  The outcome of the British General Election to be held in just over one
week's time is widely regarded as the most difficult in living memory to
predict. Current polls suggest that the two main parties are neck and neck but
that there will be a landslide to the Scottish Nationalist Party with that
party taking most of the constituencies in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats are
forecast to loose more than half their seats and the fringe parties of whom the
UK Independence Party is the biggest are simply unknown quantities. Much of
this volatility relates to long-standing and deeply rooted cultural and
nationalist attitudes that relate to geographical fault lines that have been
present for 500 years or more but occasionally reveal themselves, at times like
this. In this paper our purpose is to raise the notion that these fault lines
are critical to thinking about regionalism, nationalism and the hierarchy of
cities in Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland). We use a percolation
method (Arcaute et al. 2015) to reveal them that treats Britain as a giant
cluster of related places each defined from the intersections of the road
network at a very fine spatial scale. We break this giant cluster into a
detailed hierarchy of sub-clusters by successively reducing a distance
threshold which first breaks off some of the Scottish Islands and then reveals
the very distinct nations and regions that make up Britain, all the way down to
the definition of the largest cities that appear when the threshold reaches
300m. We use these percolation clusters to apportion the 2010 voting pattern to
a new hierarchy of constituencies based on these clusters, and this gives us a
picture of how Britain might vote on purely geographical lines. We then examine
this voting pattern which provides us with some sense of how important the new
configuration of political parties might be to the election next week.

Physics and Society;Social and Information Networks