General Election May 2015

[UndercoverElephant]

The Tories took the wrong option at the last election by taking the reins. If they had let a Lab/Lib coalition take the reins...

That was ruled out by 9am on the Friday by the intervention of several senior Labour figures who said that Labour should not form part of a government having "lost" the election. Gordon Brown had lost the support of his own MPs and was in no position to continue as PM.

[SleeperService]

I watched the program about Victorian Britain again last night and I thought that that is where we are going back to again; a country of poor workers lorded over by a very rich Kleptocracy (Bloody hell! I wrote "elite" first off. Shows how we have been brainwashed that I could so easily write such sacrilegious tripe).

Been chatting to SleeperDad about his UKIP vote he raised that very point. Margaret Thatcher promised a return to Victorian Values and every Government since has continued that move. He remembers the end of that era in rural Suffolk and would vote for anybody to avoid it...and will be.

Personally I'm relieved about the five year rule as I'm pretty certain the next Financial Meltdown is only two or three years away and this one will be orders of magnitude larger as, I'm pretty sure, it will be pension funds collapsing. The recent rule changes allowing people of Baby Boomer age to get their money out of pension schemes convinces me.

[kenneal - lagger]

Trouble is, UKIP are just as much owned by the Kleptocracy as the other three main parties are. Farage was a Kleptocrat or *anker - choose whichever you feel most comfortable with.

[PS_RalphW]

Well, I ahve voted, for the party that came last in the constituency last time around...

[frank_begbie]

I watched the program about Victorian Britain again last night and I thought that that is where we are going back to again; a country of poor workers lorded over by a very rich Kleptocracy (Bloody hell! I wrote "elite" first off. Shows how we have been brainwashed that I could so easily write such sacrilegious tripe).

Been chatting to SleeperDad about his UKIP vote he raised that very point. Margaret Thatcher promised a return to Victorian Values and every Government since has continued that move. He remembers the end of that era in rural Suffolk and would vote for anybody to avoid it...and will be.

Personally I'm relieved about the five year rule as I'm pretty certain the next Financial Meltdown is only two or three years away and this one will be orders of magnitude larger as, I'm pretty sure, it will be pension funds collapsing. The recent rule changes allowing people of Baby Boomer age to get their money out of pension schemes convinces me.

Just kicking the can a little bit further down the road.

I hope I'm going to live long enough to see the cards finally tumble.

[Tarrel]

I'm in the Southeast for a couple of weeks at the moment, so I cast my postal vote a couple of weeks back.

What has struck me is the lack of visible campaigning down here. You wouldn't think there was an election on. No posters displayed and few leaflets through the door. By comparison, in my local town in Scotland, posters from every party are on practically every lamp post and all the contenders have been busy canvassing. The SNP in particular have been running a weekly street stall and we had a great hustings last week, organised by the Federation of Small Businesses.

Mind you, the seat down here is apparently the safest Conservative seat in the country! (And the local UKIP candidate just got suspended for threatening to shoot his opponent!)

[emordnilap]

You wouldn't think there was an election on. No posters displayed and few leaflets through the door. By comparison, in my local town in Scotland, posters from every party are on practically every lamp post and all the contenders have been busy canvassing.

Must be a Celtic thing. On RTÉ this morning, an Irish reporter in London said the same as you - no posters anywhere, no billboards on lamp posts.

Over here, I've seen posters going up that make no sense whatsoever (in addition to the election posters, that is ).

[UndercoverElephant]

Mind you, the seat down here is apparently the safest Conservative seat in the country!

There's your answer then. No shortage of posters and campaigning in my consituency of Hastings and Rye. Both Cameron and Miliband have visited Hastings recently. Eddie Izzard has been quite active too (for Labour).

The Tories are probably going to lose it to Labour, but it is going to be very, very close.

