Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

Can’t David Cameron get anything right? First he climbs into bed with every swivel-eyed, far-right loony in the European Parliament. Then he ties the knot with the Ulster Unionists whose main purpose in life is to undo the Northern Ireland peace process. This is the party whose candidate in South Antrim at the next election – who will presumably have the official backing of the Conservatives – has been accused of making homophobic and racist remarks. Adrian Watson is on record for declaring that he would never allow gay couples to stay at his family-run B&B and has also called travellers “scum”. The strange alliance has already earned Cameron what must rate as one of the most humiliatingly hypocritical putdowns on the political stage: a plea from the old warmonger himself, George W Bush, not to derail a peace deal. Nice going, Dave.

Tribune’s features and comment pages – including the one with the results to our weekly online poll – go to the printers overnight on the Tuesday preceding publication. The online poll on the website isn’t usually updated until later in the week. So sometimes there’s a small discrepancy, usually no more than a few per cent, between the result we publish in the magazine and the final result which appears on the website.

This week we were asking readers what they thought the parties should do in a hung parliament: if no party has an overall majority, should there be a cross-party national government. When the pages went to press last night, a big majority – 88% – opposed a grand coalition, preferring, one assumes, minority government or a narrower coalition.

Overnight, about 200 Ramsay MacDonalds came to our site and overturned the result with their late surge in support of cross-party rule. Either that, or a single extremely committed Robert Mugabe overturned the result with some elementary computer trickery.

Whatever happened, around 200 extra votes came in in the space of a few hours, changing the result to 59% in favour and 41% against. Which is why the result on the site and the result in the magazine are so different.

Just as well our online poll is just a bit of fun and doesn’t actually decide anything important…

More here.