Conservatives have held their marginal seat in Nuneaton in the West Midlands, just east of Birmingham. Their candidate’s share of the popular vote increased from 41.5 percent to 45.5 percent, while the Labour share of the vote rose from 30.3 percent to 34.9 percent. Pre-election polls suggested that Labour would wrest many marginal seats won by the Conservatives in 2010; Nuneaton was one of them, and the result there suggests that they won’t win many.
This result pretty well confirms the exit poll and refutes the notion, advanced understandably by Labour and Lib Dem spokesmen, that the pre-election polls were right and the exit poll wrong. This was confirmed by the fact that there was no significant Labour swing, as suggested by pre-election polls, in the two London seats in which the results have been announced.
Former Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett, who stood down and is not running for re-election this year, accepted this analysis and said that Conservatives might win an absolute majority of 323 seats — a very unwelcome result, he went on to say. “We’ve got to learn the lessons for reaching out to what Ed Miliband called ‘one nation politics.’ We must not revert to the far left.” He’s the first Labour spokesmen I’ve seen, just before 1:00am UK time, take that view.
