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May 8, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
33:38
The 2015 British General Election
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So the UK election results are all but in, only 15 seats remaining uncounted for, and it looks like the Conservatives are going to be able to form a majority government all on their own.
There's been a very interesting reordering of the political landscape in Britain with this election, and I won't lie, the Conservative majority is a surprise to me, as I think it is to almost everyone.
Especially given how five years ago they couldn't muster anywhere near a majority and had to go into coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
There has been a very interesting change in the vote share since 2010.
As you can see from this graph, the UK Independence Party has gained almost 10%, which is dramatically higher than any of the other parties.
Whereas the Liberal Democrats have been absolutely crushed.
But we will get to the Liberal Democrats in a bit.
Before we go on, I'm just going to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
The latest election was for the House of Commons.
This is where the main democratic machinery of the UK government operates.
The House of Commons is democratically elected, it makes laws and it checks the work of government.
The House of Commons is made up of 650 seats, each representing a different portion of the United Kingdom and voted for by the electorate.
In the UK, elections happen every five years and what you can see here is the breakdown of the number of seats won by each party in the 2010 general election.
Each party is ultimately aiming to form a majority government, which is to say that each party would like to have the majority of the seats available in Parliament filled with party members, which of course is 326.
As you can see from the 2010 elections, the Conservatives won the most seats in Parliament but fell short of forming a majority government, which resulted in a hung parliament.
This is why the Liberal Democrats with 57 seats went into a coalition with the Conservative Party with 306 seats, so they could form together the majority.
If this wasn't possible, you'd have what is known as a minority government, which is a government formed up of a party or a coalition of parties who don't control a majority of seats in Parliament, who are then subject to the political depredations of the other parties, and can eventually be subject to things like votes of no confidence.
Put simply, democratic legitimacy is maintained by forming an absolute majority, and if you can't form an absolute majority, your political opponents have all sorts of sticks with which to beat concessions out of you.
And so on to the results of yesterday's election.
The first thing to note is that this is a clear win for the Conservatives.
There are still 15 seats outstanding, but the Conservatives only need six of them to form a majority government, which to be honest with you, I think they will do.
And if they don't, they're really not going to have to enlist very much help in order to do so.
You can see that the Conservatives gained 21 seats since 2010.
While it is only a small percentage increase, it is a very, very important thing for the Conservatives.
And they must be thrilled with this, to be honest.
The next thing that stands out is that Labour got absolutely battered.
Labour lost more seats than the Conservatives gained, and they lost them to the Scottish National Party, that had an amazing electoral run.
The Scottish National Party began with six seats and gained 50 to make them the third largest party in Britain, which obviously put the previous third largest party into fourth place.
The Liberal Democrats were massacred.
Absolutely massacred.
Not only did they lose 15% of the votes that they had from last year, they lost 46 seats, putting them down to eight seats, putting them on par with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.
An interesting thing to note about the UK political system is the number of votes cast compared to the number of seats held.
In this example, the Conservatives receives an overall majority of the number of votes cast, so there's nothing congruous there.
But you might notice that the Scottish National Party received almost a million less votes than Liberal Democrats, which combine to form about the same number of people who voted for the UK Independence Party, despite that not being reflected in the number of seats that they gained.
This is because in the UK we use something called the first past the post voting system.
And yes, I know I'm using Wikipedia and no I'm not proud of that, but the Wikipedia definition is fine, it's not controversial, it just explains briefly what the situation is.
So first past the post voting takes place in constituencies that elect a single MP.
Voters put a cross in the box next to their favoured candidate and the candidate with the most votes in the constituency wins.
All other votes count for nothing.
The effect of this voting system is that large parties tend to gain a disproportionately large share of seats, while smaller parties are left with a disproportionately small share of seats.
This is why the UK Independence Party can win as many votes as the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats put together and win far fewer seats.
The UK Independence Party may well have fielded more votes across the country, but in individual constituencies they weren't making up a majority.
And therefore they weren't winning the seats.
