Explain for an Outsider - election outcome

[Cootmeurer]

So, I see the Tories spanked everyone - what will now change? Cameron stays on, but what about the rest? Less EU friendly? More Pro-Military, Stalking/wildlife, etc...?

I also saw SNP is likely now in charge of Scotland, what will change there?

 

[User00003]

Same as all other elections, nothing really changes except we always end up paying more tax and working longer for worse public services and lower pensions. SNP, now that's a change indeed!

 

[Sauer90]

Same sh!t different day.

 

[Klenchblaize]

I also saw SNP is likely now in charge of Scotland, what will change there?

Possibly a further referendum on leaving the union in 2 years as distinct from this being a “generation” away.

K

 

[2130martin]

Cameron promised a vote on Hunting repeal.........

 

[willie_gunn]

Cameron promised a vote on Hunting repeal.........

Which I doubt will happen - the numbers still don't make it likely that repeal would get through.

As to the other implications of the result?

• A period of navel-gazing for the Labour party. With the disappearance of their base in Scotland they have a decision to make on whether they continue to move to the left "a la Milliband", and enter a period in opposition not unlike that enjoyed by Michael Foot, or swing back to the right and become indistinguishable from the Tories. Their focus, almost to the exclusion of everything else, on "saving the NHS" and their inability to face up to their share of the blame for the mess the economy left them as a one-trick pony. I see Ed Balls has now gone......
• The Tories had a good night, but face a number of difficult challenges in the 5 years ahead - UK constitution, Europe, continued austerity, etc.
• The Liberal Democrats are now out in the wilderness, and it is questionable whether they can recover. They have lost the next generation of their party's leadership
• The SNP were the night's winners, but they may face a reality check in the forthcoming Holyrood elections as their record in power comes under more scrutiny. It will be interesting to see how they vote when it comes to "English votes for English laws". They have won 5% of the vote, but have 11% of the seats in the UK parliament.
• UKIP appear to be a busted flush......
• The Greens have done well

In general I'd expect a resurgence in discussions around boundary changes, proportional representation, constitutional changes, etc. and lot's of horse-bargaining to get laws passed through Parliament. Expect to see further devolution to Scotland and Wales as "payment".

In reality little will change.

 

[finnbear270]

Possible glimmer of hope here for some sort of PR?

 

[McKenzie]

Possible glimmer of hope here for some sort of PR?

I didn't think this was a good idea until fairly recently but I have to say that this election, more than any other I've seen,beautifully demonstrates the potential benefits of PR & the downside of the existing format. It's just fairer.

 

[timbrayford]

Cameron promised a vote on Hunting repeal.........

I hope not, the presence of anti-hunting MP's even in the Conservatives will doom such a vote to failure. Wouldn't it be more useful to amend the Act to remove the 2 dogs restriction, that would be better progress. One of the unexpected benefits of the Act is to make it easier to prosecute poachers & people illegally lamping.

atb Tim

 

[willie_gunn]

I didn't think this was a good idea until fairly recently but I have to say that this election, more than any other I've seen,beautifully demonstrates the potential benefits of PR & the downside of the existing format. It's just fairer.

68% voted against PR/AV in the referendum in 2011, so I don't see there will be a rush to hold another one - at least not until after those over Europe, Scottish Independence, etc.

 

[Orion]

With the buffer of the Lib Dem coalition now removed, and the Tories able to effectively form a Government, Cameron will be under the cosh of his own back benchers to maintain a working majority in the House. Expect to see the 'nasty' side of the Conservatives make a come back and some harsh policies coming through. It'll be the Major years all over again.

 

[Mungo]

Can someone PLEASE explain why the economic crash is blamed on Labour, when it was a GLOBAL crash that orginated in the USA?

I think the Tories have pulled a very neat trick by convincing an awful lot of people that it was Labour's fault, when I think the worst they can be assused of is failing to regulate the banks rigorously enough. The crash was not caused by traditional Labour policies - it was caused by very poor decision making within a laissez faire financial system regulated in a way much more in accord with Tory ideology.

