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Shock UK exit poll suggests Britain's May fails to win majority


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5 minutes ago, darksidedog said:

Her days could well be numbered along with May it appears.

'Remain' Scotland giving Theresa May the nod for a hard Brexit. There's irony for you...

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7 minutes ago, Thaiwine said:

Yes Nick Clegg just lost his seat to Labour, lol

Karma is alive and well ......after all................:coffee1:

 

The state of play in Scotland. With only a third of the seats declared, the SNP have already lost 7

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2 hours ago, Basil B said:

One thing for sure Nicola Sturgeon and the five minute wonder party seem as popular as a drunk Glaswegian playing his bagpipes at 3 in the morning. 

Hey! I wisnae (that) drunk. I wuz jist celebratin' the demise o' the pretentious wee bizzum.

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If the Tories get a small overall majority it will be bad for May but leave the Government in a stronger situation than before the Election.

 

May will have to resign and be replaced by a more charismatic leader. 

 

Before the Election the House of Lords could block the Tories Brexit plans. This cannot now happen because they are in the Manifesto. Also new grammar schools will now be opened.

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Just now, baboon said:

UKIP are well on the way to doubling their seats...

Nigel Farage speaking a few mniutes ago on BBC Radio 5 Live hinting that he will be more active moving forward but still not keen on re-entering politics as an elected MP or returning to party leadership.

 

More of the same then.

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Why do they walk when playing the bagpipes? To get away from the noise...[emoji38]

I think it was the late Spike Milligan who said his favourite musical sound was the bagpipes, receding rapidly into the distance.

Listening on and off to BBC Radio 4s Election Night special, it seems full of excitement at how well Labour are doing. Nobody has yet to mention ( that I have heard) that the tories are likely to be the single biggest party, by some way.
Is it worth staying tuned for Mr Naughties bulldog chewing a wasp moment, when he has to admit that?
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1 minute ago, NanLaew said:

Nigel Farage speaking a few mniutes ago on BBC Radio 5 Live hinting that he will be more active moving forward but still not keen on re-entering politics as an elected MP or returning to party leadership.

 

More of the same then.

The turd that won't flush...

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Stunning blow for May as UK exit poll points to no clear winner

By Estelle Shirbon and Andy Bruce

 

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Ballots are tallied at a counting centre for Britain's general election in Sunderland, June 8, 2017. REUTERS/Ed Sykes

 

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May spectacularly lost her electoral gamble, according to an exit poll that suggested her Conservatives would fall short of a majority in parliament, throwing her Brexit plans into disarray.

 

The exit poll predicted the Conservatives would win 314 seats in the 650-member parliament and the leftist opposition Labour Party 266 -- a "hung parliament" with no clear winner.

 

May unexpectedly called the snap election seven weeks ago to increase the slim majority she had inherited from predecessor David Cameron and strengthen her hand before launching into arduous divorce talks with the European Union, set to start in just over a week.

 

Instead, if the exit poll showing strong gains for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour is anywhere near accurate, she risks losing power in what would be an ignominious end to her 11 months at Number 10 Downing Street.

 

Even if the exit poll has underestimated the number of Conservative seats, as it did in 2015, and the party ends up with a slim majority, May will be so weakened that she may not be able to keep the job.

 

"MAYHEM" screamed the headline in the tabloid Sun newspaper. "Britain on a knife edge," said the Daily Mail.

 

The BBC reported that 76 seats appeared too close to call. As the first results came in, it appeared that anti-EU party UKIP had lost a large chunk of its vote share, which had split evenly between the Conservatives and Labour. Pundits had expected the UKIP vote to go strongly to the Conservatives.

 

Until the final results become clear, it is hard to predict which party might end up leading the next government and steering Britain into the Brexit talks.

 

Political deadlock could derail negotiations with the other 27 EU countries ahead of Britain's exit from the bloc, due in March 2019, before they even begin in earnest.

 

Brexit talks were scheduled to start on June 19 but could now be delayed, a source of major uncertainty and concern for investors.

 

Senior Conservatives were quick to say exit polls had been wrong in the past. In 2015, the exit poll suggested they would fall short, but when the actual results came in they had a slim majority.

 

Sterling fell by more than two cents against the U.S. dollar as markets digested the prospect of extreme political uncertainty and even the risk of a second election this year.

 

"A hung parliament is the worst outcome from a markets perspective as it creates another layer of uncertainty ahead of the Brexit negotiations and chips away at what is already a short timeline to secure a deal for Britain," said Craig Erlam, an analyst with brokerage Oanda in London.

 

FAILED GAMBLE

 

The exit poll pointed to an extraordinary failure for May, who was enjoying opinion poll leads of 20 points and more when she called the election.

