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Because bullet points are easier than essays

Chart stolen from this guy.

I promised you a post on the British elections and didn’t deliver. Fridaypost’s as good a time as any.

A Conservative win wasn’t the worst possible outcome — obviously — but it wasn’t the one I was hoping for. I was hoping for a divided, unstable government with a small Conservative majority that would force Cameron to jig right. Here’s some bullet points in no particular order:

■ The Liberal Democrats went from part of a ruling coalition to near annihilation. Seriously, they may be done. Forever.

■ None of the pollsters came close to predicting the outcome, which sadly won’t be the end of pollsters.

■ Labour lost big.

■ The SNP won big (at the expense of Labour).

■ UKIP took a healthy chunk of the vote, but only one seat.

■ They lost Nigel Farage’s seat.

■ Cameron is bound to see a big Conservative win as a big Cameron win.

Here’s a simplistic weasel-eye-view of why this happened, also in fun, easy-to-digest bullet points:

■ It was inevitable that the LibDems would collapse at their next election test. They were a far left party that had entered into a coalition government with the main right party.

■ It became clear early on that the Scottish National Party was going to murder the Labour vote in Scotland. Stirred up nationalism and leftover bad feeling from the failed Scottish split-off (Labour had encouraged them to stay in the union).

■ Sawed off SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon began to strut and crow that if Labour got in, she’d call the shots.

■ Brits got in the voting booth and panicked at the thought of gormless weirdo Ed Miliband running the country under the thumb of the Scots. (Which may or may not have depressed the UKIP vote, although the UKIP vote wasn’t bad — they came in third in the popular vote).

Early appearances are that the election will pull Cameron to the right, not least because he can’t blame the LibDems for his leftist inclinations. In conclusion, here’s the 2006 audio snippet of Cameron calling UKIP “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.”

May 29, 2015 — 8:43 pm
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