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Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably aware that the UK had a General Election yesterday. One question that has come up is "what would have happened had there been a Labour-Lib Dem alliance"? TL;DR: the Tories would still have won, but with a reduced majority.
My (pretty simple) method:
and 12 constituencies which would have flipped to "Leave":
On top of that, there are 9 constituencies which might have flipped to "Remain" (but "Other" votes could have changed the result - see above):
and two constituencies which might have flipped to "Leave":
So, given all that, we can say that "Remain" would have gained between 42 and 51 seats, while "Leave" would have gained between 12 and 14. It's unlikely that all the "maybe" Remain seats would have gone but none of the "maybe" Leave seats, so let's take the two limits together. The baseline results are 365 seats for Leave (all Tory) and 267 for Remain (203 Labour, 48 SNP, 11 Lib Dem, 4 Plaid Cymru and 1 Green). The "missing" 18 seats are the Northern Irish ones. If we assume none of the "maybe" seats change, we get 365 + 12 - 42 = 335 for Leave and 267 + 42 - 12 = 297 for Remain, still a reasonably comfortable majority as the effective number needed for a majority is 320 due to the 7 Sinn Fein MPs not taking their seats and the speaker and three deputies not voting. If all the "maybe" seats did flip, we'd have 365 + 14 - 51 = 328 and 267 + 51 - 14 = 304 for Remain which is getting a bit tight but still at least nominally a majority.
There you go, make of that what you will. As usual, code to generate these numbers is on my GitHub. All comments and polite criticism welcome.
My (pretty simple) method:
- Assume that all the remain parties got together and just put up one candidate in each seat. For this purpose, the remain parties are Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens.
- I then think it's a reasonable assumption that the Tories and the Brexit Party would have come to a more formal alliance given the alliance against them, so assume that the Tories, the Brexit Party and the (pretty much irrelevant) UKIP just put up one candidate in each seat.
- In each constituency, we can now reduce it to three parties: "Leave", "Remain" and "Other". Run the simple analysis to find which constituencies would have had a different result in this scenario than actually happened.
- Yes, this assumes everybody who voted for one of the parties in the alliance would have voted for the alliance. Close enough for government work (pun intentional).
- One other scenario can now occur: if Leave would have won a constituency, but (Remain + Other) would have got more votes, we at the very least need to do more analysis to see what would have happened as we don't know how those "other" voters would have voted. Similarly if you swap Leave and Remain.
- This analysis ends up ignoring Northern Ireland. This is because Northern Ireland is complicated (understatement there...)
- Aberconwy
- Altrincham and Sale West
- Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk
- Bolton North East
- Bridgend
- Bury North
- Carshalton and Wallington
- Cheadle
- Cheltenham
- Chingford and Woodford Green
- Chipping Barnet
- Cities Of London and Westminster
- Clwyd South
- Delyn
- Dumfries and Galloway
- Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale
- Filton and Bradley Stoke
- Finchley and Golders Green
- Gedling
- Hazel Grove
- Hendon
- High Peak
- Hitchin and Harpenden
- Kensington
- Lewes
- Milton Keynes North
- Moray
- Reading West
- Rushcliffe
- South Cambridgeshire (where I spent a good number of years)
- Southport
- Sutton and Cheam
- Truro and Falmouth
- Warrington South
- Watford
- West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine
- Wimbledon
- Winchester
- Wokingham (where I grew up!)
- Wrexham
- Wycombe
- Ynys Mon
and 12 constituencies which would have flipped to "Leave":
- Barnsley Central
- Barnsley East
- Dagenham and Rainham
- Doncaster Central
- Doncaster North
- Hartlepool
- Houghton and Sunderland South
- Kingston upon Hull East
- Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle
- Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford
- Stockton North
- Wentworth and Dearne
On top of that, there are 9 constituencies which might have flipped to "Remain" (but "Other" votes could have changed the result - see above):
- Bury South
- Derby North
- Dewsbury (my constituency!)
- Esher and Walton
- Guildford
- Pudsey
- St Ives
- Stroud
- York Outer
and two constituencies which might have flipped to "Leave":
So, given all that, we can say that "Remain" would have gained between 42 and 51 seats, while "Leave" would have gained between 12 and 14. It's unlikely that all the "maybe" Remain seats would have gone but none of the "maybe" Leave seats, so let's take the two limits together. The baseline results are 365 seats for Leave (all Tory) and 267 for Remain (203 Labour, 48 SNP, 11 Lib Dem, 4 Plaid Cymru and 1 Green). The "missing" 18 seats are the Northern Irish ones. If we assume none of the "maybe" seats change, we get 365 + 12 - 42 = 335 for Leave and 267 + 42 - 12 = 297 for Remain, still a reasonably comfortable majority as the effective number needed for a majority is 320 due to the 7 Sinn Fein MPs not taking their seats and the speaker and three deputies not voting. If all the "maybe" seats did flip, we'd have 365 + 14 - 51 = 328 and 267 + 51 - 14 = 304 for Remain which is getting a bit tight but still at least nominally a majority.
There you go, make of that what you will. As usual, code to generate these numbers is on my GitHub. All comments and polite criticism welcome.
