A regular feature of the BBC election night broadcast for many years was Peter Snow and his ‘swingometer’. The swingometer was supposed to show how the total number of votes for each party, as they were being counted, represented a national ‘swing’, either towards Labour or towards the Conservatives.

Brexit is not the most important issue of this election!

Our survival depends on addressing 3 emergencies:

• unsustainable inequality
• the climate crisis
• nuclear weapons

What are the minimum requirement for survival that we are judging the parties against?

Minimum requirements on inequality
Minimum requirements on climate
Minimum requirements on nukes

In 2017, after the Brexit referendum and after Jeremy Corbyn became leader, 3.5 million more people voted Labour than in 2015. Labour won an additional 30 seats and came within a few thousand votes of leading a coalition government.

The 2017 General Election produced a fantastic result for the Labour Party and for Jeremy Corbyn. With polls and pundits predicting a Tory landslide for weeks, Labour instead gained nearly 30 seats and more than 40% of the total votes cast. Impressive though that was, it was not enough.

Out of 650 constituencies voting in the General Election on Thursday, the results in at least 600 of them are already a foregone conclusion. They are mostly either solid Tory seats or solid Labour seats, with a few solid LibDem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Green – or in Northern Ireland: DUP, SDLP, Sinn Fein or UUP seats. If you live in one of those solid seats, whichever way you vote the winner is likely to be the person belonging to the party that always wins that seat.

The revolutionary act of voting

Our ancestors fought and died for the right to vote. It may not seem like much to be "allowed" to put a mark against a name on a piece of paper every 5 years or so, but it is potentially one of the most revolutionary things any one person can do.

voting 'strategically' and not just 'tactically'

Opinion polls that purport to show the overall level of support and "voting intention" for each of the main parties can turn out to be way off the mark. They were last time! There was not a single poll in the run-up to the general election in 2017 that correctly predicted the Labour Party gaining 30 seats and the Conservatives losing their overall majority in that election. There are lots of possible reasons for this, including the fact that final results depend as much on who votes as it does on who they vote for.