Simon's Blog

it is all just guesswork so with that in mind my guess for how the election will turn out is:

• The Conservatives will be the largest party but nowhere near an overall majority
• Labour has a bad election and loses some seats but perhaps not too many votes
• The Lib Dems do well and so do the SNP.

1 Day – my  prediction of the election result

Shows how much I know!   Although if you look at the percentage swings of the three main national parties then another picture is painted where the Liberal Democrats have had the biggest swing to them of 4.2%.  However, given our electoral system they end up losing an MP rather than gaining several (their leader!)

So what are my thoughts about the last election?   I suspect this is going to upset some of my Labour leaning friends but I have to say I’m fascinated by what is to come.   For the last 10 years we have been suck in a muddle of relatively weak governments but now we have a government with a very impressive majority.   I have no idea what this government is going to do but this is all down to them now.   There are no more excuses; no other party to hide behind or use as a shield.  If it all goes tits up then it will be the Tories fault and they can be….I was going to say kicked out but there is the problem.  We have no opposition.  No government in waiting. Nothing.

Where there was once the noble patriotic party of the workers we now have a hollow shell whose members are too busy fighting amongst themselves to notice that they are rapidly becoming irrelevant.  All I have heard this weekend from the Labour party is delusional nonsense.  Apparently it was all Brexit’s fault.   If it hadn’t been for Brexit then they would have marched into Government.   Perhaps they are right but I don’t think they would agree that the main fault with Brexit was that it exposed their leader for what he is – a third rate politician who appears great at organising but not leading nor winning elections  Under his stewardship the Labour party has suffered two of the greatest defeats in their history.  We are told the manifesto was very popular and that might be true apart from the fact that clearly by the results, it wasn’t.  If the Labour party is not very careful they will do a Scotland in both England and Wales and lose virtually all of their MPs outside the major cities and university towns.  But at least the party will be rid of all those nasty Blairites who, lest we forget, won three massive majorities for the party of the workers.  There is no purity in the grubby business of wielding real power but the poor were helped and perhaps the country was just a little more caring.   We probably will never see such a thing again as a Labour victory.

The other winners on the night we are told are the Scottish National Party (SNP) who won 48 of the 59 seats available in Scotland.  This has been seen by Nicola Sturgeon as a ringing endorsement the SNP position of the need for another referendum.   However, if you dig just a little deeper into the votes cast you will notice that it was wasn’t a ringing endorsement for  an Independent Scotland at all but rather almost the same position as the result of the 2014 vote:

Yesterday the SNP celebrated outside a magnificent architectural achievement – the Dundee V&A.   I am not sure whether that was the wisest thing to do because whilst the building is magnificent on the outside inside it mainly contains hot air rather than any real substance.   If this election result is repeated in the 2021 Holyrood elections then it will mean that the SNP will have lost ground too.   Not quite the story that the SNP will want to be heard.

So there we have it, my reflections on the the 2019 election.   Whether you agree or disagree with him Boris Johnson is now the most powerful British politician  since Tony Blair.   What this country or the political parties will look like when he goes to the polls again sometime in the late Spring of 2024 (the Fixed Term Parliament act will quickly be consigned to the mists of history) is anyone’s guess.

Cry Havoc and…..

Well we’ll know by then won’t we.