But we've made out beds... I'm happy to have been in about the only constituency in Scotland where there was a reaslistic chance that my vote actually mattered. Poor Ian Murray - he must feel like a shipwreck survivor clinging to the wreckage...

 

[Orion]

financial system regulated

Unintended oxymoron?

 

[Mungo]

So, I see the Tories spanked everyone - what will now change? Cameron stays on, but what about the rest? Less EU friendly? More Pro-Military, Stalking/wildlife, etc...?

I also saw SNP is likely now in charge of Scotland, what will change there?

IN direct answer to your questions, I think:

1. A referendum on EU membership, which will get ugly.
2. A speeding up of the privatisation of the NHS, which will be a horrifying scavenger fest and will leave all but the wealthiest much worse off with regard to healh care.
3. Probably a gradual (but not widely advertised or acknowledged) easing of austerity, given that even within the Tory party there appears to be increasing scepticism that it does what they say it does.
4. Little or no change in direction with regard to the military (it is not high on anyone's agenda, and most governments of both flavours have been trying for decades to reduce miliary expenditure. The only reason it's even as high as it is is because Blair wanted a war in Iraq, and that lead to the inevitable commitment to (very grudgingly) support the costs of that. and Afghanistan.
5. Field sports will remain very low on the agenda. Although many of the Tory leadership are probably quite pro field sports, the population as a whole is not. The best outcome for us will be no change - anything else is likely to be worse.

More broadly - Americans often make the mistake of thinking that the Tories are our version of Republicans. They aren't really - they're actually much closer to Democrats. Labour, Lib Dem etc would be regarded as so insanely left wing as to be utterly unelectable in virtually every part of the US.

 

[geordieh]

We are either one country or not if we are, Hollyrood and the Welsh assembly should go.

 

[Mungo]

Unintended oxymoron?

Ha ha! Very much so...

 

[bewsher500]

Can someone PLEASE explain why the economic crash is blamed on Labour, when it was a GLOBAL crash that orginated in the USA?

I think the Tories have pulled a very neat trick by convincing an awful lot of people that it was Labour's fault, when I think the worst they can be assused of is failing to regulate the banks rigorously enough. The crash was not caused by traditional Labour policies - it was caused by very poor decision making within a laissez faire financial system regulated in a way much more in accord with Tory ideology.

actually I can..

Granted Labour did not cause the "Crash"
arguably Bill Clinton did when he deregulated the markets and repealed the Glass-Steagall act of 1933
The original loans may have predominantly been in the US but the complex derivatives based on the underlying loan was traded globally and as London is the centre of the financial world the government in power are responsible for maintaining control over what is traded on its markets


However, aside from the oversight of what the rest of the world was doing...
the decisions made by Gordon Brown both leading up to, during and latterly following the crash (which was a result of massive gearing of low quality debt into ever complex derivatives) are ultimately the ones that Labour were never held accountable for.

1) Selling off the Nation's Gold Reserves when gold was at its lowest price in over 20yrs...apparently as it was too "volatile"..strange that Gold is the one thing that anyone invests in when volatility in markets is high! look at the price rise between 99 and 2010!!
sold at $282/oz when it rose to $1900/oz at its height
cost to the UK between £3 and £6 Billion

2) Bank bail out - £500 Billion of poorly structured loans and guarantees. Let me put that another way. ONE HALF A TRILLION POUNDS!!!
By contrast the US offered $700m (DOLLARS)
Now I am no economist but since when has the Domestic UK banking industry or GDP been worth almost double the US banking industry!?

The Bank ReCapitalisation Fund essentially offered an interest free loan to banks who wanted it (slightly more complex than that)
Now, I work with Investment Bankers..if you offer them a sniff of anything that is a better deal than liquidity at market rates they will be all over it like a **** house rat in sewer!!

