Friday, 8 May 2015

Predicting the 2015 election

(Written on election day, but post-dated to tomorrow in case it's me who jinxes it every time).

Anyone else get two polling cards with different variations of their name on? Just me then. I only voted once, for I am A Good Thing.

Every time I've predicted the election I've got it wrong, as this blog shows in detail.  (In brief 1983 - Labour victory, 1987 - hung parliament, 1992 - Labour landslide, 1997 - Tory victory, 2001 and 2005 - don't remember caring, 2010 - Tory clear majority.) So this year here are my guesses, written on the afternoon of the election before the polls have closed.

I voted Labour, even though this marvellous website shows we're in such a safe Tory seat it's hardly likely to make a difference.  So obviously my favoured result would be:

Labour 300, Tories 299, Lib Dems and SNP = doesn't matter.

Here are my wild card predictions:

Lib Dem will get more than predicted, I say 32
SNP will get fewer than predicted, I say 48
UKIP will get no seats and Nigel Farage will have to resign (fingers tightly crossed)
Greens will retain their one
Plaid Cymru will get 4, though I don't know what they had before. No one does.

And the majority party? Tories 280, Labour 270. And if that adds up to too many seats, that shows how good I am at maths.

Final coalition? Nick Clegg has said he'd go with the majority vote so on that basis I predict he will form another coalition with the Tories and there will be riots.

In other news Katie Hopkins will not leave the country and Ed Miliband will not resign.

There you go, let's see how right I was shall we?

Kev F, 5.29pm, Thursday May 7th 2015


UPDATE 8am: I was of course totally wrong. A Tory majority (50 seats still to declare as I type).

I can't see why we didn't predict this. Labour were always going to lose about 30 seats to the SNP, the Tories were always going to gain about 30 seats from the Lib Dems, and that's basically all that happened. There was only a 1% change between Tory & Labour, so this was obviously going to happen, yet none of us predicted it. We are all idiots.

To refute my predictions in full:

Lib Dem will get more than predicted, I say 32 = they were knocked down to 8
SNP will get fewer than predicted, I say 48 = they rocketed to 56
UKIP will get no seats and Nigel Farage will have to resign (fingers tightly crossed) = they have 1 (Nigel still to declare)
Greens will retain their one = Yes, I got one right
Plaid Cymru will get 4, though I don't know what they had before. No one does. = Still no-one cares.


No comments:

Post a Comment