"The arms that you wield now are not such as your forefathers wielded; but they are infinitely more effective, and infinitely more irresistable" ~ Cymru Fydd leaflet, 1890

Friday 8 May 2015

General Election 2015 - Results

Ahead of the 2015 general election Wales had the opportunity to paint itself whatever colour it wanted to. We had a blank canvass, a chance to reject the two party politics that dominates the UK.

A blank canvass

And this is how we decided to paint the blank canvass.

This is how we painted Wales in 2015 - twitter | facebook

I've dug through the results, using a combination of Fails online (basic) and ITV (in depth) to fill in the blanks to compile the following table. I will rank the main parties from first to fifth. There will be some seats where independents have outperformed some of the parties so please feel free to use the above links for a closer look.

First place in each seat is yellow, second is grey, third is orange, 4th is green, 5th is white and 6th is blue.

Table showing the six parties election results. Share via twitter | facebook
The Greens beat the Lib Dems in three seats and beat Plaid in one. UKIP were second in six seats and third in 25. Plaid had six second places and two third places. The Lib Dems came 5th in 27 seats.

Plaid held their three seats from 2010 - 2015. Ynys Mon was their key target seat and was won by Labour by just a few hundred votes. Ceredigion remained Lib Dem and is their sole seat in Wales. It's worth adding that even if all the Greens had voted Plaid they still wouldn't have won.

Llanelli is a huge shock, whilst the austerity loving Labour vote increased by a few dozen the Plaid vote dropped by over 2000 votes. The Tories increased their vote by a few hundred whilst the Lib Dem vote collapsed. There was a large UKIP increase by over 5000 votes but the overall number of votes increased by just under 1000.

The most depressing aspect of the results is that the people of Wales overwhelmingly chose more austerity. When the Welsh budget is cut further there can be no complaint from anyone who voted for the the London parties.

Bring on the cuts, we deserve all we get. - Share via twitter | facebook
Up in Scotland though, the difference couldn't be greater. The SNP won 56 out of 59 seats. They left the three unionist parties with one seat each. This leads to the incredible scenario where Wales now has at least 59 MPs that will fight Wales' corner, unfortunately only three of those will be in Wales.

As I was watching the results live I switched over to BBC Scotland as our own channel was far too depressing to watch. Seat after seat swung from Labour who had commanded majorities in the tens of thousands.

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