Today, the British go to the polls. Despite some hopeful signs for Labour early on, the latest poll commissioned by The Independent newspaper predicts a landslide win for Theresa May and the Conservatives, winning possibly 362 seats, well above the 326 she needs for a majority, and 31 more that the party currently has. Other polls too predict a Conservative win.
This is despite the fact that the Labour manifesto seems to be more popular than the Conservative one and that more people agree with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn saying that British involvement in foreign wars has put the country at greater risk of terrorism. He was only stating what is obvious. This is after all what the recently released report of British intelligence said, warning then prime minister Tony Blair that the UK risked increased terror attacks if the UK entered into the war with Iraq.
Of course the Conservatives have tried to score political points by using his statement to imply that he was making excuses for terrorism, using the common sleight-of-hand argument strategy of falsely equating trying to understand the cause of something with excusing it. But it appears that the British public have more sense and an overwhelming majority agree with Corbyn.
The exclusive ORB survey for The Independent found 75 per cent of people believe interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have made atrocities on UK soil more likely.
The poll – conducted before Saturday night’s devastating attack – comes after Mr Corbyn was lambasted for suggesting foreign policy decisions were linked to terrorism in the UK and that the “war on terror” had failed.
This survey was done before the last attack in London and we do not know what the impact of those attacks will be. The best that I am hoping for is that the Conservatives do not get an absolute majority but at this point it looks like they will.
The phenomenon of “most people agree with the socialists” persists in Canada too. If you take the platforms of the three biggest parties and remove the labels, a staggering majority (like two thirds) agree with the NDP platform the most. Yet only a quarter of the popular vote actually goes to the NDP.
The mind boggles. I’m disheartened to hear the polling predictions. The UK Conservative policy for disability is particularly egregious, but I am truly baffled that people’s response to poverty is to vote for more austerity. It’s not helping my misanthropy that people can be this persistently self-deluded.
The polls have been all over the place… The problem (well, a problem…) is that nobody’s really got much confidence in their weighting methodology any more. Depending on how you weight for likelihood to actually vote, you can produce a pretty wide range of possible outcomes.
It’s further complicated by the constituency-based first-past-the-post electoral system, in which identical distributions of the total vote share at a national level can produce very different electoral outcomes depending on the geographic distribution of votes cast.
So, I wouldn’t put too much stock in the polls… But I’m certainly not hopeful about the outcome. It’s been raining heavily over much of the country all day, which is never good for turnout, and the Tories always benefit from a low turnout. The best I think we can hope for is that they don’t increase their majority by too much.
I wonder if Robert Mercer’s got a lot of money in this one, and whether there will be cries of “American influence on the election” (snort)
Well, I went out to cast my vote against the Tories just now. We’re in a pretty evenly matched seat here, so my vote actually matters quite a lot more than some. Sadly I’m only supply teaching at the moment, so I don’t have the opportunity to drill the importance of voting (and not voting for arseholes, ideally) into my students like I often do. But hopefully they’re all so flummoxed and frustrated by Michael Gove’s new A-levels and the prospect of rising tuition fees that they won’t need my influence to push them in the right direction.
I voted, held my nose and voted for the LibDem even though I dislike her policies, but she’s a better bet than the little oik of a Tory we’ve got now. I live in a marginal seat now and have never before had so many leaflets and letters, at least two in every post with five one day. The Tory ones were all about voting for May and didn’t even mention the oik until this week. The LibDem ones were al about how the candidate had done all sorts of things, like stopping a ward in the local hospital from closing, when she doesn’t have the power to do this as a local councillor. I feel dirty.
The BBC predicts 314 seats for May.
@mnbo
That’s a hung Parliament though. Better than a crushing majority.
I think one must be really cautious about the exit poll predictions. It looks like Ukip and SNP voters are going more for the Conservatives than Labour, so Conservatives could still pick up seats.
@ mano
While the exit polls may not be accurate the results are very close to the YouGov poll so I am hopeful.