The recovery of the funds injected into the system has been a wholesale disaster
RBS should have been aggressively broken up and sold off with overall control and recovery by the chancellor.
the bail out should have been structured so that the Exchequer gets its money back first and foremost BEFORE the accountants have spread the profit from one business into the losses of another (RBS Commodities business was going gang busters in the period after the crash......did we see any of that? did the shareholders? course not!)
When Goodwin got into a ****ing contest over ABN Amro they lost all sight of the due diligence. What they finally discovered when the dust on the auction finished was they had bought over 280 legal entities in 47 countries with books of debt that they still don't understand to this day!!
The onus does not just lie with him, it lies with the Board who are in place to control the CEO

3) Tripartite regulation - "cos three idiots managing a problem must be better than one"!! FSA - Treasury and Bank of England
Creation of the FSA and removal of direct responsibility an control of financial markets regulation from any one single entity has only ever been a disaster, we are still living with that now
if you are going to build a watchdog....don't fill it with accountants and friends of senior bankers!!
You fill it with aggressive little lawyers, disgraced traders and doorman from nightclubs in Sheffield and you target them with revenue generation from fines. give them knives and bats not calculators and breifcases.
They failed to curb any systemic issues in the derivatives markets as they fundamentally did not understand them.


I could go on by my coffee is getting cold!!

I am not suggesting any one of the idiots in Parliament could have spotted and avoided the issues but I know several bankers who did and as a result of the recommendations they made to their board, their banks did not suffer anything like as badly as anyone else's banks
did the government have a select committee in place to discuss the market issues and trends? No......of course not, they know how to run banks better than the people running them.....

 

[Mungo]

Thanks Ed - in some years of asking a great many different people, that's the first clear and more or less convincing argument.

 

[Pine Marten]

With the buffer of the Lib Dem coalition now removed, and the Tories able to effectively form a Government, Cameron will be under the cosh of his own back benchers to maintain a working majority in the House. Expect to see the 'nasty' side of the Conservatives make a come back and some harsh policies coming through. It'll be the Major years all over again.

I think that in a couple of years, after a period of Cameron having to continually buy his backbenchers' support with some pretty unsavoury policies, some people will start to think that actually, having the Lib Dems in the mix was quite nice. Because a lot of Cameron's MPs are more or less indistinguishable from UKIP. I was rather hoping that if there was an inconclusive result, the two big parties' vested interest in maintaining the first past the post system would be nullified, so some form or fairer electoral system would be back on the cards. Unfortunately now that the Tories have probably just about scraped a majority, that's not going to happen. The two big anomalies here are that UKIP (much as I loathe them) have ~13% of the popular vote, but only one or two MPs. The SNP has under 5% of the UK vote and 56 MPs. There is no way you can argue that this represents the voters properly, for better or worse. Anyway, that's not going to happen. What is going to happen is a really, really ugly EU referendum campaign that is going to leave deep scars.

I suspect that some form of constitutional settlement will be on the cards too because in effect, Scotland has a government with an overwhelming mandate to block the UK government which is of a diametrically opposed hue. And it isn't fair to impose that on the Scottish electorate either. Essentially, this is far from over. It's going to be rocky and ugly for a while.

 

[willie_gunn]

Ed

I think you could have also included the following, from the IFS:

Between 1997 and 2007 – prior to the financial crisis – the UK had the 2nd largest increase in spending as a share of national income out of 28 industrial countries for which we have comparable data. Over the period from 1997 to 2010 – including the crisis – the UK had the largest increase. This moved the UK from having the 22nd largest proportion of national income spent publicly in 1997 to having the 6th largest proportion spent publically in 2010.

Labour has always been profligate in terms of spending on the public sector, since that's where they believe they have their core vote. The financial crisis of 2008 was indeed global, but Labour's problem was that - by the time the crisis hit - they had already spent the money that most other countries had saved for a rainy day.