So the results look broadly as follows, but this isn't really an accurate representation of the political map of Britain.
The geographical map is slightly deceptive because it doesn't take into account population density.
On the right is a more realistic view of how the voting map actually looks.
It's important to remember for example that London has about as many people in it as Scotland and Wales combined.
So we can see that broadly speaking the south of England except the interior of London, the Midlands and the North are very conservative.
The mid and north of England have been Labour for quite some time and will likely remain Labour for a long time to come.
What you can see in London is Labour surrounding the City of London, right on the N of the word on the right there.
And I suspect that's due to mass immigration under Labour government.
Possibly the most striking thing about this map is how Labour have been virtually driven out of Scotland.
Only Edinburgh South remains as a Labour seat in Scotland.
This is quite a remarkable defeat for Labour and quite a remarkable victory for the Scottish National Party, but we'll go into that in a minute.
What it's going to mean though is that the Scottish National Party's remarkable rise are going to make them a formidable force in Westminster.
If the Conservatives hadn't managed to rout the Labour Party in England so thoroughly, they would have undoubtedly be playing Kingmaker, but I suspect, as the Conservatives will probably achieve a majority, they won't actually have the opportunity to do that.
So let's take a look at the information that we had at the time of recording this video.
The exit polls were wrong.
An exit poll is simply people standing outside of voting booths asking people how they voted when they come out.
The suggestion had been right on the wire polling day say that Labour and the Tories were neck and neck, but this does not appear to have been borne out.
Labour have lost Scotland and the Liberal Democrats have been pretty much obliterated, but we knew that already.
Honestly, I am surprised that Nick Clegg retained his seat in Sheffield Hallam.
But many prominent Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers have lost their positions.
Danny Alexander, Vince Cable, Ed Davy, Joe Swinson, David Laws and Lynn Featherstone.
Butchered, metaphorically.
The Scottish National Party has conquered Scotland, scooping up all seven seats in Glasgow, toppling Labour, big beasts Jim Murphy and Douglas Alexander.
Exit polls predicted it would take 58 out of Scotland's 59 seats.
Alex Salmond will be heading back to Westminster after winning in Gordon.
As stated earlier, the UK Independence Party, despite having a high percentage of the overall votes, only scored one MP, which is Douglas Carswell, an ex-Tory who returns to Clacton.
I'm genuinely surprised that George Galloway lost his seat in Bradford West for the Respect Party, leaving them with zero MPs.
And everyone's favourite straw-haired upper-class clown, Boris Johnson, is on his way back to the House of Commons, having won in Uxbridge and South Ruslip.
The filthy Continentals don't seem to be too impressed with the Conservatives winning again, with Der Spiegel saying that this is bad news for Europe.
And French newspaper Le Monde said that the UK election, which was on its front page, was a worry in Europe.
Which it probably was, but let's be fair, everything's a worry to the French.
The voter turnout in this election was rather middling, being slightly less than the turnout in 2010.
This year about 28 million people turned out to vote, whereas in 2010 you had about 29 or 30 million people who turned out to vote.
And there is obviously the eternal cry of, well, more people didn't vote for anyone than voted for any one party.
Well, yes, that's the nature of the beast.
In the modern era, voter turnout has been remarkably low in the United Kingdom.
In 1918, when universal suffrage was first granted to men and women, men over the age of 21 and women over the age of 30, 57.2% of the potential voters turned out to vote.
In 1929, when universal suffrage was rolled out for everyone over the age of 21, 76.3% of the voters turned out to vote.
Contrast that with, say, 1992, when 77.7% of the voters turned out, and 2001, where 59.4% of the voters turned out.
In 2010, this was 65.1%, and this year it's slightly higher with 66.1%.
I can't be entirely certain of these figures, but I'm sure they're accurate enough for government work.
This is a poll done on the Telegraph website, which it's worth noting is a pro-Conservative website, and people apparently seem to have already chosen the party that they were going to vote for before they went into the voting booth.
And I suspect that that's probably representative of most of the population.
