I posted on HN a while ago saying that there was no chance of this happening. Obviously it did and I was wrong, but I still don't think it's a big win for the conservatives.<p>Two or three things happened that undermined the competition and swung it imo;<p>1) SNP won big in Scotland<p>Although the SNP has pretty much pulled the policy sheet from labour and added a few Scotland specific things in, the vast majority of seats they took were from labour. Fears of the SNP deciding politics in Westminster also diminished labour support in England. For example, I vote labour but am pro-union so could never support the SNP directly or indirectly. Therefore I can't vote labour.<p>In a sense they were damaged by their own success, their whole plan was hinged on being the kingmaker for labour which actually instead of hooking onto labour support, actually cut labour support (drastically).<p>2) The crushing of libdems.<p>The lib dems lost 50 or so seats, a crushing defeat but a big loss was expected. The thing is, most of those seats flipped conservative, so we voted to punish libdems and the conservative party profited the most from it.<p>3) UKIP leveler<p>At the outset, Labour was set to be split by the SNP, and the conservatives split by UKIP. While the first happened (SNP won a lot of seats), the latter did not. UKIP did not make a lot of headway (for good reason probably). FPTP while it does have its flaws, does tend to keep "hated" parties out. Given the choice between conservative and UKIP most people vote conservative (tactically).<p>tl;dr scotland voted conservative, and we hated libdems more than tories