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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 Sunday May 10 2015, @03:48AM
I don't know about the brain bleach. Murdoch might very well have done an effective job. Scotland did abandon Labor (I refuse to use your Frenchy "u") for SNP, and England voted Tory. You can choose to be disgusted at men like Murdoch for pushing that sort of thing, or you can think of it as the voters' decision to ratify the calls of the demagogues.
Blaming the publisher is taking a supply-centric view: they control the supply of media, but nobody except a certified moron would look at either front page of the Sun and think it anything but horribly biased. Hell, I doubt a paper like that would even be profitable in the US; even Fox is subtler than British papers.
Look instead to the consumer, the demand-side of the equation. After all, they're the ones voting, making the Solemn Decision in the voting booth. They could have rejected Murdoch's calls-to-action en masse. Instead, they embraced them.
At worst, Murdoch is a very efficient, very good orator in his medium. He'd rank up there with Pericles and Cicero, if the British hadn't been so earnest about killing off classical education. Whether you like Mudoch's views is irrelevant: the majority do seem to like them. After all, if you believe that Murdoch is some evil wizard manipulating the voters like sheep through the magic and hypnotic power of media, rather than an orator persuading them, then why do you let the hypnosheep vote? Do you really believe in democracy in that case?
Democratic government is based on the idea of the demand-side: that the media consumers are smart enough to make decisions for themselves, smart enough to elect suitable representatives, and smart enough to be able to consume media without being hypnotized by it. If Murdoch were dangerous, it would be because the people are a fickle mass incapable of exercising sovereignty with prudence, and that would mean that it would be better if HRH took real power.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday May 10 2015, @06:30PM
Please don't defend Murdock (he pays lawyers for that), ever heard of News of the World [wikipedia.org]? Murdock (chaotic idiot) is no Cicero (lawful neutral) and not even a Goebbels (lawful evil). Murdock hated what newspapers were and then he became what he hated /and/ something worse. If you're not careful you'll end up defending Pierce Morgan (chaotic idiot) or —Godwin be damned— Hitler (chaotic idiot). Just don't.
Fewer people than ever read /any/ newspapers because they're all mostly shit. As an example the circulation for something like the Guardian is only about 150 thousand and from the NotW link you'll see they only ever sold a circulation of about 2.8 million and they were something close to the most widely bought paper. It's not a lot.
I refuse to believe most people buy any Sun version for anything much but entertainment value (a page of a topless beauty and then a lot of tits that are more or less entertaining and somewhat popular or “love and hate” or “love to hate” (different things to different people) loudmouths like Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear) any more than I believe most people buy any Sports Today/Weekly/Sunday/whatever version for anything but enjoying a few pretty/amazing boobs and plenty of vulgarity. Brits (and Irish!) like and are good at all kinds of comedy but a lot of it isn't all that accessible at face value or straight away. I challenge you to watch Frankie Boyle if you haven't, a communist teetotaler Scot/Glaswegian and in my opinion a great comedian despite of and because of almost constantly going far off the deep end (and his Antichrist conception joke is especially hilarious, maybe mostly because it's him saying it and there's no way it isn't biographical).
British papers, Hong Kong magazines, Japanese manga (the telephone catalog behemoths of tissue paper as sold in Japan, not the rarefied western prints), and American shock jocks all answer to the same kind of market for throwaway distractions so I'd say you yourself still end up attributing far too much influence to MSM newspapers; there actually isn't all that much demand of any serious nature or at least any such demand surely isn't being met by these things to any significant degree. Also remember that with proportional representation the outcome of the election would have been very different with plenty of seats for both the Greens and UKIP (and that in itself is also a very good argument in favor of both Scottish and Welsh independence or at least much greater political independence than now, and maybe for Northern Ireland as well: even though they already have their own parliaments/assemblies they could all be smothered under proportional representation in the common parliament in Westminster).
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