 

By putting her fate in voters' hands, three years before an election was due, she had hoped to secure a much stronger mandate that would boost her in complex negotiations on the terms of Britain's EU departure and its future trade relationship with the bloc.

 

Should she be forced to step down as prime minister after this election, that would make her tenure the shortest of any British premier since the 1920s.

 

During the campaign, she backtracked on a major proposal on care for the elderly, opted not to debate her opponents on television and faced questions over her record on security after Britain was hit by two Islamist militant attacks that killed 30 people.

 

May was widely derided for endlessly repeating her slogan of "strong and stable leadership" despite her u-turn on the care policy. She gave few policy details and appeared mostly at tightly controlled events. Some critics nicknamed her "the Maybot".

 

Her opinion poll lead narrowed sharply, although the consensus before the exit poll remained that she would win a majority.

 

"There will be a huge post-mortem about having the general election, about the manifesto ... about the style of the campaign," former Conservative finance minister George Osborne said on ITV.

 

"COMPLETELY CATASTROPHIC"

 

By contrast, Labour's Corbyn, a veteran socialist who had initially been written off as a no-hoper, was widely deemed to have run a strong, policy-rich campaign that enthused many followers.

 

If the exit poll is correct, Corbyn could attempt to form a government with smaller parties which, like Labour, strongly oppose most of May's policies on domestic issues such as public spending cuts.

 

If Labour does take power with the backing of the Scottish nationalists and the Liberal Democrats, both parties adamantly opposed to Brexit, Britain's future will be very different to the course the Conservatives were planning and could even raise the possibility of a second referendum.

 

The exit poll forecast the Scottish National Party (SNP) would win 34 seats, the centre-left Liberal Democrats 14, the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru three and the Greens one. Other parties were projected to win 18 seats.

 

"If the poll is anything like accurate, this is completely catastrophic for the Conservatives and for Theresa May," said Osborne.

 

Japanese bank Nomura said that based on the exit poll and on the results in the first two constituencies to declare, its election model suggested the Conservatives would end up winning 331 seats, a slim majority. However, it said that it would be able to produce a more accurate forecast when 10 percent of results were in, which will be around 0100 GMT.

 

For May, who went into the campaign expecting to win a landslide, even a narrow win later in the night would leave her badly damaged.

 

BREXIT IN LIMBO?

 

May herself had said during her campaign: "It’s a fact that if we lose just six seats, we will lose our majority and Jeremy Corbyn will become prime minister," predicting that the Scottish Nationalists and Liberal Democrats would back him.

 

Whilst this was campaign rhetoric designed to drive support for her party, it also suggested she saw little prospect of forming a coalition with other parties, almost all of whom are opposed to her Brexit strategy built around leaving the EU's single market, controlling immigration and escaping the jurisdiction of EU courts.

 

The centre-left, pro-EU Liberal Democrats, who were in coalition with the Conservatives between 2010 and 2015, looked unlikely to go down that route again. They were close to wiped out in the 2015 election.

 

Their former leader Nick Clegg, who was deputy prime minister during the coalition years, said the party would not prop up a Conservative government.

 

In Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a natural ally of the Conservatives, said it would negotiate with the Conservatives if they fell short of a majority, as both parties had common ground.

 

Any delay in Brexit talks would reduce the time available for what are expected to be the most complex negotiations in post-World War Two European history.

 

Labour has said it would push ahead with Brexit but would scrap May's negotiating plans and make its priority maintaining the benefits of both the EU single market and its customs union, arguing no deal with the EU would be the worst possible outcome.

 

It also proposed raising taxes for the richest 5 percent of Britons, scrapping university tuition fees and investing 250 billion pounds ($315 billion) in infrastructure plans.

 

(Additional reporting by Kate Holton, David Milliken, Paul Sandle, William Schomberg, Andy Bruce, William James, Alistair Smout and Paddy Graham in London, Padraic Halpin in Dublin, writing by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

 
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-- © Copyright Reuters 2017-06-09
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Just now, Thaiwine said:

Not yet the tories are just about holding their own at the min, tho Labour are storming it 16 seats up so far.

Standing PM's of any ilk that call snap elections to ostensibly boost their majority and subsequently fail at that task do not typically get a do-over, mulligan, resit or any other form of second attempt.

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8 minutes ago, Orton Rd said:

Time for Boris to step up and ditch this terrible weak women, she was never going to be another Thatcher. Keeping my fingers crossed for the next home secretary though, we need a laugh

 

 

Well she is ill , poor woman is going to have to have  a brain transplant , mind you a face transplant at the same time wouldnt go amiss .

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Time for Boris to step up and ditch this terrible weak women, she was never going to be another Thatcher. Keeping my fingers crossed for the next home secretary though, we need a laugh
 
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Please please let Boris be the new leader of the Tory party, it will be the end of the conservatives for a while.


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