an island of red in a sea of blue

Nottingham (and Gedling) stayed Labour, and the map of constituencies show Nottingham as an island of red in a sea of blue. The result wasn't as close as some polls may have suggested, with Chris Leslie having a majority of 6,969 despite a 1.9% swing from Labour to the LibDems. The turn out of 56.4% was up by 7.5% from 2005 with 33112 people voting.

The final figures were:

Name	Party	Votes	%
Christopher Leslie	Labour	15,022	45.4
Sam Boote	Liberal Democrat	8,053	24.3
Ewan Lamont	Conservative	7,846	23.7
Pat Wolfe	UK Independence Party	1,138	3.4
Benjamin Hoare	Green	928	2.8
Parvaiz Sardar	Christian Party	125	0.4

Nationally, the picture is very unclear. I think Paddy Ashdown summed it up best when he said that "The public have spoken, we're just not sure what they have said". Cleggmania failed to deliver more seats and Cameron has failed to win an outright majority. The figures, with 1 seat still to be declared due to the death of the UKIP candidate before election day make for a hung parliament:

Conservative	306 seats
Labour	258 sets
Liberal Democrat	57 seats
Democratic Unionist Party	8 seats
Scottish National Party	6 seats
Sinn Fein	5 seats
Plaid Cymru	3 seats
Social Democratic & Labour Party	3 seats
Green	1 seat (their first ever MP)
Alliance Party	1 seat
Other (Speaker)	1 seat

The BNP suffered across the country, failing in their hoped for seats of Barking and Stoke. In Barking, they even lost all their seats on the Council despite their plans for it being the first BNP run council. Let's see if they implode...

Since the election results became clear, the debate about potential coalitions or informal alliances has been continuous. The LibDems have been meeting with the Tories as the party with the most seats and the largest number of votes, but there have been lots of mutterings about what the (unwritten) constitution says and rumours to fill the airwaves on the 24 hour rolling TV news channels.

By tea time today we have had a series of meetings between the LibDem and Tory negotiating teams, a face to face meeting between Clegg and Cameron, hundreds of acres of newsprint speculating on what was being offered and possible outcomes, and a late development this evening with Clegg being spotted by a member of the public entering the Foreign Office by the back door while the media in Downing Street saw Brown stroll across the road into the front door. It then emerged that they had held a face to face meeting of their own.

I will probably keep this blog going until a decision is made and we have a government....