Although it's worth noting that roughly the same number of people had their minds changed at some point during the campaign, either early in the campaign or in the last few days.
This probably isn't really representative of anything, I just thought that it was a very interesting poll to include.
This is all a lot of very interesting information, but what does it mean and what happened next?
Well, after their absolutely crushing defeats, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg have resigned.
At time of recording this was breaking news, so this will probably be updated later.
But there's no getting around it.
Miliband is the man who lost Scotland to the Scottish National Party.
Miliband said that it was a very disappointing and difficult night, and that Labour had been overwhelmed by a surge of nationalism.
Is that correct?
Well, maybe.
There's no doubt that the Scottish independence referendum last year put Scottish nationalism front and centre in the minds of Scots.
Voter turnout for the independence referendum was universally high across Scotland, with the lowest areas having a turnout of at least 75%.
But the Scots are British, and part of being British is when you see everyone running in one direction, you turn around and you walk casually in the other.
The no vote for Scotland was concentrated heavily in the south.
Unsurprisingly, the parts most familiar with the rest of the United Kingdom voted to remain with it.
But that doesn't explain why the areas that were most against independence from the United Kingdom have voted for the Scottish National Party over one of the more traditional parties.
I did have a quote from Nicola Sturgeon around somewhere, but unfortunately I can't find it when I came to make the video.
But I recall her saying somewhere that the popular notion of Labour in Scotland is that they have become a party of Westminster.
They have become far less concerned with the average man on the street as the Labour Party you would think they would be and have become a party of finance and big business.
I'm not saying that that's necessarily correct, but that does seem to be the popular conception of the Labour Party in Scotland and as such they lost completely.
But honestly, I do think that there is more to Labour's defeat in Scotland and in general than simply them selling out to the city of London.
I think the old business truism of people do business with people that they like strongly applies here because Ed Miliband is just such an unlikable guy.
I mean, there is just he's not pleasant to look at.
Who wants to spend a lot of time looking at Ed Miliband's face?
And his ridiculous posturing with Jeremy Paxman was just laughable.
Absolutely laughable.
Ed Miliband goes into a room with Vladimir Putin.
The door is closed.
Two minutes later, the door is opened again and Vladimir Putin is standing there smiling and Ed Miliband is all over the floor in pieces.
Was that David Cameron who you mailed the tube?
No, it wasn't.
I don't think he uses the tube very much.
But that's rather unfair to him.
It is unfair.
Yeah, but you understand what the point is here.
The point is people think you're just not tough enough.
Well, let me tell you, right?
Let me tell you.
Okay.
Come on, let me tell you.
Oh, Ed, people are laughing at you, mate.
Don't fucking let me tell you anything.
Jesus Christ.
And then this.
Am I tough enough?
Tough enough?
Hell yes, I'm tough enough.
Yeah, well, I wasn't convinced, and I don't think a great many other people were convinced either.
Look, it's not that Miliband isn't a nice guy.
I'm sure he is.
He's just not the sort of man people are going to fucking vote for.
The places that Labour stayed strong are places where Labour would have predictably have stayed strong.
There's it's nothing to do with Miliband's charm.
And so we come on to the sorry story of Nick Clegg.
Nick Clegg, the Libre of the Liberal Democrat Party, should never, ever have gone into a coalition with his ideological adversaries, the Conservatives.
They are so diametrically opposed, it would seem like a ludicrous proposition.
Except Clegg accepted it in 2010.
But people were surprisingly optimistic.
They thought, well, the Liberal Democrats will put the brakes on anything the Conservatives try to do that the general public is going to be against.
They will fight in the corner of the little man and stick to their guns.
Except after literally being five minutes in government, Nick Clegg decides to screw it all up and breaks his tuition fees pledge.
Instead of standing by the Liberal Democrat pledge to scrap university fees altogether, and instead simply bent over and let the Conservatives do exactly what they want, which was allow institutions to charge up to £9,000 a year.
Clegg seems to have forgotten that most Liberal Democrat support comes from students.
