Friday, 8 May 2015

Thank You For the Selfies

This morning millions of Britons woke up to discover that, after months of campaigning, preparation, registration, heated dinner table debates, prediction polls, and endless news coverage, the Conservatives were still in power. Not only were they still in power, but they’d heaped up an unprecedented majority, and caused absolute carnage as a result of it. Here’s what happened.


Whatever it is the Conservatives are doing, it’s popular.
As pretty much every poll under the sun suggested, this election was, if you’ll pardon the cliché, too close to call: Labour and Conservative were neck-and-neck in the lead, and we were headed straight for a hung parliament. So it was to everyone’s surprise, most of all a very baffled David Dimbleby, when the clock struck 10 and exit polls showed a suggestions of a Tory majority.

Despite his public image as an Eton/Oxford educated toff who likes smashing up restaurants and raising tuition fees for plebs, it turns out that Cameron and his nasty party are actually more popular than they were five years ago. It’s the first time since Thatcher that a Prime Minister has improved their majority (or in this case minority) whilst in power.

What is more, Cameron took a hefty number of big scalps in the process, causing the inevitable holy trinity of resignations in the morning: Farage, Clegg, and Miliband emerged like brow-beaten schoolboys from the headmaster’s office, Farage cockily proclaiming that he felt better than other, while the other two practically wet themselves on stage apologizing.

In a manifesto that listed the return of the abhorrent Right to Buy scheme, and the promise of further NHS cuts and drawbacks, Cameron, with his sleeves rolled up and hair slicked back, has managed to pique the attention of the electorate for five more years.



Liberalism died a slow death
In the tragic turn of events that is Nick Clegg’s life, the Liberal Democrats downgraded their respectable 57 seats and a Coalition partnership, for 8 measily wins, not even enough to field a team in the House of Commons football tournament. They lost the deposit on over 300 seats, taking just 7.9% of the vote, and ending up with fewer MPs than when the party was founded in 1988.

Clegg, in his resignation speech, mourned the party’s fate, a truly saddening prospect considering the profound liberal input into the Coalition: the Equal Marriage Bill just an example of the direction Clegg and Co had hoped for. In the radical divide between right (Conservative) and left (SNP), the Lib Dems fell through a gaping hole in the middle.

Sadder moreover for some of the party’s ‘heavyweights’: a crestfallen Simon Hughes and an eternally humbling Vince Cable lost at the hands of their Coalition partners, while Charles Kennedy and Danny Alexander fell victim to the massive swing of the SNP in Scotland. Repeated proclamations that the party would 'bounce back' were excruciatingly Alan Partridge-esque, said with the conviction of a man about to run to the hills and burn all his possessions.

Behind all this, Paddy Ashdown looked on with what we can only imagine is disbelief with the fate that has befallen his pride-and-joy, left only with legacies of broken promises and a dysfunctional coalition agreement, solemnly eating his hat in the corner.



Class Politics has returned to Westminster
Gone are the days of party centralization and the so-called ‘median voter’ that gets rammed down your throat at Politics A Level. If this election showed anything its that people are starting to show their allegiance to their ideological party, and leaving behind the stragglers in the middle. The Conservatives have shown themselves to overwhelmingly be the party of the English middle class, acres of English countryside caked in blue on the BBC’s computer graphics. Where the Lib Dems once pussyfooted around, Cameron’s Tories have lapped up rural constituencies in the South West and Wales.


Scotland, meanwhile, underwent severe yellow fever, the Scottish National Party scooping up all but three seats: tired with the Westminster consensus, the SNP under Sturgeon has found its footing, and, spurred on by the close defeat in the independence referendum, has shown Scotland what they really need after years of centrism – a truly progressive party with Scotland’s interests at heart, a status that Labour could never be afforded. Scenes of a 20 year old Glaswegian student usurping the Shadow Foreign Secretary, as well as the fall of Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy, spoke volumes about the ‘lion’s roar’ that Salmond so proudly waxed lyrical about.

Far Right or Far Wrong?
In other news, so-hot-right-now UKIP classically underperformed, losing one of their two seats, and best of all failing to elect 'Man of the Racists' Nigel Farage to parliament, seeing off competition from the Pub Landlord, and the Monty Python-esque 'El-Zebabist Nation of Ooog'. He slinked away in predictably untrustworthy style, resigning, as he said he would, but saying that he might run to be leader again, which he definitely didn't say he would. He's gone...but somehow I think not for long.



Prophet Zebadiah from the El-Zebabist Nation of Ooog

Miliband’s Socialist Dream didn’t work
Make any criticism of Ed Miliband that you want – he can’t eat a sandwich, he can’t smile properly, he drops his consonants in interviews, he stumbles over his words like a drunk teenager, even his arms are too long for his body. What you can’t say is that that man isn’t ideological. Under Ed the Red, the Labour Party saw perhaps the strongest lurch to the left since Foot, with his Living Wage, his mansion tax, and his outspoken opposition of non-doms, zero-hour contracts, and even Rupert Murdoch.


What everyone who has studied politics failed to remind Ed was that Michael Foot’s legacy was one of ‘The Longest Suicide Note in History’, the 1983 Labour manifesto that gave the party its lowest seat count in the 20th century. Unfortunately, after a consistent run of neo-liberals and social democrats, a left-wing Prime Minister is not what the people (at least the English people) want.

In the wake of all this, Labour offered the Conservatives the outright majority they needed on a silver platter, losing in the process his right-hand man Balls (one day, a shoo-in for Chancellor, the next day, unemployed), and ending up with the fewer seats in Scotland than there are pandas.

All the while, bandwagon jumper Russell Brand quietly backed away, suddenly remembering that he wasn't a politician but a comedian. His backing of Miliband at the last minute was interesting yet inconveniently after voter registration had closed. His revolution was built on the back of unanimous hatred for the Tories, and with the party stronger than ever, its starting to seem unlikely.

An extremely likeable figure, Miliband’s resignation was one of equal parts fond optimism and directionless ambition. Ed left in a flurry of camera snaps and crying socialists, announcing ‘Thank you for the selfies’, and leaving a horde of trade unionists wondering what would have happened had they elected his brother.