A hundred days to go and everything to play for
Today's date is significant for a number of reasons.
As per the posts I made this morning, it is Holocaust Memorial Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auchwitz death camp. A day when we should remember that in my parents' lifetime most of the countries of Europe experienced the horror, on an almost incomprehensible scale, of an attempt to wipe out entire categories of human beings.
And then looking to the future, it is a hundred days to the 2015 General Election
An election which I expect to be as close as any election in my lifetime and far and away the hardest to predict.
Latest opinion polls are suggesting that Labour have lost the poll lead which they held for much of the parliament and that the Conservatives are something between neck and neck and a whisker ahead. But all that could change by the time of the election.
There really is everything to play for and every vote could count.
There are four realistically possible outcomes to this election:
* There could be a modest Conservative majority
* There could be a hung parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party
* There could be a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party
* There could be a modest Labour majority
With only a hundred days to go, the polls show the Conservative and Labour percentage scores very close and both in the low 30's region and none of the other parties are consistently scoring more than half the Labour or Conservative share. Realistically that means it is most unlikely that either of the two main parties could win a landslide and even more unlikely that anyone else could get anywhere remotely near to becoming the largest party. Beyond that everyone has everything to play for.
Some people are predicting a Lib/Dem wipeout like the one they suffered in last year's European elections. While I agree that they will almost certainly lose seats, I think one of the biggest surprises will be how many seats the Lib/Dems manage to hold with how few votes. A lot of their MPs are very well dug in locally, and they are not as massively out of line with the views of most British voters on the issues on which the General Election will be fought as they are on Europe.
UKIP may get a few MPs. It is possible if the next parliament is completely hung, that they may have a chance to influence who becomes Prime Minister. But their main influence on the election may be who they take votes from. Labour's so called "35% strategy" which some pundits think they were following earlier in the parliament relied on UKIP taking votes from Tories to help Labour win a majority with barely a third of the vote. If enough people who would otherwise have voted Conservative were to vote UKIP this could still happen, though such a result is certainly not inevitable.
My second biggest nightmare about the coming election is the possibility that Ed Miliband might become Prime Minister - I agree with some people on the political left as well as the right who think he would be a very bad one.
My biggest nightmare is the possibility that no two parties (other than the Conservatives and Labour, which would not work) have enough seats to form a coalition government or other stable arrangement.
Fortunately that is not inevitable either.
There really is everything to play for - every hour of campaigning work, every vote cast, could make a huge change to the election result. And let nobody tell you that the parties have similar policies or that the election will make no difference - to find a time when the Conservatives and Labour were further apart you have to go back at least 25 years and arguably more than 30: to the time of Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot.
It may not be as exciting as the "hundred days" of Napoleon's return from Elba or the Battle of Britain. But make no mistake, the next hundred days will be one of the more important such periods in our country's history.
As per the posts I made this morning, it is Holocaust Memorial Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auchwitz death camp. A day when we should remember that in my parents' lifetime most of the countries of Europe experienced the horror, on an almost incomprehensible scale, of an attempt to wipe out entire categories of human beings.
And then looking to the future, it is a hundred days to the 2015 General Election
An election which I expect to be as close as any election in my lifetime and far and away the hardest to predict.
Latest opinion polls are suggesting that Labour have lost the poll lead which they held for much of the parliament and that the Conservatives are something between neck and neck and a whisker ahead. But all that could change by the time of the election.
There really is everything to play for and every vote could count.
There are four realistically possible outcomes to this election:
* There could be a modest Conservative majority
* There could be a hung parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party
* There could be a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party
* There could be a modest Labour majority
With only a hundred days to go, the polls show the Conservative and Labour percentage scores very close and both in the low 30's region and none of the other parties are consistently scoring more than half the Labour or Conservative share. Realistically that means it is most unlikely that either of the two main parties could win a landslide and even more unlikely that anyone else could get anywhere remotely near to becoming the largest party. Beyond that everyone has everything to play for.
Some people are predicting a Lib/Dem wipeout like the one they suffered in last year's European elections. While I agree that they will almost certainly lose seats, I think one of the biggest surprises will be how many seats the Lib/Dems manage to hold with how few votes. A lot of their MPs are very well dug in locally, and they are not as massively out of line with the views of most British voters on the issues on which the General Election will be fought as they are on Europe.
UKIP may get a few MPs. It is possible if the next parliament is completely hung, that they may have a chance to influence who becomes Prime Minister. But their main influence on the election may be who they take votes from. Labour's so called "35% strategy" which some pundits think they were following earlier in the parliament relied on UKIP taking votes from Tories to help Labour win a majority with barely a third of the vote. If enough people who would otherwise have voted Conservative were to vote UKIP this could still happen, though such a result is certainly not inevitable.
My second biggest nightmare about the coming election is the possibility that Ed Miliband might become Prime Minister - I agree with some people on the political left as well as the right who think he would be a very bad one.
My biggest nightmare is the possibility that no two parties (other than the Conservatives and Labour, which would not work) have enough seats to form a coalition government or other stable arrangement.
Fortunately that is not inevitable either.
There really is everything to play for - every hour of campaigning work, every vote cast, could make a huge change to the election result. And let nobody tell you that the parties have similar policies or that the election will make no difference - to find a time when the Conservatives and Labour were further apart you have to go back at least 25 years and arguably more than 30: to the time of Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot.
It may not be as exciting as the "hundred days" of Napoleon's return from Elba or the Battle of Britain. But make no mistake, the next hundred days will be one of the more important such periods in our country's history.
Comments
I think the SNP will take seats from labour, and i dont think ukip will do so well, i would expect carswell to be the only holder of a ukip seat.
I would say lib dem would lose about half their seats, and would now be surprised to see a conservative minority win, followed by a Labour/SNP government.