A mere 72 hours after polls closed on 4th June, the parties and candidates contesting the 72 UK seats available for the European Parliament will know their fate later this evening. Let’s remind ourselves what happened five years ago, in 2004, when these seats were last up for grabs:
Conservatives: 27% (27 MEPs)
Labour: 23% (19)
Ukip: 16% (12)
Lib Dems: 15% (12)
Greens: 6% (2)
BNP: 5% (0)
SNP: 1% (2)
Plaid: 1% (1)
N. Ireland: 3 MEPs (1 each for DUP, Sinn Fein, Ulster Unionists)
What will happen this time? Will the Tories do better under David Cameron than they did under Michael Howard? Will Labour retain second place and stick above 20%? Will Ukip surge through to take runners-up spot despite their patchy record over the last five years? Can the Lib Dems retain the 12 seats won in ’04, in spite of the overall reduction from 78 to 72 MEPs? Might the Greens shock everyone by coming fourth? And will the BNP do enough to gain one or more seats?
Those Lib Dem Voice readers who are members of our private party members’ forum can view and make predictions in the LDV thread here – those who aren’t, or are happy to expose their thinking to public gaze, can use the comments thread here instead. For what it’s worth, here’s my wet-finger-in-the-air guesstimate:
Over to you…
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3 Comments
We got 18% in the North East (no change) and Fiona Hall re-elected, together with one Lab and one Con.
BBC graphics are so poor that not only do they make it impossible to compare 2009 and 2004 effectively, but the percentages for a single year are so unreadable that a close-up of a single figure is required. Why not a simple bar chart filling the screen?
Eastern England: Andrew Duff safely back, Greens (up 3% on 9%) fail to win a seat. No change. 3 Tory, 2 Ukip, 1 LD, 1 Labour.
Wikipedia.org has good figures on past Euro elections – eg articles on each regional constituency, list of candidates this time, etc.