14/05/2005

Election 2005 - post-mortem

entry posted by Inquisitor at 24:46 (permalink).
categories: Blogging , Misc , Politics , TV

I did, in fact, stay up for the election. Instead of blogging, however, I was on the #ukbloggers IRC channel gratefully hosted by Nick Barlow, qwghlm.co.uk and others, for whom I'm extremely grateful.

So, it's a third term and another big but more controllable majority for Tony Blair. Not really a surprise; a surprise would have been if Howard got in. Not very many surprises on the night, in fact; the only biggies were that George Galloway somehow got back into Parliament (I'm not a fan) and the fact that the Lib Dems made as few gains on Labour as they did, despite having a very large percentage of the vote. And, unfortunately, Blunkett's back in the Cabinet; ironically overseeing Child Support; even worse, Blair replaced Geoff Hoon with one of the only less suitable men in Parliament, the indescribable John Reid, and Ruth Kelly's still there. My MP, Alistair Darling, got relected with a reduced majority. Such is life.

The fact that Labour got a majority of 68 on only 37% of the vote means, of course, that we need a much more proportional electoral system than we have now; something Jack 'master of doublespeak' Straw doesn't seem to be able to comprehend (link courtesy Nick Barlow) in an article so godawful I'm surprised the Guardian even agreed to print it. Nick makes the argument about as well as I would, pointing out the 1997 manifesto commitment to an electoral reform referendum (swiftly forgotten post 170-majority) and the ignoring of the Jenkins commission. We may well not see a decent voting system from this government, and it's a real shame - FPTP should have been consigned to the history books long, long ago.

And may I just extend my commiserations to Tim Ireland (of Bloggerheads and Backing Blair fame), who is about to suffer four-to-five years of Anne Milton... shame, really.

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