The general election to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, held on 7th May 2015, concluded five years of coalition government between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. Conservative leader David Cameron had served as Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had been Deputy Prime Minister.
Many declared this election was the most unpredictable, with polls for weeks beforehand showing that no party had a clear lead, suggesting another hung parliament which would lead to a long struggle between parties to put together coalitions which might be able to hold power; right up until the polling stations closed on the day itself, it was thought that the two most popular parties, the Conservatives and Labour, would be on a knife edge with each winning virtually the same number of seats.
The election campaigns by party leaders were noted by many to be especially bland and empty, with nobody offering a particularly inspiring message or meaningful ideological positions, due to the fact that none of the leaders expected to win outright, so they avoided committing too strongly to anything that they might have to give up to make a coalition deal workable. Nevertheless, it is widely believed that the pledge made by the Conservatives to renegotiate Britain's relationship with the European Union and then hold a referendum on continued membership was a) done to prevent Eurosceptic voters from moving to other parties (principally UKIP), and b) would have been given up if, as expected, they had to enter into another coalition with the Europhile Lib Dems.
Another noteworthy aspect of 2015 was the sudden appearance of so many different parties on the national stage. In addition to the "big three" parties of 2010 and before (Tory, Labour, Lib Dem), the leaders' debates featured the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the Scottish National Party (SNP), the Green Party, and Plaid Cymru for the first time.
At 10 p.m. on voting day, an exit poll was released that shocked everyone, predicting Labour to have a net loss of seats whilst the Conservatives were just 10 seats short of an overall majority. The actual result saw the Conservatives actually win the election outright (for the first time in 23 years) — and left pollsters scratching their heads over why their predictions were so wrong. An official inquiry was launched, concluding that the selection was not random enough and ended up understating the Conservatives' support because it simply didn't get through to enough of their voters. (One pollster managed to get close to the actual result because their system accounted for exactly that.) The polling failure was hardly unique in historical terms, as the elections of 1970, February 1974 and 1992 also produced the 'wrong' winners (Edward Heath's Tories, Harold Wilson's Labour, and John Major's Tories, respectively) relative to what the polls suggested, and the Lib Dems failed to make the significant breakthrough in 2010 that was being widely predicted.
The Liberal Democrats, the junior party in the coalition government, were absolutely torn apart, largely down to the perception that they had betrayed their voters and were the Conservatives' lapdogs; they had known they would lose seats, but the results were far worse than anticipated, being reduced from fifty-seven seats to eight.note The Lib Dems were left with not a single seat to their name in the South of England and just one each in London, Wales, and Scotland, with the North West and Yorkshire and the Humber the only parts of the country where they had more than one MP;note their loss was largely the Conservatives' gain. The Scottish National Party, with its support bolstered from the independence referendum the previous year, went from six seats to 56 (every seat in Scotland bar three), largely at the expense of Labour, who had 40 seats in Scotland reduced to just one.note
Unsurprisingly, Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband both announced their resignations the following day, as did UKIP's Nigel Farage after he failed to win South Thanet from the Conservative incumbent, although Farage's resignation was later rejected by his party and he continued in post.
A big issue raised by this election was the future of the single-member plurality (a.k.a. first-past-the-post) voting system: The UK's 56th parliament is least proportionate in history, with numbers of seats won by each party now bearing barely the slightest resemblance to the proportions of votes those parties received; UKIP finished third in the popular vote but won only one seat, whilst the SNP became the third party despite coming in fifth in the popular vote. However FPTP endured for two reasons: firstly, a referendum on the alternative vote system had been decisively defeated only a few years before, during the previous government; in addition, many left-wing voters noticed that UKIP, though winning only one seat, had won enough of the popular vote that, in any conceivable proportional system, they would have formed a majority coalition government with the Conservatives.
