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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I reckon May's decision was understandable. Great polling with a complex negotiation coming up - makes sense to establish a national convention consensus government and press on (regardless of that decision being a bad one or not).

But she completely fluffed the campaign, to a ludicrous extent. She had a weak opposition and popular support, and seemed to make every possible attempt to run as poor as a campaign as possible.

I'm nervous about this being spun as a victory for the left, which I'm already hearing. It's more of a collapse of the Tories.

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It makes sense but it makes way more sense to do that before triggering Article 50, not after and 11 days before negotiations commence. Just reckless and stupid.

Labour as an opposition have been abysmal prior to the election campaign. But they ran a really remarkable campaign during the election period. It's all the more impressive when you consider we have the nastiest, most vicious rightwing press in Europe. Here are the national newspaper headlines from Thu 8 Jun: https://imgur.com/a/Gojht

Elections are still won on hope for change it seems. Not that anyone won but certainly more of the same with nothing much positive seems to have not won it for Tories.

Why is Corbyn a weak candidate? I don`t get it why left = communism.

Corbyn is a lot like Sanders he can get the youth to vote for some degrees and has good ideas for the majority of a country.

Austerity is not a good solution for the future within the new dawn of technology around the corner (ML/AI driven software)

Why is Corbyn a weak candidate?

He had consistently poor approval ratings in the run-up to the election, and was hampered by having no support from the parliamentary party. I'd argue that he also had rather muddled and inconsistent policies, but that's open to interpretation.

Austerity is not a good solution for the future

Completely agreed, but I don't think that the correct response is that kind of leftism.

Idealogues on the right don't think there is room for any kind of leftism, which will be their undoing.

That applies to both sides.

Jeremy is well to the left of the majority of labour party members he's a old school socialist not a communist though.

David Miliband (the king over the water) or Ed Miliband running on the same platform would have probably got a LAB majority given the disastrous tory campaign.

Not necessarily, a major component of Labour's pitch to the middle ground was explicitly that a vote for Labour would help keep the Tories in check whilst safe in the knowledge that there was no chance whatsoever it would put labour in government, because of Jeremy Corbyn.

MM that's really cynical could be some richer tory pensioners (wo may have voted UKIP last time) did that because of the steal your children's inheritance, means testing of winter fuel payments and losing the triple lock.

I agree on the campaign, someone decided to have 'strong' and 'national' into the campaign slogan, despite the fact it actually didn't work terribly well for the UKIP last time around (nor this time!), and didn't work for the Front National either a few weeks back.

To me, in both cases, it seems the ruling caste has misread the fact most people want to see some real change with some sort of isolationist/nationalist trend...

Her asking for a mandate was laudable mind you, it was clearly needed. However, it now leaves her with nothing to stand on, and especially no weight whatsoever to negotiate that brexit thing. Unfortunately I don't see who can replace her either...

The thing is, on the other side the labour proposals are in some case quite laughable -- but they seems to have inherited a lot of anti-brexiters who decided that it was the least-worst scenario.

I have to say quite a few people I know where very, very confused about who to vote for, there was none of the 'classical' 'generational voting' which seems to have existed before. Even Lib Dem failed to attract people, and I have to say that surprised me a bit, as the 'center' seems to have worked for Macron in france -- perhaps they lacked a figurehead?

Even Lib Dem failed to attract people, and I have to say that surprised me a bit, as the 'center' seems to have worked for Macron in france -- perhaps they lacked a figurehead?

As a staunch centrist liberal, I'd have to agree I'm surprised :)

The lack of a central figure is definitely part of it. Tim Farron is a nice guy, but not much of a political heavyweight unfortunately. I still think they're suffering from the hangover of the 2010 coalition, and as ever voters are turned off by the feeling that a Lib Dem vote is 'wasted' which—thanks to FPTP—it often is.

I believe that Tim Farron is a great leader and the campaign went well for him, the truth is that his manifesto got lost in the campaign with the Tories and Labour party taking over all media coverage.

That's probably a fairer assessment, yeah. It's a shame, because their manifesto was great.

> I'm nervous about this being spun as a victory for the left, which I'm already hearing. It's more of a collapse of the Tories.

But it is a victory for the left.

Before this election everyone thought Corbyn was a fucking joke - even his own party.

He ran a strong campaign and Labour got 40% of the vote.

I don't think Corbyn ran a strong campaign, that's the point. The Conservatives handed the election to him on a silver platter, and the Labour Party still lost.

