BBC News reports that the Conservatives have defied pre-election polls and all the exit polls to win an overall majority in the House of Commons. The race was thought to be much closer than the final results have shown, with many predicting either another coalition government or possibly a minority Conservative government being formed.
The Conservatives made gains in England and Wales and are forecast by the BBC to secure 331 seats in the Commons, giving them a slender majority. Sources say [Labour leader] Ed Miliband is expected to stand down after Labour was all but wiped out by the [Scottish National Party] in Scotland. [Liberal Democrat] leader Nick Clegg has already said he will quit, with his party set to be reduced from 57 to eight MPs. [United Kingdom Independence Party] leader Nigel Farage is also quitting after he failed to win Thanet South, losing by nearly 2,800 votes to the Conservatives.
The Conservatives have taken 331 of the 650 seats available. However, when Sinn Fein's continued boycott of Westminster is taken into account, along with the four seats they current hold, 324 is enough for a practical majority. An overall turnout of 66% is expected, marginally up on the previous general election in 2010.
Shortly after the results of the exit polls were revealed, Lord Ashdown, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, stated in a live interview on the BBC that he would "eat his hat" if the predicted losses for the Liberal Democrats came true. The poll showed the Lib Dems losing 45 seats - in the end they lost 47. Lord Ashdown mentioned shortly after he made the statement that he had received through Twitter ten offers of hats if he didn't have one of his own.
For those of us not familiar with UK politics, what are the views of the Conservatives we should be concerned about (if any)? How will their viewpoints affect the world political stage and/or the technology world?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @11:35PM
As I understand, EU treaties required the UK to pass equality legislation. However, the UK Equality Act, Section 10 [Religion or belief] remains a prospective clause [legislation.gov.uk]. This is not in the spirit of the treaties but it is widespread and applies to most of the other clauses in the act. Therefore, it is legal to discriminate based upon age [legislation.gov.uk], health [legislation.gov.uk], religion [legislation.gov.uk], gender [legislation.gov.uk], marital status [legislation.gov.uk] and other criteria. Sex discrimination only gets protection under previous legislation passed in response to industrial unrest in the 1960s [wikipedia.org]. Race discrimination had similar piecemeal legislation.
The most cinical move was a UK 2015 election pledge to force large companies to publish gender pay gap information. Unfortunately, that's been a prospective clause for five years [legislation.gov.uk].