Err, yes?

“Anyone think the Tories really try in Merthyr Tydfil?”

One of them does: the candidate just starting out tries really hard to put on a good show (organisation, speeches, networking, gracious defeat, etc.) so that they get offered a better seat next time.

Apparently, the Labour candidate for my Constituency has been ‘redployed’ to the West Midlands….

Merthyr is just used as a testing ground by Conservatives. Can you work with volunteers, do you say the right things to the local paper etc, resist the urge to chin people on doorsteps? If so, next time you get to fight a marginal like Wellingborough. If not, nothing much lost.

And almost everyone votes for party or leader. Lots of people can’t name their MP and very few of them can tell you much about their political positions (I can: wet surrender monkey). It’s got to be a really tight marginal for any door knocking to make much difference.

Tory incumbent here with a large majority. She has sent us three leaflets. Reform, greens and independent one each, labour and libdem nothing. The Labour candidate Mr Khan lives in Hounslow and ‘will move to Lincs if elected.’ I’d like to ask him to sing the Lincolnshire Poacher or endorse the many local butchery products but I don’t suppose we’ll hear from him again. Nor will anyone else if his performance is meant to reward him with a better chance of a seat next time.

The only campaigner who has ever been to my door at any election-time was last week, some fairly pleasant lady from the Labour Party.

After a brief, and entirely polite, chat, I told her that if I did vote for her party it would be on strictly tactical grounds, She sighed and said, “yes, I’m hearing that a lot”.

But of course the rules are different north of the border: it’s all about keeping the SNP out.

My constituency in central Glasgow used to surprise everyone by having one of the most active Tory associations in the country. It was wound up in the mid-’90s. I assume CCHQ is fielding a candidate today, but I have no idea who it is.

@WB, Rhoda, Steve
Isn’t this really what’s gone wrong? In the UK electoral system your MP is supposed to be your representative in Parliament looking after your interests. Parliament, the whole of it, looks after the interests of the country as a whole.
The party system has turned being an MP into a job working for a party. And I think we can safely assume, the party is mainly interested in looking after the interests of the party. Any government comes out of this is purely accidental.

Got my vote cast for Donald Robert Walmsley (Reform UK) in Calder Valley.

For all you moaning about the “two cheeks of the same arse” uniparty – get out and vote for a change!

Just got back from voting for Reform. I live in a bell weather dear and was hesitating until I bumped into the local Tory MP the other day who called RUK voters ‘idiots’.

Also, we had a mock election at the school I work out and I saw the result today: 36% Labour and 26% Reform. Still keen on giving 16-17 year olds the vote Starmer?

Voted Reform, I’m doing my part.

“ Also, we had a mock election at the school I work out and I saw the result today: 36% Labour and 26% Reform. Still keen on giving 16-17 year olds the vote Starmer?”

Also, we won’t be hearing the left moaning about the unfairness of FPTP and demanding PR for quite a few years.

Voted Labour. Thus two results. I stuck it to the SNP and the Tories.

Yes, I voted Reform in a staunch Conservative seat. Here’s hoping.

I voted reform.

Not sure how much difference it will make.
Even while the rest of the red wall fell to the Tories last time, mine was still Labour, but only just.
Depends how many people round here have woken up. Quite a few it seems. But it’s an uphill struggle here.

Reform for me. It won’t make a difference to the local result (LimpDims won in last by-election ) but the more votes nationaly for Reform the better.

Round here they weigh the votes, it’s quicker.
I was hesitating between a spoilt ballot and Reform, who seem to me a bit wet.
Not that it makes any difference but I put an X on the R candidate, just to make up the numbers.

I voted Labour. The exit poll says Labour won. It is a great win for Labour. One of the biggest majorities in history. The public have chosen a moderate centre left government.

Voted for Nige. Looking at the stats at the mo’, Reform have 3 million votes = 4 seats. Dum Libs have 2.2 million votes and 44 seats.

Something needs to change perhaps?

p.s. Really, sincerely sorry to see Andrew Bridgen lose his seat………..

@CM

Surprised by that exit poll indicating 13 seats – something wonky with their modelling since double figures was not realistic. Obviously it’s hard for the psephologists to model when a new phenomenon comes along, but they do have experience handling a 4-party setup in Scotland and Wales.

The problem for Reform was never the raw vote numbers. They were always going to get those. It’s the seat to seat variation that matters, and Reform was inevitably too evenly spread out – the same Achilles heel as the SDP. Unless you’ve actually done some statistical modelling on it at some point in your life, I don’t think most people realise just how much the parliamentary seat totals rely on votes being concentrated efficiently into your target constituencies. Preferably not too concentrated – 55% in two constituencies is more efficient than 80% in one and 30% in another – but either of those is better than a flat 11% across 10 constituencies.

