Polls apart

So how accurate did my election forecast turn out to be? Well, I correctly predicted that the vote would happen yesterday, but got just about everything else wrong. I don’t feel too bad though, since even the professional pollsters were way out, and nobody was talking about a Conservative majority.

Which is of course the nightmare scenario. Things were bad enough in the last parliament, when the Tories were at least mildly restrained by the LibDems, so goodness knows how grim it will get in the next few years. Last time round there was some hope that the rightward drift of the government might provoke a left-leaning backlash, but, outside of Scotland (where the situation is more complicated than it looks at first glance), that never really materialised, and the chances of a progressive resurgence seem even slimmer today.

Oh well, back to the barricades I guess. Though I’m getting too old for all that street politics stuff…

Final prognostication

The polls in the UK General Election open in a few hours, so I guess I’d better put my political reputation on the line by predicting who will come out on top once the votes have been counted.

Here’s my forecast:

Labour will be the biggest party, though they won’t have an overall majority. They will do better than expected in Scotland though, and the SNP won’t have the influence that they have been hoping for. The LibDems will take a bit of a hammering, but won’t be wiped out. UKIP will have one or two seats at most. The Tories won’t be too far behind Labour, but they won’t be able to put together a workable coalition. Labour won’t go into coalition either, but the anti-Tory numbers will add up to make a minority government possible.

So… Our next Prime Minister will be Ed Milliband. Things will be rocky for a while, but will stabilise, and he’ll serve a full term.

A Labour government will be different from a Tory government, and the more marginalised sections of the community will probably do a bit better, so I suppose that this result would be the least bad possible. I’m not expecting any revolutionary changes – as time passes I’m getting more resigned to the idea that I won’t see such developments in my lifetime. Though if there’s one thing that history teaches it’s that you seldom see these things coming, so there’s always hope.

Anyway, check back in a couple of days, and we’ll see how right I was…

Long range forecast

Well, I’ve been reading the papers, keeping up with the polls, and watching the debates on TV, but I’m not feeling any more confident about calling the outcome of the election. I have managed to come to one conclusion however; my confusion isn’t down to any inherent unpredictability in the process, but rather stems from my inability to imagine why the electorate might choose to vote one way rather than another.

This in turn is at least partly due to the homogeneity of the political scene here; while there are some differences between the parties they are all singing from essentially the same pro-capital hymn sheet. The left is even more marginalised than it was five years ago, and class-based politics is all but dead, so an old Bolshevik like myself has no sense of which way the population might be leaning, since from my perspective the available options are all equally bad.

But a more personal, and probably more important, factor is my gradual withdrawal from active politics over the last decade or so; I’m almost totally reliant on second-hand reports of what is agitating the public mind, most of them gathered through the unreliable channel of social media. Add in the decline of my youthful certainty, and some age-related general bewilderment, and it’s little surprise that I have no idea who is going to come out on top at the start of May.

Perhaps it’s all just too close to home; anxiety about how the outcome might affect my personal circumstances may be clouding my judgement. I certainly find it much easier to pronounce authoritatively on what will happen across the Atlantic; Hillary will win. You read it here first.

Predictably unpredictable

After months of anticipation the UK General Election is finally upon us. All the pundits are saying it’s the most unpredictable contest since, well, the last one, but I feel I should hazard some sort of forecast.

So, based on an entirely unscientific reading of a few highly selected news feeds, I’m going to say… no, it is too hard to call at the moment. The broad outline of the debate seems clear – it’s going to be won and lost on the economy – but there are enough confounding factors to leave the likely outcome frustratingly obscure. How much will the Liberal vote collapse, and where will it go? Will UKIP supporters return to the Tory fold? Will Labour do as badly in Scotland as the polls seem to suggest?

I guess things may become clearer over the next few weeks, and I will get round to making a prediction before polling day. In the meantime I’ll try to keep up some sort of commentary on developments, which might help focus my own thoughts on the matter, if nothing else.