Tories Whomp Labour to the Tune of 331 Seats (Out of 650), An Outright Majority in an Election That Polls Alleged They Would Lose Badly

There's some nice bonus damage:

First of all, Jew-hating, terrorist-supporting traitor George Galloway has lost his seat in that charming little "British" burg where they attack Jewish interlopers for daring to make themselves present, to a Labour candidate of the correct ethnicity (Pakistani, I imagine).

I think the new MP, Naseem Shah, will be an improvement over Galloway:

Earlier, [Galloway] was reported to police by Bradford Council for allegedly breaking election laws. He is said to have retweeted his party's own exit poll before voting ended.

Ms Shah criticised Mr Galloway's campaign, saying it had "demeaned democracy".

The Labour candidate won with a majority of more than 11,000. Mr Galloway's Respect party won 8,557 votes and the Conservatives 6,160.

Ms Shah is a political newcomer who has overcome childhood poverty, a teenage forced marriage and the imprisonment of her mother for killing an abusive partner.

She had urged voters to reject Mr Galloway, saying: "We do not need a one-man Messiah to tell us how to come and fix up Bradford.''

Maybe I'm just hopeful but... I dunno, maybe she's not insane, and maybe she's not all gung-ho for the primitive Patriarch domination (as in real patriarch domination) of these semibarbaric tribesmen.

Via Noah Rothman, with more on this, this stupidly-grinning pogrom enthusiast exited with his customary grace.

I should also note the actual headline story of that piece -- a big macher in the Labour machine lost his seat.

That man's name is Ed Balls.

This is actually big news, but of course I have no idea who Ed Balls is.

But we cannot let it pass that they've tossed Balls out.

A while ago the idiot Russell Brand, often mistaken by dumb people as an intelligent man, told people not to vote in elections, because they were all a farce. Fair enough, I suppose, but then this squalid lefty changed his mind and began campaigning furiously for the leftwing Ed Millibrand.

Well, that didn't work out too well.

Charles Cooke, stationed in London to cover the elections, writes about the complete shock of an easy Conservative win after months of a guaranteed Labour win, and picks through the rubble.

All told, the Tories are not the only victors in town. As was predicted, the ascendant SNP has effectively turned Scotland into a one-party region. Remarkably, it now controls 56 of the 59 constituencies north of the border -- a nine-fold increase in its share of Parliament’s seats. In the short term, this development has mostly hurt the Labour party, which has hitherto relied on Scotland as an electoral bulwark. In the long term, though, it is likely to serve as a strong blow to the integrity of the Union....

[I]t is worth recording that Labour did poorly in England, too -- perhaps in part because the English worried that a vote for Labour would be a vote for an alliance with the Scottish nationalists. Below the border, the map is now an almost unbroken sea of blue [the Tories], with just a few well-populated red holdouts in the North and in South Wales. Indeed, the final tallies show that Labour could have won every single seat in Scotland and still have lost to the Tories by two dozen votes. Long term, that augurs badly. Elections have consequences, as the old saying goes, and for both the Labour and Liberal Democratic parties, last night's will augur nothing but ill fortune.

The news was no better for the Liberal Democrat party, which has now been all but wiped off the map....

In fact, Sky News’s Faisal Islam observes this morning, both parties [Labour and Liberal Democrat] "would best see their current predicament as existential crises."

...

The saddest story of the day, perhaps, is that of the U.K. Independence party, which managed to win 3.5 million votes and to come in third overall, but secured only one parliamentary seat. In response, UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, made good on his promise and resigned from his role as the party’s frontman. He will play no great role in the future. UKIP as a whole, however, almost certainly will, for while its candidates were thwarted by the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the party as a whole demonstrated neatly that there is genuine frustration about the European Union and about the U.K.'s broken immigration system that can simply not be ignored.

The first-past-the-post system is the one we use in America, where the guy who gets the most votes in a district wins the seat. That's different from some states where one just votes for a party, which then gets apportioned a number of seats for them to assign to their slate of candidates. Such a system does not reward third parties or split constituencies.

Cooke notes things actually look even better for the Tories, and worse for Labour, than it seems; the borders of the constituencies are old. When they are adjusted again, they will favor the Conservatives more.

posted by Ace at 01:30 PM

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