ALL ANGLOSPHERIC POLITICS IS THE SAME:

[L]abour now potentially faces a mountain to climb in its efforts to win power in 2020--at least if it is trying to do so simply by winning over Conservative voters. While it would take only a small swing--just 0.4 per cent--to deny the Conservatives to win an overall majority, it could take as much as a 9.6 per cent swing--or the equivalent of a 12.5 point lead over the Conservatives--for Labour itself to win an overall majority. Even the objective of becoming the largest party would require a 3.7 point lead.

Or at least these are the targets that Labour would face if it were to fail to dent the 50 per cent vote that the SNP now has north of the border. In short, Labour faces a monumental task in its quest for power in the absence of a significant decline in the SNP vote next time around. That implies that any strategy for Labour recovery has to be aimed at lost left-leaning Scottish voters as well as the aspirational voters that Labour supposedly failed to win over in England.

Meanwhile there is another fly in the ointment--the prospect of a boundary review aimed at eliminating the differences in constituency sizes--and thus the advantage that Labour currently enjoy on that front. A review should have been implemented before May 7th, but it was blocked by Labour and the Liberal Democrats after the latter fell out with their coalition partners over Lords reform.

The Conservatives will not even have to use their new overall majority to ensure a review takes place; their opponents only succeeded in delaying the review until after the election. The government may drop the idea of reducing the size of the Commons from 650 to 600 MPs, because that would put Tory MPs' careers at risk too, but doing so need not compromise the aim of making the constituencies more equal.

Thanks to the very radical changes that were proposed, working out what would have happened on May 7th if the review had not been blocked is not straightforward. But if we take as our starting point estimates prepared by Anthony Wells of what the outcome would have been in 2010 if the new boundaries had been in place and take into consideration the regional variation in party performance this time around, it looks as though the Tories would have won at least 312 seats in the new reduced Commons. If the lower swing in marginal seats was replicated as well the Tory tally might have been as much as 325--or a majority of 50.

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