“Yes there have been swings from Lib Dem to Conservative. In a couple of rural and semi-rural authorities in 2007 they resulted in quite large losses. This year they resulted in a much smaller net loss”

lol.. it was a bit moe than a couple in 2007, otherwise they wouldnt have been large losses. Of course the net loss was much smaller this year mainly because there were far fewer seats at stake but also because Labour did so dismally that the LDs were able to make gains from them in a number of areas which offset losses to the the Tories elsewhere.

“Firstly that we don’t have a political system where national share of the vote is important. Therefore it is never going to be terribly useful to try and put national share of the vote in one end and get seat results out the other, because the national share is created by local results, not the other way round”

This argument has been trotted out before and I have probably given a similar response to that which follows but it is suckh patent nonsense that it has to be said. It is a given that swings are never exactly uniform and there are some individual seats which will buck a national trend and there will also be regional variations, but benjamin somehow seeks to imply that the result of a general election is merely the sum of 650 totally seperate and unconnected elections occurring within each constituency. If the situation was ever remotely like that, it hasnt been so for about 150 years. It is well known and well documented that incumbent Liberal/LD MPs have had a good record of resisting national trends, or limiting them at least but it isnt a perfect record and in any case the vast majority of seats in the UK are not LD seats. The majority are safe Labour, safe Conservative or marginal between those two parties and in the vast majority of those seats the swing is along national lines with some variation being caused by factors such as incumbency (positive or negative), demographic change and very occasionally a local issue (eg Edgware general hospital). If benjamin’s hypothesis was correct we would not have seen large swings against the Conservatives in just about every constituency in Britain in 1997.
It is useful theefore to have a model of a national swing and apply it to constituencies, but ofcourse the point of a site like this is to identify specific local factors or demographic trends which would suggest why a seat might stray from the national trend in some way - whether it will be stronger or weaker. There are some LD seats (Eastleigh and Westmoreland) have often been cited which might well see an incraesed LD majority - this one could conceivably be another such example given Nick Cleggs incumbency boost plsu the leaders bonus. But it is very unlikely that if there is a sizeable swing from Labour to Conservative - of say 5% nationally - that there will be seats swinging from Conservative to Labour. The only excpetion might be those kind of seats with a peculiar ethno-religious profile which likewise provided against-the-trend swings in 1997. If all contests were purely local and the national result was the sum of all these local contests we would surely see seats swinging in all sorts of directions and that does not happen.

Regardless of the second part of your post, I think we need to clear up a few facts. The seats contested in 2008 were last fought in 2004, the Lib Dems’ high-water mark. And we gained seats. Also, in 2007 yes we took severe losses overall but in fact there were only a small number of authorities where these were concentrated-Waverley, Torbay, Herefordshire, Windsor and West Berks. Excluding these few very bad results where either we forgot how to campaign or never knew in the first place, it was not too bad a year. It was, after all, the first time we overtook Labour in the national share of the vote. I also think I should pull you up on the question of “most places” being Labour vs Tory. Actually in most of Southern and South West England the contest is between Lib Dems and Conservatives with Labour in third place. There are lots of Northern and inner city seats where the main challenger to Labour is a Liberal Democrat. You Tories already have enough of an advantage over us Lib Dems without fabricating more of one!

“Actually in most of Southern and South West England the contest is between Lib Dems and Conservatives with Labour in third place. There are lots of Northern and inner city seats where the main challenger to Labour is a Liberal Democrat.”

Depends what you mean by lots. The LDs certainly sneaked into second place in a lot of safe Labour seats in area like Tynhe & Wear but this is irrelevent as they are safe Labour seats. There are no more than about a dozen such seats where the LDs are seriously in contention.
While what you say is true of much of the South West (approximately half the seats in that region anyway) it is not true of most of southern England generally. In Kent, Surrey and Sussex there are at most 5 seats where the LDs are in contention (including Lewes) and there are 39 which are either safely Tory or are Labour-Tory marginals. Of 24 seats in Herts, Beds and Bucks only Watford has the LDs in contention. There are over a hundred seats in the East and West midlands and barely half a dozen of these have the LDs in first or second place. There must be around 500 constituencies in the UK where the LDs are pretty much an irrelevence (including plenty where they were second place, but distantly) so yes I would say that is most places.