https://vine.co/v/eWWJBZvdBUd
Ooer.
Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband gets his ‘coalition’ face on.
Earlier: Presuming Ed
Notice: The Broadsheet UK Election team will be on hand throughout the night to deliver the results at they come in to Twitter and the BBC. We have correspondents watching both Sky and ITV even RTÉ at all the key count centres. Join them. Bring a flask.
Meanwhile…
Democracy.
It’s a beautiful thing.
Via Joanne Lake
UK Labour party leader Ed Miliband and wife Justine Thornton after casting their votes in today’s UK General Election in Sutton, South Yorkshire this morning.
On Wednesday, ICM released provisional numbers which showed the two main parties deadlocked on 35% each. But the telephone fieldwork continued into evening, and the final figures – based on the full sample of 2,000 interviews – find Labour holding steady on 35%, while the Conservatives slip to 34%.
Any excuse.
Labour has one-point lead over Tories in final Guardian/ICM poll (Guardian)
Meanwhile…
Robert Webb writes:
Now, I’m not one of those guys who think that all Conservatives are evil. This is a solipsism from which I was saved by the reality that nearly everyone else in our family was, in essence, a) a decent, loving person and b) a Tory. A father, a stepfather, four grandparents and a beloved great-aunt – all dead, all Conservative voters. But it’s worth making a distinction between the voter and the thing that they’re voting for. Life is long but too short to hate people. Still, it’s entirely legitimate to hate a set of ideas.
And a tone of voice. Every day, I walk past the newspaper stand of the local shop and see the headlines blurting from the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the rest of them: how business “leaders” are scared of Labour, how Ed Miliband is a threat to literally everything that was ever dear and good, how Nicola Sturgeon is personally about to tie him to a chair and beat him around the head with a concrete (if it’s the Mail, inevitably) haggis until he calls the Kremlin and invites Putin to come over and strangle the Queen, and so on.
And I think, wow, these guys aren’t kidding around. The right-wing establishment – the Tories, their self-interested newspapers, their self-deceiving friends in the City, their self-serving business supporters signing their bullshit letters – are throwing everything at this.
Not just the kitchen sink but the plumbing, the sewers and the attendant rats. They can’t bear it. They can’t bear to be challenged. In the fathomless depths of its arrogance, they just can’t cope with the thought that anyone else could be allowed to run the show.
I wouldn’t put Ed Miliband on a T-shirt, but I will vote for him (Rober Webb, The New Statesman)
The eve of 1992 General Election issue of The UK Sun (top) and today’s cover (above).
Ah here.
Research by the Media Standards Trust found that 95% of the leader columns in Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid were anti-Labour ahead of Thursday’s general election, compared with 79% that were judged anti-Labour in 1992.
…Rupert Murdoch is said to have berated journalists on the Sun for not doing enough to stop Labour winning the election and warned of the consequences of a [Ed] Miliband win for the future of News UK.
Miliband has said he will take action against the amount of power wielded by Murdoch in a review of rules regulating media ownership in the UK…..
Sun has torn into Ed Miliband even more viciously than it hit Neil Kinnock (Guardian)
He’s on his feet as we write:
“In 1940, my grandfather, with my Dad, climbed onto one of the last boats out of Belgium. They had to make a heart-breaking decision – to leave behind my grandmother and my father’s sister. They spent the war in hiding, in a village sheltered by a brave local farmer. Month after month, year upon year, they lived in fear of the knock at the door.At the same time, on the other side of Europe, my mother, aged five, had seen Hitler’s army march into Poland.
She spent the war on the run sheltering in a convent and then with a Catholic family that took her in. Her sister, her mother and her.
My love for this country comes from this story. Two young people fled the darkness that had engulfed the Jews across Europe and in Britain they found the light of liberty.”
Meh.
We still prefer the Brother.
