SteynOnBritain
BRITISH ELECTION NIGHT: THE MORNING AFTER
All the action from Bognor to Ballymena - live(ish) as it happens.
7.30pm BST For some reason, I didn't get around to making a formal UK election prediction. Too depressing, really. But with polls about to close let's just say I expect turnout to be down, and the question then is: who's most motivated to show up? The Tories ran one of the most stupid campaigns in British history - making Blair's "lies" a big issue when, even if one accepts that he did lie, he lied on a subject on which they broadly agree with him: Iraq. The net effect of playing up the Blair "lies" about WMD is to gin up all those anti-war voters to go to the polls and vote for the anti-war Liberal Democrats, various anti-war Labour candidates, the anti-war SNP and Plaid Cymru - everybody but the Conservatives.
How any of this will play out in the bewildering permutations of marginal constituencies is anybody's guess: conceivably, if the "progressive" vote gets split between Labour and LibDems in particular ways, the Tories could pick a seat here or there. But my sense is that Labour will win a reduced but workable majority that weakens Blair but strengthens Gordon Brown; the LibDems will get their best result in a generation; and the Tories will end up with an inconclusive result that will keep the party alive but without any clear sense of purpose. Toss in the various Celtic parties, including a record number of Sinn Fein voters, and this snapshot of the UK electorate will be far from encouraging for anybody who believes in the cause of British conservatism.
10.25pm BST Just one teensy observation: If there's anything more boring than a PBS pledge drive, it's the bit on election night where they start the election special an hour before polls close and spend the first 20 minutes explaining the set, the box in the corner on the screen that will bring you up-to-the-minute updates on the state of the parties - Labour 0 Conservative 0 LibDem 0 Others 0 - plus the scroll down the left-hand side that records the swing to Labour, the scroll down the right that records the swing to Plaid Cymru, the flashing graphic that tells you the weather in Tuvalu, etc. And ITV explaining how their election helicopter works or Alistair Stewart going goo-goo over his virtual Downing Street set is even dumber than Sky. I'd say one reason why turnout is so low is because the flashier and more televisual politics gets the more mind-numbingly boring it is to anyone who isn't in television
11.25pm BST If these exit polls hold up, it looks as if the big loser tonight will be the media: The received wisdom - that the LibDems had fought an excellent campaign and would be rewarded with seat gains, that the Tories had miscalculated by being boorish and vulgar enough to bang on about immigration - looks to be wrong on all fronts. If the Conservative gains in Scotland and urban England prove correct, that suggests that, even in demoralised defeatist Euroburdened Britain, the "progressive" vote has its limits.
12.10am BST Hard numbers coming in very slowly. Here's a question many of us Canucks will be pondering: How come in Canada - where we operate the same electoral system as Britain - we can add up federal election results across a vast country with six time zones in a couple of hours whereas our ever so tiny mother country takes hours and hours to add up votes in constituences two miles square?
12.20am BST A mini-trend seems to be emerging in parts of northern England: The British National Party vote has increased - for a nowheresville party reviled by metropolitan sophisticates - somewhat significantly. In Barnsley Central, they were within a whisker of saving their deposit - 4.9%. That doesn't sound a lot, but if that had gone to the Tories Tony Blair would have been in much bigger trouble tonight. The lesson is that cultural and national identity questions are real issues and, if Conservatives can figure out a way to frame them, that vote could be theirs.
12.25am BST The trend so far: A big chunk of the Blair coalition has fallen away, but in different directions - some to the LibDems, some to the Conservatives, and some to the BNP.
12.50am BST The word is that George Galloway is ahead in Bethnal and Bow Green. The defeat of Oona King, a black Jewish pro-war Labour MP, will mark an ominous development in British politics. I think there's no doubt that, under cover of "anti-Zionism", there's now an explicit anti-Jewish component to the political scene. And, disreputable as it is, Labour nominating committees will be thinking very carefully about whether they want to run Jewish candidates.
1.15am BST Jack Straw back in Blackburn. So much for the idea that a 25% Muslim constituency means a big anti-war vote.
1.55am BST Hornsey's huge swing to the LibDems confirms that, in some ways, the real battle of this election is that being fought through various marginals between Labour and the Liberals. The LibDem "decapitation strategy" against Conservative biggies - David Davies, Theresa May and even Michael Howard - is a huge bust, but they're winning against Labour in part because Tories wasted so much of their energy campaiging on an issue - Blair's "lies" about Iraq - that logically could only benefit the Liberals.
2.05am BST Labour's defeat in Blaenau Gwent, even to clapped out parochial Welsh nationalists like Plaid Cymru, is great news for everyone who's sick of politically correct quota systems. This constituency is a solid Labour heartland - Michael Foot's and Nye Bevan's old seats - but to be told by head office that they had to have a woman candidate was too much for the party's voters. Good for them.
2.30am BST Despite Tony Blair's chastened speech in Sedgefield, Labour are headed for a majority of 82 - which by the standards of 20th century British governments would be regarded as a huge majority. The Tories appear to have fought a crisp professional disciplined campaign - to no effect. For a conservative party, economic issues aren't enough - not against a reformed socialist party that's no longer seen as a threat to economic well-being. The Tories need to learn - as the Republicans did - how to frame the cultural issues to their advantage.
7am BST Making a big song and dance about the reduced majority - around 60-65 seats - is ridiculous. By comparison with anything other than the last two Labour landslides, that's a huge majority. And, given that there's a half-dozen Sinn Feiners who won't take their seats and the rest of the opposition is fractured between Tories, Liberal Democrats, the Scots, Ulster and Welsh parties, in practical terms it's an unassailable majority of between 75-80. How "European" Britain is is a matter for debate, but compared to the clear-cut two-party politics of half a century ago this is a very Continental-style parliament.
9am BST Mulling things over and thinking about the way the BBC, Guardian et al are likely to play things, I'd say this was a very bad night for British conservatives: it's a goodish enough result for the Tories that it will lull them into postponing for another electoral cycle the serious intellectual renewal they need. If you look at, say, the Midlands, the Conservatives did quite well in recovering some prosperous shire seats, but the inability to take back urban seats like Edgbaston from Labour and the loss of a heartland seat like Solihull to the LibDems puts them realistically as far away from power as ever.
9.30am BST Yes, Labour's 60-65 majority was achieved with only 36% of the vote - an all-time low for a winning party in Britain. That reflects an election in which the traditional party labels didn't quite capture the real divisions in the electorate. Nonetheless, I'd say it's worse news for the Tories - not just because it's an unprecedented third consecutive loss for the party but because such recovery as there was was so pathetic. In the days before the election, a lot of Tories told me that the real measure of their success was whether and by how much they'd break the 200-seat barrier. And even that was a conscious effort to lower expectations. The Conservatives are presently on 195 seats. That would have been regarded as a disaster for Thatcher, Major or even William Hague, and swift resignation would have followed. The Tory leadership's ability to spin this as a great "improvement" is confirmation of just how shrivelled the modern British Conservative Party really is.
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