I agree with Nick....

It seems that the prees have all come to the conclusion that both Brown & Cameron seem to be saying the same thing after the election TV debate.... I agree with Nick!
Looks like the opinion poles have also gone through an almighty upheaval with the prospect of a hung parliament greater than ever. Cameron has even gone onto 'only the Tories can deliver a strong government' mode!

Hmm, so, many pundits or experts are saying hung parliament between Labour & The Tories with Nick Clegg as "king maker"...
What if the Lib dems come in as second largest party (I think suggesting they could become the largest party would be stretching things a bit too far)...

Due to the first past the post (fpp) voting system it would be unlikely that the libdems would pick up enough seats to be second in the house. If you use the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] the LD would need in the region of 37% to overtake the Tories (though strangely 39% to become largest party). However if they picked up 30%+ of the votes and this was not reflected in the number of seats in Parliament there could be a huge public backlash against both Tories and Labour.

The larger the LD vote share across the country the stronger their mandate for overhauling the political system would be. I think that would be the most important outcome of a large LD increase at the poles.

I think trying to predict what the outcome will be is very difficult - after all there are two more debates to go and just look at how much the last one has shaken things up!. One thing is for sure though the night of 6 May / morning of 7 May is going to be a very interesting one...

Mrs C

And I'm an early shift on the 6th onto a long weekend off...

I must admit I looked up Nick Clegg's profile on Wiki and was quite surprised that he is worldly wise and experienced in managing and negotiating. I know the press deliberately don't report on him but it does seem as if a better picture would be easily portrayed. He's not some innocent from the political machine wound up to spout the right answers.

So hopefully things will liven up a bit more and none of the old school can assume they have the right to the dispatch boxes on either side of the house!

Wood Troll wrote: However if they picked up 30%+ of the votes and this was not reflected in the number of seats in Parliament there could be a huge public backlash against both Tories and Labour.

Sorry, but I don't understand. Why would you expect a party that had 30% of the overall would necessarily win any seats? That expectation would be reasonable if politics were reasonably uniform throughout the country with regard to the other two main parties. But when that is not the case .......... Imagine a distribution of political feeling where almost all the districts are either heavily Labour or heavily Tory, where you have just strongly left districts and strongly right districts. So in a heavily left leaning district the vote might be 60% Labour, 30% LibDem, 10% Tory and in a strongly right leaning district 60% Tory, 30% LibDem, and 10% Labour.

Not at all crazy to imagine a situation where a small party holding a few seats actually loses seats although gaining greatly in overall support because winning a seat depends just on the local vote, not the overall vote. Might have won those seats the last time in very close elections. This time although even there gaining a tiny bit losing the seats because the distribution of support for the other parties has changed (last time won with Labour 34%, LD 36%, Tories 30%; this time around there was a general shift to the left, labour 38%, LD 37%, Tories 25%).

BTW -- what I just described is not specific to "first past the post". Plain vanilla IRV is subject to the same potential problem where who is the winner moved in the opposite direction of an overall shift in support across the spectrum. Assume IRV vote counting and that the next preferences are always to the closest alternative and split evenly if that next choice is to either side. See who wins if in the first election was 35% L, 32% LD, 33% T (the labour candidate wins) and in the second election following a public opinion shift to the left 36% L, 37% LD, 26% T (the Lib Dem candiate wins).

In my opinion the voting system is wrong, the person who may be best for me & my family nationally is not necessarily in the party that would look after what I think is the best interests of the country, which way should I go, that is a rhetorical question btw...

I also find it strange that in a democracy the most votes do not necessarily win.

I think one of the best quotes to do with this came from that great series The West Wing & goes something like,

" a democracy isn't where the majority rules, it is where the majority select the minority who rule"

Well Mike's example shows how FPP sucks. (not sure what IRV stands for though).
Well its been going on like this in british politics for a long time and both the two old parties don't want it to stop (I wonder why?).

The two old parties have been at it as usual
I think it has been brilliant to see the Tories totally knocked off course and unable to decide whether to attack or ignor the Lib Dems. Labour are also trying to remain on message with policies and cosying up to the Lib Dems in readiness for a hung parliament. The Lib Dems are just not playing by the old parties' rules of attack or cosy up!

Meanwhile the Lib Dems get on with letting people know about their policies with all those column inches to be filled by a confused media.

I like the attack by the Daily Mail today! You know you have arrived when they start attacking you and not just the usual 'damn good ignoring' they give the Lib Dems.

So a week has gone by and Clegg did not make any mistakes on the second debate so the poles are still saying it will be a hung Parliament. Mind you after the "biggot" debarkle by Brown today, who knows what the polls will be saying by the weekend!

Has anyone met their candidates yet?

Hairyloon are you still of the opinion that there are only two choices?

Wood Troll wrote:Hairyloon are you still of the opinion that there are only two choices?

in the wake of bigotgate I would say that was more or less definite.

