Election post-mortem
I'm taking a weekend off to recover from working all night on the election coverage - there will be the usual YouGov/Sunday Times survey night but I expect there will be little else anyway. So, in terms of the aftermath for the elections, what's the impact?
In the locals, Labour gained 800 seats, so not that far outside expectations. Gains were very much concentrated in the North, in the cities and against the Liberal Democrats. They had some good performances - places like Waveney and Gravesham - but these were more the exception than the rule. They did very well indeed in Wales, but horribly in Scotland. Because it was a mixed bag, because the Tories didn't do badly and because Labour did so badly in Scotland these elections probably aren't going to give Ed Miliband the big boost they could have - it's not going to be reported in the media as Ed Miliband's first big victory. I had expected (and have been predicting for months on end when people ask) that Labour would open up a bigger lead in the polls after May as the locals would be seen as the start of Labour's big comeback... on the back of this I'm not sure they will.
The Liberal Democrats took the thorough kicking everyone expected - if anything, it was worse. They avoided wipeout in Wales, in Scotland they were pushed back to just the island seats and top-ups, recieving derisory votes in many seats with their vote often appearing to shift wholesale to the SNP. In their more Northern and urban councils they often faced wipeout in those seats contested, in most councils that were a contest between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats they made losses (with a very few notable exceptions like Eastleigh and Cotswold where they made gains). It remains to be seen how the party reacts to the defeats - a couple of Lib Dem leaders on councils have called for Clegg's head, but none of the party's big guns so far.
The Conservatives did surprising well. The Rallings and Thrasher projections had them losing about 900 seats or so, in reality they made a small net gain. The reason seems to be that Labour's best advances were in places the Tories didn't have many councillors to lose (and where wards are larger, so there are fewer councillors per voter!), so the Conservative loss to Labour was smaller than might have been expected and cancelled out by Conservative gains from the Liberal Democrats across the South. The Conservatives don't seem to be crowing about making gains (probably so as not to further unsettle the coalition or set themselves up for a fall when the mid term losses that are still inevitably eventually do arrive). David Cameron himself probably would have faced a lot of dissent from his backbenchers had the AV referendum been lost, but it wasn't. The question now is probably more what (if anything) he doesn't to bolster the position of his coalition partners.
The SNP were the unadulterated victors of the night - Scotland was simply a massive, sweeping, SNP landslide, a magnificent victory. There were a couple of polls (from TNS and Scottish Opinion) in the final few days that reported massive SNP leads, much bigger than the more modest ones being shown by YouGov, that at the time I'd assumed were going to be wrong. While the Scottish Opinion 30 point SNP lead obviously didn't materialise, they were obviously picking up a genuine wave of support towards the SNP at the end of the campaign (and, indeed, YouGov's internal experiment with exit polling also picked up a big shift towards the SNP, if not to it's full extent). In Scotland the SNP are now the masters - the effect on wider British politics will be whether this leads to a referendum on Scottish independence and if so when.
The AV referendum went down to the defeat that almost everyone now expected and that the polls had been showing for weeks (the final results were 32/68, so ICM got it bang on). There will be time later to dissect exactly why the NO campaign won so convincingly, but beyond the destabilising effect it has had on the coalition (and what degree that was real or feigned), its now more of an academic point. Electoral reform is now presumably a dead issue for at least a Parliament or two.
Now, I'm off for a rest!
