back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

Two pieces of analysis on the Coming Lib Dem collapse crossed my desk this morning. The first is an analysis of the potential electoral outcomes for the Lib Dem, Conservative and Labour parties if the current polling position for the Lib Dems of about 10% translates into vote share at the 2015 General Election.

The first is from Robert Ford, of the University of Nottingham School of Politics and International Relations, the second is from Hopi Sen, Labour blogger and co-author of In The Black Labour.http://hopisen.com/2012/the-coming-libdem-collapse-and-labour/#comment-13293

Ford trials two scenarios for the shifting of Lib Dem voters and looks at the results.  The first is a universal national swing. Lib Dems lose seats to the Tories, the Tories lose seats to Labour in Con-Lab marginal with high 2010 Lib Dem votes. The end result is that the Labour party ends up 6 seats short of a majority in the House of Commons with the Lib Dems on 11 seats. 

Which allows the Labour Party to form a majority coalition with the Lib Dems, or for the Conservative Party to form a (rather unlikely) coalition with the Lib Dems and the Unionist parties in Northern Ireland.

The second scenario looks at the votes cast if the current split of 2010 Lib Dems votes hold true for defected to Labour, the Tories, to Don’t Know (further re-allocated) and stayed Lib Dem.

This scenario sees the Lib Dems reduced to zero seats in the House of Commons and the Labour party sweeping to a Hung Parliament, 14 seats short of an absolute majority.

The SNP finish on about 7 seats.  I’ll let those with a calculator do that sum.

Hopi Sen broadly agrees with the analysis but questions some of the detail about how Don’t Knows split between Labour, Lib Dems and Conservative. He also asks some questions about UKIP. Things will be messier than just one axis of change.

In real life lots of stuff will happen that goes against the general rub of the green and actual results might vary and in such a close election might prove significant.

On this analysis the results look far from being a Labour landslide.  It doesn't take much to shift for both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party to end up on functionally the same number of seats and for the Lib Dems to end up more influential than they were in 2010.  If this strikes you as a perverse result, well that's First Past the Post for you.

And raises the question touched on in an earlier post of mine, who do you vote for if you want constitutional change and electoral reform?

It seems clear to me that if you want Devo-Max and you concede that the Yes to Independence campaign won’t win the 2014 election then I think the party to vote in any seat where the SNP came second to the Labour Party is the SNP. 

Which doesn’t help me much. I live in a three way marginal, and the SNP are 4^th.