Statistician Nate Silver says UK election could be 'messy' - BBC

(Reuters) - U.S. statistician Nate Silver, who successfully forecast the result of the last two U.S. presidential elections, believes the outcome of Britain's general election on May 7 could be "incredibly messy," the BBC reported. In a interview on BBC's Panorama programme on Monday, Silver said Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party would get 283 seats and the opposition Labour party would have 270. He expected the Scottish National Party to win 48 seats, the Liberal Democrats 24, Democratic Unionist Party eight, UK Independence Party one and others to get 16 seats. "If these numbers held steady, you'd have the Tories as the largest party, but Labour plus the SNP are more. Even then they are not a majority," Silver, the statistician behind the popular FiveThirtyEight blog, told the BBC. "The betting markets seem to think there would be more paths for Miliband in that case, but it's an incredibly messy outcome. There is still enormous uncertainty about who forms a government after 7 May." Opinion polls have consistently shown that neither of the two main parties is likely to win an overall majority in the 650-seat Parliament. The latest Ashcroft poll on Monday gave Conservatives a six point lead over Labour whereas the Yougov Monday poll showed the Prime Minister's party ahead by one point. (Reporting by Shivam Srivastava in Bengaluru. Editing by Andre Grenon)