The Eeeeew

[Mongrel]

Looks like Britain's headed for a minority government and a hung parliament.

And - ooops - the news just broke that Labour is now more likely to be the winner than the Conservatives. Expect there to be a lot of votecount arguing!

So the Tories are now 2 for 2 on calling votes and shooting themselves in the foot face.

Two PMs call votes that go against the way they wanted. Political elite decides letting people vote is a bad idea.

Given it's the Tories...

[Mazian]

Looks like Britain's headed for a minority government and a hung parliament.

And - ooops - the news just broke that Labour is now more likely to be the winner than the Conservatives. Expect there to be a lot of votecount arguing!

Can't say I'm seeing that; forecast I'm seeing at the moment is 322 for the Tories and 261 for Labour. Majority is 326, but then there's... Ireland!

* Sinn Fein MPs never take their seats, so if they hold their four current seats, effective majority reduced to 324
* DUP and UUP have 10 seats between them in the previous parliament and already often quietly work with the Conservatives, making them potential kingmakers, which would then inevitably have a follow-on effect on NI politics


Meanwhile, Nick Clegg just lost his seat. Remember when Nick Clegg had political influence? It seems so long ago now.

[Thad]

Votes are still being tallied. Exit polls are showing anything from a very slim majority for the Tories to a very slim majority for Labour. It looks like at this point the Conservatives' best-case scenario is that they wind up looking like fools and enter Brexit negotiations from a severely weakened bargaining position.

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg just lost his seat. Remember when Nick Clegg had political influence? It seems so long ago now.

As I recall that was mostly Nick Clegg's own fault, so I can't say I have much sympathy there.

[Mongrel]

[Mazian]

As I recall that was mostly Nick Clegg's own fault, so I can't say I have much sympathy there.

See, he and Cameron had common ground after all. Or at least a shared interest in unnecessary self-inflicted wounds.

[zaratustra]

[Thad]

Yep, looking like Conservative/DUP coalition. Which raises its own share of issues, as the DUP leadership wants a soft Brexit, Northern Irish voters don't want Brexit at all, and the non-UK portion of Ireland is staying in the EU, full stop, and nobody's really keen on what closing the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland would mean.

[Mongrel]

So if you've followed the ongoing governance mess in Northern Ireland, May's alliance with the DUP is baaaaaasically the worst possible thing she could have done for Northern Ireland. Like, possibly-having-the-Good-Friday-agreement-completely-collapse levels of bad.

Twitter threads are The Worst Format, but this is the best quick summary I've seen, if this is all new to you:

[Thad]

Twitter threads are The Worst Format

No, screenshots of Twitter threads are The Worst Format.

Except at reminding me I'm way overdue for an eye exam. For that purpose, they're a great format. I should really schedule one. I've got a week vacation coming up; maybe I can squeeze an appointment in after my trip to Flagstaff and before my trip to Tucson.

Linking to the first tweet pulls up a page that goes on down through the next bunch. (There's a "next 26 replies" accordion right above where other people start arguing with him.)

Anyhow, thanks for the reference (if not the format)...yeah, this hasn't been getting any attention in North American coverage at all, aside from general references that there's not a lot of appetite for Irish border enforcement for obvious reasons.

[Mongrel]

WRT the format, it baffles me that this has become a thing instead of people just... you know writing an article and then linking to it with a tweet.

But that would be crazy.

I blame Jeet Heer.

[Thad]

I guess if you're already typing a thing on a fucking phone, Twitter's as good a place as any to squeeze it out 140 characters at a time.

The link question raises a good point: it's fucking inconvenient to make a link on a phone. (I mean, a good link, not a straight link.) I mean, maybe Twitter's got a decent frontend for it (it doesn't take much; Microsoft Word's had an "insert link" button for, what, 20 years? Just put an "insert link" button, then one field for URL and another for label; it ain't fuckin' rocket science), but it seems like a bafflingly rare thing.

I don't suppose anybody knows of a screen keyboard that has easy shortcuts for <a href=""></a> and [ url=][/ url]?

[Thad]

Stross has a nice quick rundown of his thoughts on the election and its aftermath (so far). I'm kinda hoping the Democrats see this bit as maybe being applicable here in the US:

Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn delivered the biggest swing to Labour since 1945, his rebellious right-wing Blairite back-benchers are publicly recanting and swearing allegiance, and everybody woke up blinking to discover that (a) the 18-24 demographic turn out to vote in large numbers and vote overwhelmingly for socialist policies if you run a manifesto that doesn't prioritize the interests of pensioners, and (b) the UK still has a broad base of support for honest left-wing policies.

From there, there's talk about the difficulties in reaching common ground between the Tories and the DUP (DUP's going to have trouble both with moderate Tories, who support abortion and gay rights, and with hardliners, who want to close the Irish border), and some related allegations of Saudi election interference.

[Mongrel]

HOO BOY

[Thad]

Theresa May ditches key manifesto pledges from Queen's Speech after failing to secure DUP deal

Downing Street had previously signalled that a deal with the DUP was imminent. However, DUP sources told Sky News on Tuesday that negotiations with the Conservative party in order to prop up May's minority government "haven't proceeded in a way that DUP would have expected" adding that they had been "surprised at the [low] level of negotiating experience" in May's negotiating team.

The channel's Ireland correspondent David Blevins described May's failure to win agreement from the DUP as "a quite extraordinary debacle".

As a result May is understood to have dropped a series of major election pledges from the speech that will be unveiled by the Queen on Wednesday.

[Spooky Skeleton]

This is more than her just ditching pledges, if they can't get DUP on board, this government is dead on arrival.

With that apartment fire driving May's already low numbers lower, she's doomed. All Labour needs to do is get some of those people in Scotland who voted for the Scottish independence party to go Labour instead and it'll be Corbyn as Prime Minister of a Labour majority.

[Thad]

Maybe I just don't understand how parliamentary democracy works, but...it looks to me like electing a Labour PM wouldn't just take the SNP, it would also take the Lib Dems, and both DUP and Sinn Fein.

Which...doesn't sound nearly as easy as what you said.

[Bal]

Some of it has to do with confidence in government. Even if Labour doesn't have a majority, the mandate from the election kind of demands that the Conservatives step down, and even if they don't, Theresa May really should. Like, they called an election to gain a stronger mandate to do things their way. Instead, they lost seats, lost the majority, and I don't think made gains literally anywhere. From a political perspective this essentially means they lost the election even if they occupy the most seats without a majority.

[Mongrel]

I'm not sure if Thad realizes that if the government fails a confidence vote, the government falls and there are new elections.