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Date: 07/05/10
Math And After
I got to bed shortly after 08:00 and stayed there until about four this afternoon. I might not have got up then but for the fact that I had something I had to do.
So, all the results are now in (Thirsk & Malton excepted, of course) and the first thought is that the original exit poll was more or less spot on. Which leaves the question once again of what went wrong with the Lib Dems. They were quite obviously squeezed in many areas, and combined some good gains in Northern England with some catastrophic losses in the south. They seemed to fare particularly poorly in Scotland in what was otherwise an 'as you were' election up there, with no seat changing hands from 2005.
Labour got a kicking just about everywhere bar Scotland, with big swings against them in central and southern England. What we seem to be seeing is the electoral geography in those areas simply reverting to its 1979-1997 pattern where - outside of some of the larger towns and cities - Labour were all but invisible. Only London itself did not see a substantial fall in Labour's share of the votes.
And it was probably London which did for Cameron's chances of a majority government. While they did make gains there, they weren't on anything like the scale that they needed to be handed the keys to absolute power. They should have been helped by a largely static percentage of votes in England for the far right, but those levels were so low anyway that they didn't make much of a difference in most seats; they would have won nearly all of them anyway.
Wales saw Plaid Cymru marginalised again as the attention was focussed on the Lab-Con battle. The Tories did pretty well from what was quite a low base point, but again it was nowhere near the twelve or thirteen seats they belived they could win. The Lib Dems stayed pretty static with only the loss of Loopy Lembit to a very strong local Conservative candidate. Labour lost a few, but salvaged something of their machismo by reclaiming Blaenau Gwent and holding on to Ynys Môn. They hold 65% of the seats on just 36% of the votes, however.
And here was the biggest loser of the night: the public. When one party can be within licking distance of the greasy palm with 47% of the seats on just 36% of the total vote, whereas another party can poll 23% and get less than 9% of the seats, something is very wrong with the system itself.
I have no real hopes of the situation changing, either. Although Cameron is extending a very general offer to Clegg today, the most the Conservatives are likely to offer is some woolly all-party enquiry into the voting system. 'All-party' in this case meaning 'dominated by those who don't want the current system to change'. Nothing less than a broad-spectrum campaign of public agitation is likely to push them beyond that, and I don't see that as being particularly likely either.
There is a fairly strong likelihood that we're going to have to go through all this again in the next twelve months, against a background of cuts in public services, rises in indirect taxation which will have a disproportionate impact on the already disadvantaged, and the further featherbedding of those at the top, and the concomitant social unrest which could result from all these would probably play straight into the hands of the authoritarian wing of the Conservative Party. This was what we saw in 1979 and afterwards.
Some small consolations from yesterday were the election of a Green Party MP, and the failure of the Niagara of smears, insinuations and outright lies from the right-wing press to get their boy into power.
For me, well my predictions from the start of the night were quite a long way off, but I can boast that I got 90% of my seat-by-seat predictions right. In the long term, I and my many fellow toilers in the public sector already knew what was going to be done to us, but it still remains to be seen by whom. 