Anyone who was hoping that the pollsters had stuffed up badly and Reform were going to become the surprise official opposition had their head in the sand. With Brexit, a couple of percent of error or bias could make a big difference in a tight referendum where every vote counted equally. I know the famous bias is “shy” voters not wanting to voice an unfashionable opinion, but the bigger problem for pollsters is reaching politically disconnected voters and accurately weighting their likelihood to vote (a lot of people voted in that referendum who would not ordinarily have been expected to turn out, for example). The pollsters had some egg on their faces after the results came out, but they hadn’t been saying Remain would win 70-30. They had been saying it would be pretty tight. The fact so many polls got the final result wrong was due to a couple of percentage points error. It happens. Sometimes a few percent here or there makes no difference, sometimes it’s critical.

But in a general election it’s the efficiency of votes that’s crucial rather than the raw percentages. For a party with very efficient votes, just a few percent in the polls can make a huge difference to seat numbers. That’s one reason it was hard to predict how well the Lib Dems would perform – as things stand their vote share has risen by 0. 7% to 12.3% which sounds tiny, but their number of seats has jumped from 8 to 71! (Aided by the Conservative vote being split by Reform, of course.) A few percent more or less and the Lib Dems would have reached a completely different seat total. Reform with 14.3% of the vote stand to get 4 seats. A couple of percent of error here or there for Reform would have barely changed their seat total – it would have had more effect on other parties, in fact. The effect of the right-wing vote being split was the thing that was difficult to predict about Reform’s performance. The fact Reform were only going to get a handful of seats was blindingly obvious. Given their very inefficient vote distribution, Reform would have needed something like 25%, maybe more, of the national vote to match the Tory seats on seats.

It might have had the potential to happen – a big question is how low Farage’s ceiling is, even his fans would admit he has a marmite effect – and if Sunak had stumbled on until autumn while his government fell apart, who knows. But throughout this election, the pollsters only ever had Reform snapping at the Tories’ heels. Even allowing for the fact that the polls can be misleading, you would have needed to see Reform polling crushingly higher numbers than the Tories for the wipe-out scenario to be in play. Nothing even close to that ever showed up in the data, which meant Reform were bound to get a “count them on your fingers” result. I’m very surprised the exit poll, which has a lot of advantages over other polling (especially that it avoids the genuinely tricky issue of modelling likelihood to vote), was unable to forecast that it would be more like “fingers of one hand”.

Something I didn’t mention above but I did post here in the past: even the scenario where Reform trumped the Tories to become the major right-wing party was incompatible with becoming official opposition. The only realistic scenario in which it happened would have been as a fight to be 3rd or 4th. It’s the Lib Dems who would have been poised to take 2nd spot of the Right split like that. Reform couldn’t expect to take over the entire Tory vote share since they fish in a somewhat different pool to the Conservatives and there are plenty of die-hard Tories about. Even in the most optimistic scenarios for Reform, those diehard Tories would have won a handful of Conservative seats, Reform might have managed rather more if they could get their widest possible voter coalition together (and got them to turn out) but in a lot of well-heeled constituencies this would have meant the Lib Dems coming through the middle. The LDs came quite close to becoming official opposition even with this pretty poor Reform showing. If Reform had done well enough to get a good number of seats, the LDs would have romped into 2nd place behind Labour.

@Adders

Currently 71 MPs for LDs with 3.5 million votes vs 4 MPs for Reform with 4.1 million. Something must change? Well if you want perpetual rule by the Uniparty then feel free to campaign for PR. If you want a party like Reform to win a smashing majority then FPTP is your best bet, you just need a lot more voters. If you don’t have a “salt the earth” approach to the Tories, and thought a coalition might be viable in future, then you might prefer Alternative Vote or STV. That would have avoided some of the problems of the Tories and Reform splitting the right-wing vote. Only problem is it would also help Greens, Labour etc avoid splitting the left-wing vote.

As I’ve said elsewhere I don’t blame the bbc, channel 4 or the telegraph for their sniping fearmongering and outright lying. I blame the more than 20% of weak pathetic individuals who clung to nurse and in doing so kept the uniparty secure for the foreseeable future.

Farage will do his best in parliament but he’s about as unlikely to be called to speak when it actually matters as a reform supporter who somehow got into a question time audience.

I’d suggest now what’ll be interesting is the war that’ll inevitably break out in what remains of the Tory party. Both parliamentary & constituency. My suspicion is it’ll be the One Nation/wet end of the Tory party will be getting the blame for this. But it’s them will be manoeuvring to keep control of the party. I reckon there’s a lot of ruin still to come. Any luck. it’ll disintegrate.

@Joe Smith.
I wouldn’t agree that Reform have taken that place. Although they might do eventually. But it strikes me that Reform are roughly where Macron was at the start. And we can see what happened to Macron.