After the battle.....

‘The shouting and the tumult dies,

The captains and the kings depart’

 

Well, that’s it for another 5 years.

 

After the most boring and trivial election campaign in history, Dave confounded the pollsters and got his old job back. With an overall majority hen the money was on another hung Parliament.

 

It was as I predicted – that the thought of having the leader of the Scots Nats, the Virgin Sturgeon, leading Miliband by the nose in a coalition government was sufficient to scare a lot of waverers into the Tory camp. The election also took the scalps of here party leaders -Miliband Labour, Clegg Libdems, Farage UKIP (but you can be certain that Farage will be back in September.

 

But it really is absurd that SNP can get 50 seats out of 1.4 million votes and UKIP one out of 3.7 million. The ‘first past the post’ system worked in the days of a two-party system, but the system is now broken. Not that anything  will be done about it because any change would not suit the two main parties. But the least Dave can do is to ram through the long-overdue revision of constituency boundaries to get rid of the ridiculous anomaly of Labour getting more seats than the Tories with fewer votes overall. He should also repeal the equally ridiculous five year Parliaments law that fixes the term regardless of the state of the parties.

 

Previously it was the prerogative of the Prime Minister to decide the date of a General Election with the result that election campaigns only lasted the six weeks between Parliament being prorogued and polling day. And revert to the former system for postal votes, which were only available to a small number of people who were unable to physically get to the polling station. The postal-votes-for anybody is, as we have seen, an open invitation to corrupt practices.

 

Next up is the EU  referendum in two years’ time. No backsliding, Dave!