General Election 2017 | Cabinet reshuffle: Hunt re-appointed Health Secretary for record third time

How do you intend to vote in the 2017 General Election if eligible?

  • Conservatives

    Votes: 80 14.5%

  • Labour

    Votes: 322 58.4%

  • Lib Dems

    Votes: 57 10.3%

  • Green

    Votes: 20 3.6%

  • SNP

    Votes: 13 2.4%

  • UKIP

    Votes: 29 5.3%

  • Independent

    Votes: 3 0.5%

  • Plaid Cymru

    Votes: 2 0.4%

  • Sinn Fein

    Votes: 11 2.0%

  • Other (UUP, DUP, BNP, and anyone else I have forgotten)

    Votes: 14 2.5%
  • Total voters
    551
  • Poll closed .
Mr Pigeon said:
Best case scenario - May continues as PM and keeps fecking up, leaving the race open for Labour in five years. And they won't be able to pass as many austerity measures as before because some of their own MPs who won with very small margins won't want to piss off their constituents. All we need to do is survive the upcoming mutant invasion. Sorry for being a monumental arsehole earlier btw.
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5 years ...nope...nope
 
1922 General Election

Conservatives win 344 seats. 308 needed for form a majority

Andrew Bonar Law is elected Prime Minister, but is dying. He steps down in May 1923 to be replaced by Stanley Baldwin

Baldwin was an unlikely radical – an industrialist who cultivated the image of a pig-farming midlands country gentleman – but he made the surprising decision to call for Tariff Reform, a policy that had proved unpopular in pre-war elections and had been ruled out by Bonar Law at the 1922 hustings. The tariff debate led quickly to a General Election called on the issue of free trade or tariffs. Some Conservatives suggested a referendum on Tariff Reform, which – as with Europe in the 1970s and now – might have been an elegant way out of the dilemma. In any case, there was no urgency and the Baldwin government could have tried to build the case for tariffs with public opinion before going for an election.

In 1923, the press had not been squared, and the middle class was quite unprepared, for Baldwin’s lurch toward Tariff Reform and the election into which he tumbled. Even the pro-tariff press refused to endorse the Conservatives in the election, because he did not promise their favoured model of tariffs that included an Empire free trade zone. Significant numbers of Conservatives, particularly in Lancashire, supported free trade. The most plausible explanation of events is the simplest – that Baldwin had indeed been convinced that tariffs were necessary and that he believed that the Conservatives could win an election and introduce them.
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A General Election is called

1923 General Election

Conservatives win 258 seats. They remain the largest party, but no longer have a majority.

The Liberal upsurge created a strange election result. In some ways it was a Conservative victory. The Tories were the largest single party in terms of seats (258 seats, compared to 191 for Labour and 159 Liberals) and also in votes, with 38 per cent of the votes cast compared to about 30 per cent each for Labour and the Liberals.

It may have appeared logical simply to dump Tariff Reform and probably Baldwin too, and form a minority government with Liberal toleration. But the party was weary of long years of coalition and distrusted its main supporters like Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead. Getting rid of Baldwin might have meant a split – it was a period in which all the parties had acute problems with disunity and there was no guarantee that many Tories would accept a replacement’s authority and fall into line with a Con-Lib coalition. Neither were most Liberals very keen to keep the Conservatives in power.

Several desperate options were considered in the period between the election and the convening of parliament in January 1924 to shut Labour out. But Baldwin and Asquith both accepted the legitimacy of Labour’s claim to govern, and felt that the circumstances of 1924 offered the safest conditions possible for a mild dose of ‘socialism’, and would with any luck acculturate Labour into the ways of Whitehall.

On 18 December Asquith announced that the Liberals would support a Labour amendment to the King’s Speech, effectively guaranteeing that Labour would form a government. Because Labour would not discuss coalition, it would be a minority government. Asquith and the Liberals at that point hoped that the 1923 parliament would last several years, notch up several useful reforming achievements, build good working relations between Liberal and Labour and perhaps cement it with electoral reform such as the Alternative Vote. He was to be brutally disappointed.
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Labour formed a Minority Government with Liberal support. The pact only lasts a few months however, as Labour wish to remove the Liberals from office
The 1923-24 Parliament was a miserable experience for Liberal MPs, who on the face of it had enjoyed an electoral triumph and held the balance of power. They trooped through the division lobbies in favour of measures they had no part in drawing up, in the interests of a party that was openly contemptuous of them and was increasingly organising against them in their constituencies. The 2010-15 Parliament is a jolly romp in comparison.

The end of the Labour government of 1924 was, like its predecessor, essentially suicide rather than murder. The purpose of the 1924 government was to show that Labour could govern, and the purpose of the October 1924 election was to destroy the Liberal Party, and in this it was a success. The Liberals tumbled to 40 seats and were relegated to their position as third party. Baldwin returned in triumph, his blunder of December 1923 redeemed by a victory in 1924 that bears comparison in its scale with Tony Blair’s of 1997. But Labour’s electoral support also increased and Labour became the largest party in Parliament at the next election, May 1929.
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1924 General Election

Conservatives regain control of parliament until 1929

Some interesting parallels and tangents there I think
 
Eire Red United said:
A 2/3's majority? So if 65% of the country had wanted to leave then you'd have let the minority dictate to the majority? Face it, the country voted leave.
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Em. 65% is the majority. So how would the minority be dictating? I agree with the other poster. Cameron screwed up royally not stipulating that kind of element to the referendum.
 
