This
Thursday the voters of The United Kingdom will go to the polls to elect their
next Government.
The
current Conservative Liberal Democrat Coalition is spinning for it's life
trying to portray the economy zooming along in 6th gear, but the reality is
it's still by and large a banjaxed car with a reconditioned engine that is
going great guns for now, but may splutter to a halt in the near future.
The
Labour Party, as Right Wing as ever, is engaged in a game of taking very small
scale initiatives, and trying to make them out to be huge groundbreaking
promises. This is in order to try and
deflect attention from the real issues affecting the Working Class in the UK,
so they will not be forced to make any promises that will come back to haunt
them, as it has the Labour Party here.
It really is sickening to see their electoral machine in full flow.
Labour are merely saying we'll cut as much financially as the Tories will, but
we will do it in other areas. If you
look at the backgrounds of many Candidates standing for Labour, they are near
identical to their Tory counterparts.
there are very few miners sons standing for Labour this time around.
Dennis Skinner is one, but is he the only one? Thankfully, a lot of people are
not being fooled by the Labour rhetoric that the country would be a far worse
place if the Tories remained in power instead of Labour taking over. Voters in Scotland now understand (Which they
would have not say 20 years ago) that a majority Labour Government, would be as
bad as a Tory Government, with more fillups to the rich, be it via tax cuts or
privatisations. This is a big part of the reason quite a number of people who
voted NO in the Scottish Referendum intend on voting SNP on Thursday.
UKIP's
Current Aggregate Poll number has them on 14%. This is a figure that wildly fluctuates. For
example there will be areas in the South East if England were UKIP could get
over 20%, but there are many areas in the North of England were they would only
get 5-7%. Talking anecdotally to some people from England, there is a sense the
media are purposely understating the level of support in the South East of
England for UKIP as they try to push the
Tories at all costs, in the forlorn hope Cameron would gain an overall
majority.
The
last time around (2010) The Conservatives got 36.1% of the vote and 307 seats.
The Labour Party got 258 seats on a vote of 29%, and the Liberal Democrats got
57 seats on a vote of 23%. There were a number of constituencies were Lib Dem
Candidates came second, just behind the Labour or Tory candidate. Thus they
could have easily ended up with over 70 seats, but it was not to be. The
poll of polls, an amalgam of all the different opinion polls, extracted and
crunched to get a cumulative average result, have the Conservatives on 34%, and
The Labour Party on 33%, UKIP on 14% and The Liberal Democrats on 8%. Despite the low result of 8%, commentators
say the Lib Dem vote is quite compact, with certain areas were it does really
well, and others were it barely registers. Thus some commentators say the Lib
Dems could get 20-25 seats. Yet at the
same time some have said UKIP will only get 3 or 4 seats, despite being 14% on
the latest poll. I just don't know how
they could make such a disparity between Lib Dem and UKIP chances, unless it
was a concerted effort to give the
Conservatives every jockey back it can. I fear that UKIP will get higher than
14%, and could even end up with over 10 MP's.
The last time around the Tories ended up 19 short of a Majority. Doing the deal with the Liberal Democrats
gave them a majority of 38. Lib Dems and
Labour would have still been 11 short of a majority back then.
The
predictions are that the Conservatives would be extremely lucky, when all is
factored in, to get over 300 seats. Most say they could and would end up around
the 390 mark. They would badly need to
get at the very least the 392 mark to make a Conservative-Lib Dem-DUP coalition
reach the magic 326 number - 392 Tory seats, 25 Lib Dem Seats, and DUP retaking
East Belfast and getting 9. It is highly
likely the end result will see this triumvirate between them failing to get 326
or more.
Labour
got 258 the last time. If the
predictions are right, and the SNP get 50 seats in Scotland (Could be even
more) and , assuming the Liberal Democrats hold onto the 2 strongest of the 11
seats it got in 2010, that would put Labour on 17 seats in Scotland, leaving
Labour with 234 seats if they got the exact same result as 2010 in England and
Wales. Add the 50 SNP seats to that
number, it leaves us with a total of 284. A whopping 42 seats short of a
majority. Thus it looks highly likely,
based on the opinion polls, the next government is set to be a minority
one.
How
does this affect us in the Republic of Ireland?
The biggest affect will be in the rate that Sterling may go to. It was
recently at 70p to €1, and the lower the pence goes vs the cent, the better it
is for Irish businesses as it makes our goods more cheaper to UK consumers, and
thus they are more likely to buy Irish. But
Sterling has already gone up to almost 74p, and if the result on Thursday is as
fractious as the polls and analysts expect, it could push Sterling up even
more, and be bad news for our economy, from an export and tourism point of
view. Also if the Markets took a really
bad view of the overall situation in the UK, and Sterling climbed up to say
86/87p to €1, we could once more see large tailbacks on the M1 into Newry.
Another
outcome, should the numbers stack up as some are predicting, is that proposals
for an in/out Referendum on the UK's membership of the EU would not see the
light of day, as a Majority of Liberal Democrat, Labour and SNP reject this
idea. So if the Conservatives managed to
cobble together a minority Government, and put a bill to Parliament calling on
the In/out Referendum to be held, it would be defeated, and the Tories would
happily put the issue well and truly to bed.
The
third and final issue that concerns us is the DUP. Should they be in a position
to be dealmakers, and the Conservatives come on bended knee to them looking for
their support, a demand to be allowed reduce Corporation Tax rates in the North
would undoubtedly be very high on, if not top of their list. This angers me, as
the DUP should instead be calling on the Conservatives agreeing to allow the
Stormont Assembly significantly increase the minimum wage, and other state
supports, instead of seeking to make profitable foreign companies even more
profitable, as many people in Northern Ireland struggle to make ends meet.
I
of course hope that a good number of people in the UK vote TUSC or Left Unity,
and that we see many councillors elected from both, which could lead to some of
those councillors begin elected to Westminster the next time around.
Plenty
of Popcorn at the ready for Thursday night!
