Well the election results have come in and what a surprise. The Conservatives have a slim majority, its such good news. The prospect of Ed Miliband as Prime Minister was so scary and embarrassing but seemed so inevitable. Luckily the opinion polls were universally wrong and the Labour Party lost a pile of seats. My favourite moment was Ed Balls loosing his seat...a fine moment and one I managed to see live as the count, and recount, took so long I was more than up and ready to watch TV by the time the result came in.
It will be interesting to see the new Cabinet listings and see if people like Ian Duncan-Smith are left to continue their excellent work on reforming benefits. My preference is for Gove to be given Education back again, the teaching unions really need to be brought into the C21st. I will also look forward to the Boundary Reforms, that were attempted last time but scuppered when the LibDems broke their promises and voted against, can be set in motion.
All in all a really good result and a testament to the basic common sense of the electorate. There are problems in the system, SNP got 1.5 million votes and 50+ seats while UKIP got over 4 million votes and only 1 seat. Doesn't seem fair, but a basically good result for the country, especially without Balls and now Miliband has resigned so, theoretically the Labour Party can reflect on what they did wrong and rebuild. Though judging by their comments today the Labour Party feel their problems were caused by right wing media, negative campaigning(theirs was the most negative campaign, followed by the LibDems according to academic research) and so on.
The real problem the Labour Party needs to address is that they have taken their supporters for granted for many, many years and have no idea what they want. Too many Labour Party officials are metropolitan, Southern and from comfortable or wealthy backgrounds. Hardly representative of their constituencies, which tend to be Northern and poor! As was said in Scotland 'we didn't abandon the Labour Party, they abandoned us', which is true. The Labour Party has turned so inward and spouts so much dogma they have no connection with their supporters. We will see if they learn this, plenty of commentator have been saying the same all day, so they can't say no one has told them.
Update: well Ian Duncan-Smith has been left to continue his reforms of the benefit system which is really good news and while Gove hasn't been given Education back he has been given Justice and can get to work on reforming the Human Rights legislation to stop criminals using a 'right to family life' as a get out clause, even when they have deprived other people of their 'right to a family life' by murder! I will look forward to seeing what happens.
The press and twittersphere have been in overdrive the past few days with the Left deriding the results and generally being unpleasant and nasty. As far as they are concerned anyone who voted Conservative is evil and only Labour should ever be allowed to win....only to be expected but, God what entitled babies!
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