Needless to say, this has students up in arms, accusing him of conning voters, and it allowed Harriet Harmon to go around and say, oh, he'd been led astray by the Conservatism government and make him look like an absolute imbecile.
Needless to say, Labour started making jokes at Clegg's expense.
And Clegg thought, well, I will do the decent and reasonable thing when one has fucked up.
Clegg apologised like a man.
Directly.
Unashamedly, he said, I was wrong.
But Clegg doesn't appear to know who he was dealing with.
And his apology became a viral video that was mocked in student unions across the country.
We made a promise before the election that we would vote against any rising fees.
We would vote against any rising fees.
We would vote against any rising fees.
It was a pledge made with the best of intentions.
The best of intentions.
But we shouldn't have made a promise.
We weren't absolutely sure we could deliver.
I'm sorry.
I'm so, so sorry.
There's no easy way to say I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm so, so sorry.
There's no easy way to say I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
When we're wrong, we hold our hands up.
But when we're right, we hold our heads up too.
You've learned from real mistakes, and that's what we will do.
I accept that won't be enough for everyone, but I owe it to you.
You've learned from real mistakes, and that's what we will do.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry.
There's no easy way to say it, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry.
There's no easy way to say it, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, we are sorry, we are sorry.
The limbo democrats are sorry.
There's no easy way to say we are sorry.
We are sorry, we are sorry, we are sorry.
The limbo democrats are sorry.
There's no easy way to say we are sorry.
And if we've lost your trust, that's how I hope we can start to win it back.
Needless to say, it wasn't enough, and Nick Clegg never actually regained the student confidence, despite being literally the only politician in the country who gives a shit what they think.
But that wasn't enough for the students.
Oh no, they had to go on an active campaign to try and break the Liberal Democrats nationwide.
National Union of Students launched advertising campaign targeting Liberal Democrats who broke tuition fee promise.
Not only did these jackals go out of their way to create propaganda posters to brand the Liberal Democrats as liars, so that around the halls of academia the Liberal Democrats' name would be mud, they paid for this to go on the road in a scorched earth campaign against the Liberal Democrats, the only party they could possibly in good conscience consider supporting.
But I guess it's true.
I guess to really hate something, you have to have loved it first.
And it worked.
The Liberal Democrats have been crippled.
I can't believe Nick Clegg was voted back into his constituency in Sheffield, but frankly, he's going to resign as the leader of the party, and I would be amazed if his political career is not over.
Clegg absolutely tanked the Liberal Democrats by thinking that anyone who supports the Liberal Democrats wanted to see him cooperate with the Tories.
If he'd just remained a thorn in their side, he would probably be even more popular than he ever was.
So their replacements are the Scottish National Party, who are indeed poised for greater influence at Westminster after election gains.
And to be clear, the election gains of the SNP are nothing short of phenomenal.
They are the masters of Scotland now, and they are undoubtedly going to try and drive a wedge between the remaining British parties who are influential in England.
This tremendous victory is going to reap dividends for the Scottish National Party.
They are now entitled to sit or win chairmanships on many of the most influential select committees, including the Treasury, Defence and Foreign Affairs Committees.
It will entitle them to have automatic speaking and tabling rights during Commons debates and at Prime Ministers' questions, putting it ahead of the Liberal Democrats for the first time in the party's history.
They are most likely going to form some kind of voting bloc with minor national parties such as the English Greens and the Welsh Nationalists played Simru.
And this, I think, is going to lead to an interesting occurrence.
They are going to do whatever they care to do that may well cause merry havoc in England, all the while reporting back to Scotland just how much good they are doing for the Scots.
And I think it's probably going to work.
I think it's hard to persuade people not to vote for a party that is operating so directly in their own best interests, because all of the Scottish National Party's power comes from this angle, especially given the current paucity of opposition.
Luckily, these nationalist parties are self-limiting, and I can't see anyone in England voting for the Scottish National Party.
You can't really overemphasise just how much of a win this is for the Scottish National Party.
