European election news

While checking some other results, I discovered that 1,514,084 votes were cast in the Eastern Region European election (36.6% turnout). That's quite a big increase from the 994,438 cast last time (details from here).

A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests that, given the increased turnout and loss of one MEP, parties are going to have to get something approaching 200,000 votes to get a seat. My rather uninformed guesstimate of the result is that we'll end up with 3 Tories, 1 each for the Liberal Democrats, Labour and UKIP and Martin Bell taking the seventh seat. If Bell doesn't get enough votes to win, though, I'd guess the seventh seat will go to either the Lib Dems or UKIP - you can make a good case for either of them coming second in the region, and even for Labour holding on that position if you want.

Update: OK, envelopes (even virtual ones) aren't the best way of calculating these things. It's probably closer to 150,000 than 200,000 and the Tories do have a chance of a fourth seat. I think the determining factors will be firstly whether Martin Bell does well enough to get a seat, and if he fails, how large the UKIP vote is and how much they take from the Conservatives.