The 2015 general election in the United Kingdom has ended with a very unexpected outcome resulting in a much clearer outcome as predicted in the polls. The Conservative Party with the old and new Prime Minister David Cameron has secured a majority in the new parliament, winning 331 of the 650 seats. As the BBC concludes: “The Conservatives win a 12-seat majority in parliament as Labour are almost wiped out by the SNP in Scotland and the Liberal Democrats suffer major losses.”
Looking at the election results in a conventional map, this very clear outcome becomes even stronger, with much of the map being dominated by blue (for the Conservatives) and yellow (for the Scottish National Party). Very little consolation for the main losers, but a more honest picture emerges, when changing the perspective, as shown in the following map series. The hexagon map shows the real political representation as it emerges in the Westminster Parliament, with every constituency being coloured according to the winning political party there. The third map in the series is an equal-population projection which gives every person living in the UK the same amount of space, so that the true picture of how people are being represented is painted. The latter differs slightly from the constituency view, as the constituencies in the UK are not only differing in (land area) size, but also in population size (which is part of a critical debate about electoral reform). So here is the complete picture of the 2015 general election:

(click for larger version)

Note: Northern Ireland has been omitted from these maps. None of the parties standing in the rest of the United Kingdom is standing there, and the political parties in Northern Ireland stand there exclusively (as do the Scottish National Party in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales who, however, compete with the remaining parties there).

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