One MP described the lack of any formal coalition deal with Labour as a liberation, allowing them flexibility to wield their votes and influence on an issue-by-issue basis.
They've already opened up lines of communication to the centre-left Labour MPs in efforts to build alliances over renewing Trident and opposing deeper spending cuts.
They know what they want and they're going to work for it, and I think they have the muscle and influence over Labour after whipping them so thoroughly that they will be heard.
George Galloway of the Respect Party lost his seat in Bradford, which I am commenting on because I think it's a great surprise.
Bradford is a city with a large Muslim population, and Galloway had, frankly, never been shy of pandering to them.
I'm not really interested in the fact that he's been reported to the police for tweeting about an election poll exit before its release.
I'm interested that he's lost his seats to Labour candidate Nassim Shah, and I am wondering if this is, well frankly, people voting along ethnic lines.
It's interesting that in Northern Ireland the largest party was the Democratic Unionist Party, which reflects a broader trend in Britain to keep the country stitched together.
Honestly, I don't really know much about this party, but apparently according to Reuters, they are expecting some more influence.
As far as I can tell, they were planning to hopefully butter up the Conservatives in the event that they had to form a coalition government again.
But I've actually just checked the results in the process of making this video, and it turns out that the Conservatives have achieved a majority.
Which just goes to show how long it takes to make these videos.
So it looks like the DUP has lost any kind of leverage it might have expected to gain to pursue its opposition to gay rights.
The Green Party did reasonably well, having over a million votes in total and winning in Brighton.
Personally, I found the Greens manifesto to be the most sensible.
So I'm surprised that they didn't receive more grassroots support.
Is that a pun?
Although the Greens already held the Brighton Pavilion seat, this became more entrenched at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, with a swing of about 10%.
Something I don't think that anyone is particularly surprised about.
This was the most successful election campaign ever for the Green Party.
And Miss Lucas of the Green Party is also adverse to the first past-the-post system, which most of the smaller parties, frankly, are.
Which leads us finally to the dark horse of the British elections, the UK Independence Party.
Now, they have had a very mixed bag in these elections, and I think they have been treated very unfairly.
So, after failing to win the South Thanet seat, Nigel Farage has resigned as the leader of UKIP.
He lost to Conservative Craig McKinley, which doesn't really bother me one way or another.
You're not really getting anything particularly different.
What bothers me is the way people treated him.
As the votes were read after a long night's wait, Mr. Farage's defeat was greeted with derisive cries of by Nigel.
Why?
What has he actually done wrong?
Well, the question really is: why does everyone think Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party are racists?
Farage's background is in finance.
He used to work in the city of London, and he seems very, very concerned about British sovereignty.
Good morning, Mr. Van Rumpuy.
You've been in office for one year, and in that time, the whole edifice is beginning to crumble.
There's chaos.
The money's running out.
I should thank you.
You should perhaps be the pin-up boy of the Eurosceptic movement.
But just look around this chamber this morning.
Just look at these faces.
Look at the fear.
Look at the anger.
Poor old Barroso here looks like he's seen a ghost.
You know, they're beginning to understand that the game is up.
And yet, in their desperation to preserve their dream, they want to remove any remaining traces of democracy from the system.
And it's pretty clear that none of you have learned anything.
You know, when you yourself, Mr. Van Rumpuy, say that the Euro has brought us stability, I suppose I could applaud you for having a sense of humour, but isn't this really just the bunker mentality?
You know, your fanaticism is out in the open.
You talked about the fact that it was a lie to believe that the nation-state could exist in a 21st-century globalised world.
Well, that may be true in the case of Belgium, who haven't had a government for six months, but for the rest of us, right across every member state in this union, and perhaps this is why we see the fear in the faces, increasingly people are saying, we don't want that flag, we don't want the anthem, we don't want this political class, we want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history.
And we had the Greek tragedy earlier on this year, and now we have the situation in Ireland.
Now, I know that the stupidity and greed of Irish politicians has a lot to do with this.
They should never ever have joined the Euro.
