UK Election: Part 2.

I should start by apologising to UK voters. The actual turn out was around 40% of registered voters which is double the 20% I earlier predicted. However this still means that 60% of British people who had the chance to have a say in how their country is run chose not to bother.

The big story of the election has been the Scottish Nationalist Party's (SNP) success in the Scottish Parliament. In a land where the Conservative Party fear to tread the SNP took a lot of votes off the Liberal Democrats (LibDem) and more surprisingly the Labour Party in order to win a Parliamentary majority for the first time in the history of both the party and the Parliament. This has prompted lots of excited talk about Scotland holding a referendum on breaking away from the United Kingdom and the start of negotiations between the leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond and the British Prime Minister, David Cameron over the Scotland Bill that it is currently making it's way through the Westminster (British) Parliament. Although these negotiations are still very much active they will be tempered by the fact that the SNP campaigned on the premise that a vote for the SNP was not automatically a vote for Scottish independence.

Nationally the LibDems did even worse then earlier predictions losing 702 of their 1800 seats. Although they were worst hit in England where they lost 689 seats to both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party the loss will be most noticeable in Wales. Here, along with Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalists), they lost seats to both the Conservatives and Labour who were left with 30 seats of the 60 seat Assembly - 1 short of an overall majority. Labour are currently trying to decide whether to form a coalition with one of the independents or just go it alone. Incidentally now that the Welsh Assembly has gained law making powers surely it should be upgraded to a Parliament?

In Northern Ireland it is still very much more of a peace process then a democratic process. That means the first thing they do is lock the ballot boxes up until every thing's calmed down a bit. Then the next morning they start counting the votes using a form of Proportional Representation (PR) in a nod to the Irish Republic. As a consequence a result won't be announced until Saturday (7/5/11) or possibly Sunday (8/5/11). Whatever that result will be power in the Northern Ireland Assembly will be shared between the largest Unionist party (probably the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP) and the largest Republican Party (probably Sinn Fein).

In the national referendum on adopting the Alternative Vote (AV) system the answer has been an overwhelming and resounding "No." Although the official results have yet to be certified and released the provisional results show that 31% of 19.1 million voters voted "Yes" while 69% voted "No." In fact it appears that in only 7 constituencies the "Yes" vote won and both I and the Electoral Commission will have to look at those results in more detail later because they've come in Boroughs where the dead tend to not only walk but use postal votes on election day.

Overall though that result's a bit of a surprise because with the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron fronting the "No" campaign in his usual repellent style and the "Yes" campaign being fronted by the Labour Party leader, Ed Milliband you would have expected all the anger at the cuts to be translated into support for AV. Then once most voters were too confused to understand the voting system and too stressed out with a mixture of work and poverty Britain would have been free to become the totalitarian dictatorship some people so desperately want it to be.