[UndercoverElephant]

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/20 ... itish-coup

Our parliamentary system is quite straightforward. A government needs to be able to muster the support of the majority of sitting MPs in order to be legitimate. If it can survive a vote of no confidence, and most MPs back its Queen’s Speech – the government’s legislative programme – then its democratic legitimacy is unimpeachable. The magic number in order to govern – given Sinn Fein’s boycott of the Westminster parliament – is 323. But the Tories and their allies are arguing otherwise. They have told newspapers that they will “declare victory” if the party wins “most seats and votes”, and that Labour will have no “legitimacy” if it is the second party in terms of seats and needs to rely on the SNP. When Theresa May and the Mail on Sunday suggested that an SNP-backed Labour government would represent “the worst crisis since the abdication” – eclipsing the minor blip of the Nazi conquest of Europe – it was rightly mocked on Twitter. But this may well prove a mild foretaste of what is to come.

We are sleepwalking into a dangerous moment. If there is a left-of-centre, anti-Tory majority in parliament then the Tories must fall, however many seats they have won. Left-wing parties will have won the election and a left-of-centre government led by Labour must take office. And yet it would be deemed “illegitimate” by the Tories and most of the media. That really would be a situation with few precedents in an advanced democracy: where the opposition and media refuse to accept the democratic legitimacy of the national government.

I have no idea if he's right about this, but if he is then we really are heading for the greatest constitutional crisis since WWII. On the left, people's anger will be uncontainable. The response will make the poll tax riots look like a tea party.

[Little John]

If that stunt is attempted to be pulled, then I will take to the f***ing streets.

If the bastards try that, there will be civil unrest. Me and thousands like me will not stand for it.

[kenneal - lagger]

We had loads of stuff online and some through the post and there are plenty of signs up on the roadside but then the LibDems are trying to get the constituency back from the Tories. They are trying all sorts of tricks like saying that their candidate lives in the constituency implying that the sitting MP doesn't. He lives in the West Berkshire district Council area but the parliamentary boundary was moved so he now lives in Reading West constituency. Petty! But I suppose it might change a few voters minds! If they've got any!!

That is the level of debate we have in West Berkshire.

[UndercoverElephant]

If that stunt is attempted to be pulled, then I will take to the ******* streets.

If the bastards try that, there will be civil unrest. Me and thousands like me will not stand for it.

I think he's wrong. I don't think it makes any difference what the tories, newspapers or the BBC say or do in an attempt to "illegitimise" an anti-tory majority. If Miliband can pass a Queen's Speech and survive a no-confidence vote, and Cameron can do neither of those things, then Miliband will become Prime Minister and will stay Prime Minister until the 5 years are up or he loses the confidence of the majority of MPs.

If the establishment refuses to accept this reality then f*** only knows what happens next. I'd like to think the police and army would side with Parliament rather than the establishment. If they don't then we will have regressed, constitutionally, to before the civil war.

[emordnilap]

's no problem, Labour are part of the establishment. They'll do what they're told.

[UndercoverElephant]

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... mes-second

David Cameron has claimed Ed Miliband would have a “massive credibility problem” if he tried to become prime minister without Labour winning the most seats.

With less than 48 hours to go before the polls open, constitutional questions have become the most burning issue of an election campaign that now seems almost certain to result in a hung parliament.

The Tories have pre-emptively begun a campaign claiming that a government led by Miliband would be illegitimate if Labour have fewer MPs than the Conservatives, even if he could command a majority in the Commons with the help of the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National party and potentially others.

The prime minister told LBC radio on Tuesday: “I just think that there’s a massive credibility problem, with this idea that you can have a Labour government, backed by the SNP, only fighting for part of the country, I mean, the concerns of voters that I’m hearing about that are very, very strong.”

Well, tough shit.

Clegg's at it too:

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Clegg said the largest party after the election should be given the time and space to form a government before attempts are made by the second largest party.

This is complete bollocks. There is absolutely no constitutional, legal or practical reason why Labour and the SNP can't conduct negotiations with each other in parallel to Tory attempts to form a majority. And Tory-SNP negotiations wouldn't last very long. They wouldn't even start.

[UndercoverElephant]

's no problem, Labour are part of the establishment. They'll do what they're told.

Includling allowing Cameron to continue governing even though he can't get Queen's Speech through parliament?????