#GE2015 One week today, the UK decides

With Rupert Murdoch’s Sun urging its readers to vote Conservative to block the SNP, and Murdoch’s Sun in Scotland urging its readers to vote SNP because the Tories don’t understand Scotland, you know we’re entering the final crazy days of the 2015 UK general election.

The polls are unchanged and we’re heading for another hung parliament, with the electorate refusing to give a single party a majority in the House of Commons. This is despite our manifestly unfair electoral system regularly awarding giving parties with minority electoral support a majority of the seats.

Nate Silver, the statistician who correctly forecast the results of every state in the 2012 US presidential race, made his prediction for next week’s general election on Panorama on Monday evening. His conclusion is a near dead heat between Conservatives and Labour, triggering a ‘chaotic, uncertain nightmare’ in which the parties furiously negotiate to form a government.

Using opinion polls from 12 Apr 2015 to 29 Apr 2015, sampling 21,058 people, Electoral Calculus predicts the following distribution of seats:

The Green surge appears to have stalled, but they’re possibly strong enough in a couple of seats, UKIP support is holding steady and they will secure one or possibly two seats. The SNP, on the other hand, looks unstoppable in Scotland with 54% support in the latest poll. Which just goes to show that Rupert Murdoch (proprietor, The Times and Sun) doesn’t make election winners, he just backs those most likely to win to protect his media interests. It never was, nor ever will be, “The Sun wot won it.”

But the real story is that Labour and Conservatives have failed to break away from each other. Blue & Green doesn’t hold a flag for any political party. While a third of our readership supports the Greens, the other ‘leaders’ debate’ parties enjoy 54% support (Con 16%, Lab 14%, LD 11%, UKIP 8%, SNP 3% and PC 1%).

One of our key questions is, ‘How deeply unpopular must the Conservatives be?’ Despite incumbency, presiding over an economic recovery, having the support of the majority of the English press barons (Telegraph, Times/Sun, and Mail) and vastly outspending their rivals by an enormous margin, they haven’t been able to pull ahead in the polls.

Our other key question is ‘How deeply unpopular is Labour in its traditional heartlands of Scotland?’ it took the Conservatives four decades to lose their power base in Scotland (they had 36 of 72 seats in 1955, and none in 1997), but it has taken ten years for Labour to lose theirs (they had 41 of 59 seats in 2010, and could be reduced to none in 2015).

The Conservatives are now planning to ‘rip it up’, whatever that means, the Lib Dems are exposing Tory child benefit cuts and Labour is talking to Russell Brand.

Tonight on BBC1 at 8pm David Cameron and Ed Miliband will face questions from the Question Time audience.

Who will win tonight? Who will overall? In this election every vote really does count.

You can see which party’s policies match your views at www.voteforpolicies.org.uk/survey/blueandgreentomorrow.

For a full list of candidates standing in each constituency please visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/constituencies.

To see the profile of your constituency and the state of the parties over the last few elections in then please visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Kingdom_Parliament_constituencies.

Photo: yarranz via Freeimages

Further reading:

#GE2015 Will Airdrie & Shotts, Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross and Na h-Eileanan an Iar, vote for policies, parties or personalities in 2015?