All right. So. We have just had an election here in Britain and the damned Tories have won it somehow. They defied all expectation, the polls (barring the exit poll, more on that shortly) were catastrophically wrong and there have been a number of surprising results. Time for The AnarchoGoth post-election post-mortem! Party by party, let’s start with;
The Scottish National Party.
They won a crushing, sweeping, overwhelming victory over absolutely everybody. Anybody with half an ear on Scotland in the last few months would have seen this coming but the unionist parties were so obsessed with England and each other that nobody really noticed or gave themselves any breathing space to say or do anything about it. Jim Murphy was made leader of Scottish Labour because Labour thought the mood of Scotland had swung to the centre but after the independence referendum, and the raft of promises all the unionist parties immediately forgot about, they badly misjudged the mood. This was a huge, hard swing to the left and for much greater autonomy, the SNP are not ‘nationalist,’ they are ‘national’ and nobody south of the border was willing to pay attention to that.
Add a general anti-Tory feeling and a seething, nasty, overwhelmingly negative campaign from Scottish Labour and the recipe for disaster was clearly there for Labour. It should be no surprise at all.
The LibDems.
You reap what you sow. A party elected by students, for students at the last election stabbed them in the back. This is no surprise at all and they are now a political irrelevance, I shall waste no more time on these pointless nonentities.
The Green Party.
The Green surge… didn’t. That’s what you get when you can’t even quote your own policies on a friendly radio interview.
UKIP.
No serious pollster had ever suggested they were going to win a great number of seats. One, and from a popular constituency MP who crossed the floor, is a catastrophe for them. Farage, just as I started to type, announced he was stepping down. UKIP are and always have been a one man show, they’re finished. They seem to have taken many, many more votes from disenfranchised Labour voters than from Tories but there are reasons for this. This all leads me to;
Labour vs. The damned Tories.
I shall try to be impartial here. I shall fail, for I am but human.
The warning signs were there if you looked for them but I didn’t and neither did anyone else. The right wing press sprung in to action, as they always do, and front pages warning of the horror of a Lab/SNP coalition smeared everywhere galvanised some sections of society in to frantic, crazy voting. There was a sneering tone to the debate about the SNP in England, suggesting that Scottish people shouldn’t be so unhappy about being told what to do by their English overlords and should simmer down like good little colonials. This strategy, sickeningly, worked brilliantly. Add to that a growing economy (for which I’ve seen little evidence but apparently that’s the case), and an absence of Gove and Osborne on the campaign trail and you have a recipe for Tory success. Social media is clearly not the power all the parties thought it would be.
Minor Notes.
The headstone thing Labour put up was fucking stupid. Really insanely stupid. Bloody stop that sort of thing in future.
Cameron refusing to enter most of the debates was a good move for him.
At least Boris Johnson won’t be Tory leader for a little while longer.
The majority of the Conservatives is slim and beatable, though not easily.
George Galloway losing his seat was fine and dandy.
My constituency went from LibDem to Labour, I’m okay with this.
Labour are the lesser of two evils, this appears to be the mood of their own base (and me, as it happens, but it bodes ill for a party when your supposed ‘supporters’ don’t even really support you).
Bugger. Bugger, damn and bugger again.
theanarchogoth 