Conservatives get clear majority in UK General Election. …And everybody is blinking in surprise.

Neil has hit this story over at RedState already, so let me just embed this…

…and note that it came out of nowhere. I was expecting the Tories to lose seats overall, honestly. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see three of the four other major parties (Labour, Liberal Democrats, and UKIP) to be suddenly bereft of leadership. I’d feel bad about getting last night’s results wrong, except that everybody else did, too.

Moe Lane

PS: Mind you, a ‘Conservative’ in the UK is like a Democrat here. Albeit one being hunted out to extinction.

9 thoughts on “Conservatives get clear majority in UK General Election. …And everybody is blinking in surprise.”

  1. I’m in Europe still, for a couple more days, and I flipped between the two english language news stations I can get, BBC News and the international version of CNN. Remember all the news coverage in 1994 election night? It was like that. You had some seriously morose talking heads on there.

      1. So what actually made you change? A vision on the road to Damascus? High school math finally sunk in?

        1. Keeping with the British theme, perhaps it was a truism falsely attributed to Churchill that did the trick:
          “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”

  2. Makes no sense that SNP got 1.5 million vote and got all those seat. UKIP got 5 times as many votes and got 1 seat.

    1. Concentrated regional party in 50 districts, versus nationally diffuse across 300. Such are the limitations of geographic districts. Similar reason why there’s no strong third party in the US.

      1. We’ve had “strong” third parties in the U.S. In Wisconsin and Minnesota the Progressive, and Farmer Labor Parties did fairly well in the 30s and 40s, but only in Wisconsin and Minnesota respectively, both were co-opted by Democrats, or run out of office by Republicans.

    1. SF is Sin Fein, and they won’t be sitting in Westminster, DUP is the largest party in Northern Ireland, meaning Democratic Unionist Party. As I understand it they’re mostly a Centre-Right political party.

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