ArmchairCritic said:
Labour were supposed to be done for as a party 6 weeks ago, now Corbyn has them in a position to win the next general election, that's why it's a win whilst being a loss. In many ways I'd argue this is a better scenario for many in the Labour Party at large (if they show some tact) because Corbyn can continue to work the youth vote whilst May fumbles with Brexit and NI potentially destabilizes. Depending on when the next election is (doesn't feel like another one this year but who knows), potentially Corbyn wouldn't be running (murmurs of him stepping down may have influenced this GE being called IIRC) and he could well have setup an extremely easily tap-in for whoever is in next.
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This overstates it quite a lot.
 
Rory 7 said:
Em. 65% is the majority. So how would the minority be dictating? I agree with the other poster. Cameron screwed up royally not stipulating that kind of element to the referendum.
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The other poster said Cameron should have stipulated the leave vote required 2/3's majority (66.6%), so if 65% had voted leave, remain would have won, so the minority would be dictating? Or am I picking something up wrong here?
 
Norman Smith BBC: 'Senior Tories say Nick Timothy & Fiona Hill must be sacked this weekend, or leadership challenge on Monday'.
 
Ubik said:
This overstates it quite a lot.
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Yeah it does rely on everything going pretty much as the last 6 weeks did which is as extremely unlikely as the 'tap-in' described, and it does rely on the Labour Party showing some tact which they haven't done for a while and on the Conservatives moving not back towards the centre a little bit. But it's my very optimistic take on how stuff will pan out and one that I wouldn't have thought was even conceivable 6 weeks ago.
 
ThierryHenry said:
They won't get rid of him now, after this election. It's clearly his party, for the time being. I'd expect him to step down before 2022 due to age though.
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Just looked up his age, wow 68! Looks pretty good for his age. But yeah 68 is pretty damn old. Not exactly one to be around for the long haul. May is 60 so even she may not want 2 terms and debatable if she would be given that by the Conservatives anyway.

Geez oldies coming out in force lol. Even Cameron is only 50 now. Blair is younger than Corbyn at 64.
 
Eire Red United said:
A 2/3's majority? So if 65% of the country had wanted to leave then you'd have let the minority dictate to the majority? Face it, the country voted leave.
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17.42 million people voted for Brexit out of a total electorate of 46.5 million. How is that not the minority setting what the majority does?

If there had been 100% turnout then 50.1% would not be unreasonable but as it stands
 
Bury Red said:
17.42 million people voted for Brexit out of a total electorate of 46.5 million. How is that not the minority setting what the majority does?

If there had been 100% turnout then 50.1% would not be unreasonable but as it stands
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Well then its the fault of the people who didn't want to/didn't bother to vote, not like they didn't know there was a referendum on.
 
Eire Red United said:
Well then its the fault of the people who didn't want to/didn't bother to vote, not like they didn't know there was a referendum on.
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I didn't even count the 18 million eligible to vote but not registered. Why should the country suffer because 25% of the electorate believed a bunch of lies and xenophobic propaganda. The whole thing is a clusterfeck and the state of our parliament now pretty much guarantees that our Brexit will be as bad , if not worse than most of us remainers feared.
 
Robert Peston ITV:

The prime minister has sent a team of officials, led by her chief whip, Gavin Williamson, to Belfast to negotiate the details of an alliance with the DUP.

“A coalition would be much better than a looser alliance”, one senior minister said. “We don’t want the DUP demanding money for this or that project they fancy every time we need them to support us in a vote. That would be deeply unstable”.
 
SteveJ said:
Robert Peston ITV:

The prime minister has sent a team of officials, led by her chief whip, Gavin Williamson, to Belfast to negotiate the details of an alliance with the DUP.

“A coalition would be much better than a looser alliance”, one senior minister said. “We don’t want the DUP demanding money for this or that project they fancy every time we need them to support us in a vote. That would be deeply unstable”.
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This is a disaster. Somehow i think it wont hurt then though
 
SteveJ said:
Robert Peston ITV:

The prime minister has sent a team of officials, led by her chief whip, Gavin Williamson, to Belfast to negotiate the details of an alliance with the DUP.

“A coalition would be much better than a looser alliance”, one senior minister said. “We don’t want the DUP demanding money for this or that project they fancy every time we need them to support us in a vote. That would be deeply unstable”.
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Wow if this becomes an actual coalition. Surely the Davisons and Cameroons in the party wouldn't accept that.
 
Akshay said:
What does this mean for Brexit negotiations? Any chance Brexit is postponed now? What if May can't broker any kind of reasonable deal with EU?
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I don't see how it changes Brexit negotiations tbh. In reality it will still be the same people negotiating with the same desired outcomes.
 
SteveJ said:
Robert Peston ITV:

The prime minister has sent a team of officials, led by her chief whip, Gavin Williamson, to Belfast to negotiate the details of an alliance with the DUP.

“A coalition would be much better than a looser alliance”, one senior minister said. “We don’t want the DUP demanding money for this or that project they fancy every time we need them to support us in a vote. That would be deeply unstable”.
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The DUP won't negotiate on Sundays
 
ThierryHenry said:
If the next election is in the next twelve months, he should be the leader, but if this is a full five year term, he'll turn 73 during the campaign. Surely that's too old?
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Id agree with that but perhaps 2 years. I also think it'll be hard to maintain momentum without a new leader in the distance, in the same way people just want to get on with Brexit now im sensing people may want closure on Corbyn or at least an added approach.
 
This is not acceptable. The DUP with meaningful political influence in Britain cannot stand. The Good Friday agreement will fall and those feckers will be demanding child sacrifices before too long. If there are any half decent Tories left, you have to tear this disgraceful arrangement down.
 
Ubik News: Nick Timothy resigns.
 
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