> Labour's vote share is 9.6% up on 2015 - the largest increase from one election to another, for any party, since 1935-1945 (9.8%)

That's pretty impressive, especially considering the vigorous campaigns from DM, and the Sun, against Corbyn.

How is it a collapse for the Tories when they still have 48.5% of the vote? It seems pretty good to me - though I'm not familiar with English politics.

(Serious Q not attacking)

You might have noticed that the last US presidential election was not won by the candidate who had most of the vote. In a similar fashion, the key thing in the UK vote is individual district elections of members of Parliament, not the % of the overall vote.

Well actually I'm fairly sure the parent comment is referring to % of seats - just under half. The tory vote figure I've heard is 43% - so they've outperformed their vote share (which labour and conservatives do consistently under FPTP).

So to the parent: they have less seats - that % was just over 50% before. It's significant because they've been 20%+ ahead in the polls before the election was called - and we've heard predictions of them getting a 50-100 seat majority. They certainly weren't expecting to lose seats.

The latest projections have them at 42.4% of the vote vs Labour's 40.1%. They do have 48.5% of the seats because of an unfair system.

There's always a tension between fairness and stability.

In a perfectly fair system you can end up with dozens of small parties, each having small number of people in parliament, struggling to find majority for a government (see last elections in Netherlands).

That's why some voting systems are designed to give a winning party some premium over their vote percentage.

The supposedly stable system has led to 3 nation elections in 7 years (probably another one this year too) and 2 hung parliaments in the same time. Meanwhile Germany and many other countries have very stable politics with proportional representation.

To add to this, having a system which has to learn to work with other parties, negotiate and compromise is a good thing. MMPs supposed downsides are not necessarily so.

But it does mean that fringe extremist parties can get pet policies passed by holding their partners feet to the fire that the majority of the population wouldn't vote for

Its why NI doesn't have abortion or the same rights for Gay people its down to the Ultras in the DUP as Churchill Said "nothing so loyal as an Ulster "policeman"

> But it does mean that fringe extremist parties can get pet policies passed by holding their partners feet to the fire that the majority of the population wouldn't vote for

Evidence for this: CSU in Germany (the quite-a-bit-more-right-wing sister party of Merkel's CDU).

Evidence of it would be present in just about every MMP government ever formed. Here in New Zealand it's present. Sure, the tail wags the dog a little, but if it happens too much the larger party in government loses votes next election.

Unfortunately with increasingly divergent views we have now ended up with three consecutive elections with no solid majority. We've ended up in the same situation, but with less fair representation.

As strange as it seems we may not have had brexit if UKIP had had representation proportional to their support. The reason we ended up going down that road is a large number of Tory MPs feared UKIP. In a proportional system that may not have mattered so much.

That's actually an advantage of British voting system: it makes issues that are important to a large minority of voters impossible to ignore.

Had UKIP had proportional representation in parliament their demands could be ignored forever. And while in this particular case Britain could be better off that way, it is a wrong thing to do in general.

I'm not sure they would have been ignored, perhaps they may have had enough influence to stop it becoming such a big issue.

I was strongly in favour of remain but I can see some people felt they weren't benefiting from the UK being a member of the EU. If they had been given a bit more attention early on we may not have ended up in this mess.

In pre-election polling they had a comfortable lead of over 20%. That's reduced to 3% - a relative collapse! Polling is of course never entirely accurate, but it was their election to lose.

(They did take a greater share of seats due to FPTP)

A few months ago people were talking about a 100-seat majority for the Tories. Now they have no majority at all: they'll need to get every member of their party plus a few from the DUP to agree to any controversial thing they want to pass (e.g. the Brexit treaty) which might force the government (administration) to make concessions to extreme wings of the party (e.g. a hard-Brexit faction).

actually for some votes that only effect England the DUP cant vote so they cant pass "English" bills without doing a deal with labor / liberals.

When I look at http://www.bbc.com/news/election/2017/results/england (the election results for England specifically), it shows a comfortable majority for the Tories (297 of 533 seats = 55.7%). Am I misunderstanding something?

This isn't quite accurate.

On such bills there is an additional phase in the process where the English MPs can veto the bill, but they must also be voted through the full parliament.

They were running against a candidate who was widely thought to be a joke. They should have had a landslide win. Instead they lost seats, and they lost so many seats they no longer have enough of a majority to win, so we've got a hung parliament.

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