They suffered with low interest rates, a false boom, and a massive bust.
But look at your response to them.
What they're being told as their government's collapsing is that it would be inappropriate for them to have a general election.
In fact, Commissioner Wren here said they had to agree their budget first before they'd be allowed to have a general election.
Just who the hell do you think you people are?
You are very, very dangerous people indeed.
Your obsession with creating this Euro state means that you're happy to destroy democracy.
You appear to be happy for millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor.
Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro dream can continue.
Well, it won't work because it's Portugal next.
With their debt levels of 325% of GDP, they're the next ones on the list.
And after that, I suspect it'll be Spain.
And the bailout for Spain would be seven times the size of Ireland.
And at that moment, all of the bailout money has gone.
There won't be any more.
But it's even more serious than economics.
Because if you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence.
I can only hope and pray that the Euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens.
Thank you.
I think what Farage has said is entirely in keeping with the British mindset about Europe.
And there is nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
For some reason, though, there is a distinct strain of idiot in this country who thinks that any questioning of Europe or the outside world makes you a racist.
And this is something that Farage has had to struggle with for his entire career.
It is an easy label that people have tried to slander the UK Independence Party with.
And despite being constantly hounded by this, they did remarkably well.
They got as much of the vote as the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrat Party combined.
In fact, the general opposition to the UK Independence Party seems to be entirely Pavlovian, with gangs of idiots harassing him in his day-to-day life because they disagree with his political opinions.
This is unacceptable.
These lunatic leftist fucking students who think that they should go and harass a man having lunch with his wife and children because he thinks a federal Europe is a bad thing.
But you know what?
Let's talk about prejudice.
As with all things, anyone who takes a stance on an issue like immigration is probably going to attract bad elements.
So when you have a councillor like Roseanne Duncan saying she has a problem with Negroes, yes, you can say that she is a racist.
And what happened?
She was summarily expelled from the party.
Someone who was openly racist was expelled from the UK Independence Party.
The UK Independence Party did exactly the right thing.
Now let's compare that to a party member of the Liberal Democrats who is openly and brazenly sexist.
A young lady who is clearly some kind of feminist radical made multiple tweets of a disturbingly hateful nature including kill all men, fuck men and die cis scum.
Despite being openly and willfully prejudiced in comparison to the woman who just felt that it was acceptable for her to say that she didn't like the look of Negroes and she didn't think that made her racist, this person is deliberately and wantonly sexist and the worst they got was a suspension from their regional party.
Oh, and, you know, to ask to delete the tweets and apologise, which is in no way a completely perfunctory gesture.
The point is, if you want to say that the UK Independence Party is a racist party, then by the same standards, the Liberal Democrats are a sexist party.
Despite the smear campaign against the UK Independence Party, which broadly comes from the half-educated middle classes, just so everyone's clear, the people in the lower classes are generally quite aware of the situation on the ground.
And so they're not against restricting immigration.
By and large, I know it sounds terrible, but it's true.
But the UK Independence Party won their first general election seat, despite Mr. Farage's resignation and loss.
And I just want to make it clear that I didn't vote for the UK Independence Party.
I am making this defense of them because I am tired of the mob mentality that happens in British politics.
A disturbing level of confirmation bias and groupthink takes hold when immigration is discussed.
And it doesn't take hold amongst the upper class or the lower class.
It takes hold amongst the middle class.
They are most guilty of perpetuating this, in my experience.
So why did the Conservatives win?
Well, the Conservatives won because everyone else was fucking useless.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats were unelectable.
You get people like the UK Independence Party who, despite the large number of votes that they accrued, were the subject of a middle class smear campaign.
Not even in the media, necessarily.
So all the Conservatives had to do was not fuck up.
That's it.
They didn't have to win.
They just had to not lose.
And not lose they did.
Despite ATOS, despite workfair, despite the privatisation of the NHS, somehow we are stuck with a Conservative majority for the next five years.
So great job, everyone.
Pats on the back all round.
I'm sure things are going to look great in 2020.
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