The Morning After..

I'll post on the polling day experience later (when we know the result of our constituency), but first some thoughts on the election result.

I'm obviously disappointed because the result does not lead to a definitive Government and is almost certain to lead to another election within (say) 18 months. The uncertainty over this, and more importantly over which parties will co-operate to form the next Government, has lead to a fall in sterling and a rise in the cost the UK has to pay to borrow. As I noted earlier, this really is money taken out of the economy. Hopefully the parties will sort out who will do what before Monday so they can get on with sorting out public finances.

I'm a bit pleased since the result is in line with my expectations posted yesterday, particularly with my comment that all the parties had a bad campaign.

First thoughts:
- the real unfairness of the voting system remains the unfair distribution of seats and boundaries, hence the reason the Tories do not have a majority despite getting so many more votes. All methods of voting have elements of unfairness; I would be focusing on reducing the number of MPs and making seat distribution fairer before introducing another system.
- this particularly emphasises the different result in Scotland, where the seats largely remained unchanged with a small swing to Labour, to England where there was a sizeable swing to the Conservatives. Scotland has more seats per head than England. Is it time to promote Scottish independence?
- the Lib Dem surge didn't happen. This suggests that the excitement either came from people not registered to vote, or it was just a media hype (very likely), or on reflection people realised the Lib Dems were not promoting anything new.
- I'm rethinking whether there will be a Conservative arrangement with the Lib Dems. It is too soon to resolve this - they need to know the results of all the seats to see just how far from a majority the Conservatives are - but the sudden switch of Labour to wanting voting reform, and their continued promotion of Brown as leader, may make it all a bit too unconvincing.