the European Union, looks set to win just one seat. …