"IRV" stands for "instant runoff voting". Your ballot is required to list all candidates running in your order of preference and if your top listed candiate is eliminated, you vote transfers to the next on your list that is still in the contest. Since I referred to it earlier. counting these ballots the "condorcet" way ignores "order of elimination" and instead counts "on how many ballots does A beat B" (for each possible combination) and if for each combination A beats X on a majority of ballots (not necessarily the same ballots as those on which A beats Y) then A is a "condorcet candidate" -- Condorcet was an early theorist of "democratic systems", 18th Century, a casualty of French Revolution infighting.

But no, what I was referring to, that results in terms of number of seats won might not reflect overall support is not a consequence of FPP vote counting. It's a consequence of "local representation".

Assume you have 100 electoral districts and each one elects a representative. Assume that there are just two parties contesting the election (let's keep this simple).

Case 1) Preference distribution is equal across the society, no local differences.
So in all 100 districts lets say party A gets 60% of the vote and party B gets 40% of the vote. All 100 seats are won by party A.

Case 2) Preference distribution is entirely local. Imagine in your case Scotland and Wales dominated by "independence" politics.
So in 60 districts party A gets essentially 100% of the vote and in 40 districts party B gets essentially 100% of the vote. 60 seats are won by party A and 40 seats by party B. This is the only distribution of preference that more or less guarantees the "expected" result that the number of seats matches overall support.

Case 3) Preference distribution is complex. A combination of some extreme localization (in some of the districts) with non localization in others. In other words, in some region one of the parties has a very strong "base" but expcet for there the other party's support is uniform.
So in 40 districts party A gets 80% of the vote and party B just 20 %. In the other 60 districts party A gets 46.7% of the vote and party B gets 53.3%. Well then party B wins 60 seats to just 40 seats for party A even though the overall preference is still 60% for party A and 40% for party B.

Notice that FPP had nothing to do with that as there were only two parties in contention (in which case the different methods of vote counting aren't different). BTW, that is not irrelevant as to why you have a FPP tradition. When you began voting that's how your society tended to be divided, into two camps. Yes, FPP vote counting tends to reinforce not having more divisions, but this is a "chicken or the egg" situation, if you start out with only two factions hard to conceive that you might need a more complicated method, and the reverse is also true. For example, if you had "proportional representation with low threshold" then you would tend to many small parties and the voting system would reinforce that (make it difficult to merge small parties into a smaller number of larger ones because coalitions would tend to be unstable).

Thanks Mike,
We call it STV (Single Transferable Vote) on this side of the pond.

Billy I agree that Bigotgate has upset a lot of tradlabs, who knows they might go out to vote Lib Dem

Wood Troll wrote:Hairyloon are you still of the opinion that there are only two choices?

I never said there were only two choices (at least I don't think I did).
I did say that the Lib-Dems were not convincing, but they have since shown more promise.
I've not decided who to vote for yet, but no change on who to vote against... It's scary to think Plaid Cymru may be the way to go... :?

Green Party

...I am damnned if I EVER vote Tory again...I did it once and regret it now, still.......

I was one of the original "Worcester Women" in the media frenzy in the '97 election...still have the press clippings etc somewhere..and was on Newsnight being interviewed about it this time 13 years ago...ah memories memories!

My youngest has just dashed in and out again after her Saturday shift at our little branch of a well known chemist. I thought she was on her way to an evening out, but as she disappeared she said 'Three of us are going over to Malvern to hear Nick Clegg speak'. Interesting that he's having this effect on teenagers!!

Nick Clegg was here yesterday morning. Graefin von R and her parents and the kids saw him while shopping in Clarks village. Didn't mention it to me untl I came to ferry them back to base. I was rather aggrieved as I would have liked to ask him a couple of pointed questions, but ho-hum.

Wow, he certainly gets around (unless there's more than one.....)

I suspect that the result with be a Minority Tory govt, supported by the Libdems which will fall when Cameron reneges on the his promises of reform.

Hopefully Labour will remove Brown and start to find its way back to being the party it once was.

Does anyone remember a time when we voted IN a Government because we wanted them rather than voting OUT one because they had become so hated that there was no option?

Thing is I only know I will not vote for. The rest seem to be as bad as each other & now they have started to slag each other off, just like kids in the playground. How I HATE that.

Badger wrote:
Does anyone remember a time when we voted IN a Government because we wanted them rather than voting OUT one because they had become so hated that there was no option?

Interestingly, my two daughters both had election letters addressed personally to them from David Cameron, while OH and myself had none. I presume they didn't bother with us because we're old enough to remember the sense of relief when the conservatives were voted out. (That didn't last long....)

Great Billy,
Seen it already but well worth watching more than once!

You all have your polling cards so please go the HML virtual polling station and cast your votes

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] I love this...it is so funny and SO TRUE [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]