BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION - 4TH JULY

Lee Anderthal re-elected for Reform. Big Independent vote means he's in with a small enough total poll.

He was a Labour councillor only about 5 years ago; he could easily have a fourth party by the next election.

Labour hold both Barnsley

That Reform 13 has to be re-evaluated as less now.

BBC are saying their swingometer's broke, going near 25 percent swing to Labour in some seats... (a swingometer thats totally virtual reality, and could go to over 9000 if needed......)

Its pretty mad that a party that wins about a third of the share of the vote can get 2 thirds of the seats.

Such an undemocratic system.

Instead of a labour landside, there really should be a coalition with Labour, Lib Dems and the Greens

I'm surprised that we don't yet have our resident Farage superfan on here screaming to the rafters that their beloved Putin-fangirl has finally managed to become an MP. A backbench MP of a tiny protest party…but an MP nonetheless alas.

Makes me wonder what might become of GBNews now. With a Labour government they could keep the Gbeebies train chugging along with daily complaints about how those lefty marxists are somehow ruining a thing. But will enough people continue to watch with Farage gone?

That's also assuming that he gives up his rant talk show. As a sitting MP he can't really be doing that, although that said GBNews hasn't followed OFCOM rules all that much at all since its launch. Wouldn't be too surprised if he attempted to keep his show and be an MP.

Whatever you say about RTE you can't slate them for poor election coverage over here. It's one of the things they do really well imo.

The UK election jams into 3 or 4 hours what takes us 3 or 4 days!

Labour only got about 35% of the vote yet have a about a two thirds majority. Bizzare voting system.

That's the primary problem with First Past the Post, and you could say similar about the Tory win in 2019. Their landslide back then also only came from small percentage shifts in certain areas. It's why I don't take seriously any suggestion that Ireland should adopt a FPTP system.

The Irish system for example is far more proportionally representative, with the consquence that it does seem to result in coalition governments. The same would probably happen in the UK in such a system, with Labour & Lib Dems likely forming a coalition and the seat distrubution being very different.

Oh absolutely, I was talking about rte purely from an Irish election coverage point of view. People were giving out about it earlier int he thread.

Clearly PR more representative.

Seems like Reform splitting the tory vote is really what got Labour in here. Corbyn's Labour actually got significantly more votes than yesterday.

Could have been even one better but for less than 200 votes in East Derry.

My sentiment too, although I'm a little disappointed that the Lib Dems didn't overtake the Tories to become the Opposition. Only a little disappointed since that was a long shot anyway.

A bit concerned that Reform got so many votes overall despite their tiny amount of seats. I'm wondering if most of those votes were diluted out to all of the seats the Tories lost to other parties as the only alternative some Tory voters were willing to use. May indicate that there are still a good few ultra-nationalist types out there that are not all that bothered by the tone of Reform, or the character of their Putin-supporting leader.

The DUP being replaced by the TUV is a worrying sign of the potential problems ahead on this island.