How are things going to look in May?

All the main pundits have done a New Year prediction of the General Election result. I’m not a professional pundit, just an opinionated Labour activist, but here is mine, in a bit more detail and so with more hostages to fortune than their ones. It will be interesting to look back in May and see how accurate I was.

I arrived at it by taking my best guess at what the final national percentages would be given the current polls (I’ve assumed Lab 35%, Con 32%, LD 12%, UKIP 10%, Greens 3%, Others 8%) then taking into account local factors and specific seat opinion polls when I looked at seats at the margins of those swing results or with a UKIP challenge, and factoring in a higher swing to Labour in some regions like London where there is evidence for this. For Scotland I assumed a Scottish Labour vote share recovering to 35% and a degree of anti-SNP tactical voting. I’m expecting a better performance by UKIP in their target seats than most people are, and that the SNP will slip back a bit.

My predictions for seats by region are:

London
Lab  47 (+9)
Con 21 (-7)
LD 5 (-2)

South East
Con 65 (-10)
Lab 10 (+6)
UKIP 6 (+6)
LD 3 (-1)
Speaker 1 (-)
Green 0 (-1)

South West
Con 35 (-1)
Lab 10 (+6)
LD 10 (-5)

Eastern
Con 41 (-11)
Lab 11 (+9)
UKIP 4 (+4)
LD 2 (-2)

East Midlands
Lab 23 (+8)
Con 22 (-9)
UKIP 1 (+1)

West Midlands
Lab 32 (+8)
Con 26 (-7)
LD 1 (-1)

North West
Lab 61 (+14)
Con 9 (-12)
LD 4 (-2)

Yorkshire & The Humber
Lab 39 (+7)
Con 13 (-6)
LD 1 (-2)
UKIP 1 (+1)

North East
Lab 27 (+2)
Con 1 (-1)
LD 1 (-1)

Wales
Lab 30 (+4)
Con 5 (-3)
PC 3 (-)
LD 2 (-1)

Scotland
Lab 30 (-11)
SNP 23 (+17)
LD 5 (-6)
Con 1 (-)

So the national totals would put Labour just a whisker away from an overall majority and able to form a single-party government:

Lab 320 (+62)
Con 239 (-67)
LD 34 (-23)
SNP 23 (+17)
UKIP 12 (+12)
PC 3 (-)
Speaker 1 (-)
Green 0 (-1)
Northern Ireland Parties 18 (-)

All the usual caveats apply – this is just my best guess based on the situation right now and the limited knowledge I have of specific local circumstances.

All still to play for!

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