General Election UK -- Marginal seats up very significantly and more surprising results to come.

One of the ways to understand the kind of results that will undoubtedly come through in the early hours of tomorrow morning is this. Whenever the UK goes through a realignment, while it is happening and before the new alignment has settled down the number of marginal seats goes up significantly. (Marginal meaning capable of changing hands on a swing of 5% or less). This is because the change in voting patterns that is part of the realignment makes formerly safe seats marginal while at the same time seats that always were marginal remain so, although with each election they usually move further into 'safe' territory. To some extent this process is constant, due to demographic change, but it happens much more dramatically during a realignment, and much more rapidly.

You can see this very clearly in the last really big one, in the 1920s, when the number of seats that were three way contests or were won with a vote of around 30% were at record levels. You can see it right now in Scotland, where we are in the final phase of a realignment around the new issue of Independence versus Unionism. Currently a near majority of the seats in Scotland are marginal, whereas as recently as 2005 there were almost none in that category. There's a similar pattern in Wales and England. Everything suggests that a lot of seats in the North and Midlands, and Wales that have been safely Labour since the last realignment in the 1960s and 1970s (or in many cases even longer) will be held by very narrow margins or lost to the Tories. Meanwhile down south a lot of Conservative seats will be held with reduced majorities (much reduced in many cases) and seats like Canterbury look set to move from safe Tory in 2010 to safe Labour now. There will also be some losses for the Conservatives down South, some of them coming as quite a shock.

All this produces a new geography, which people get used to very quickly and assume is natural. Before 1964 people would have been amazed to hear that within twenty years the Conservatives would be totally wiped out in Liverpool - in 1959 they had won most of the seats there, comfortably (they'd held all but one of the seats even in their catastrophic defeat in 1906). Similarly North Norfolk was a pretty safe Labour seat from the 1922 onwards but in 1970 it went Conservative and became first a safe Tory seat and then a Liberal Democrat one - Labour is nowhere to be seen. The point is that in both of those cases there was a very rapid shift in voting patterns over a couple of elections and less than ten years. The same thing is happening now. What this means tonight is an awful lot of tight results and very narrow wins and holds, with some very surprising local results.