First election thoughts

Phew; what an election!
The result went some way to restoring one's faith in the collective sense of the general public to get it right when electing a government. It demonstrates that in politics, as in life, no one should count their chickens before they are hatched.
Much has been made of the dramatic rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party, winning in all but three seats north of the border. They will try to exercise some muscle in Parliament putting Cameron on the tightrope. He will implement the conclusions of the Smith report for DevoMax but must surely insist that the SNP represent only a small percentage of the population of the UK. After all, 15% of the Scottish electorate voted Conservative a fact that Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP in Westminster, seems to have forgotten when he claimed, ramping up the rhetoric, that Cameron had 'no legitimacy' in Scotland.
It is also worth remembering that UKIP with 4 million votes won one seat, polling more than the Lib Democrats and the SNP together who garnered 64 seats between them. Hardly Democracy, is it!!

When a member of the audience in the pre-election BBC programme, Question Time, suggested that the Lib-Dems could become an irrelevancy, Clegg replied; 'charming'. However, that's what his Party has become, not charming but irrelevant, but why? Most people point to their failed promise to peg tuition fees in the coalition but for me, it was another pledge that they failed to honour that wrankles most. Clegg promised to support electoral boundary revision but in a fit of pique renaged on this commitment. He would never be forgiven and during the election, the Conservatives lost no opportunity to stick the knife in.

Will the Labour Party attempt to bring back Ed Balls from the political wasteland? They could get him elected to the Lords in the next New Year honours and from there, back into opposition, but I doubt it. He and Miliband were too close to the toxic treasury team of Gordon Brown, too close to the whiff of financial ruin to be ever trusted again.

Who will replace Miliband? The choice could lie with either Yvette Cooper, tying with Caroline Flint as the most odious women in Westminster, or Andy Burnham, the angel of Mid Staffs. With candidates such as these, Labour could join Balls in the political wasteland.

However, the most galvanising aspect of the new Parliament will be the presence in Westminster of two charismatic performers, Alex Salmond and Boris Johnson. With the prospect of a referendum on Europe to come, politics in the UK will never be boring. Bring it on!