The End For Labour

It's 2.30 am on 7th May and all the signs are that later today we will have a Conservative government. It is not 100% clear yet whether they will have an overall majority but they won't be far off. If they do not, I think it is likely that David Cameron will try to govern with a minority government while he fixes the constituency boundaries and reduces the number of MPs to ensure that there is a built in Tory majority and that no longer will there be a weighting towards Labour. Then, when support for the Lib-Dems has faded away, he will go to the country again and get the overall majority that he wants - and we will be back to the same old politics which the public wants to get away from. The old system in which 30% of the vote is enough to give a big enough majority of seats to ignore the voting split. So far there has been no discussion of the percentage share of the vote last night but I think it will show yet again that even when the Lib-Dems increase their share of the vote it makes little difference to their number of seats unless they can surge past 30%. On the basis of current information the Labour Party plus Lib-Dems will still not have enough seats to form a majority government.

One of the most disturbing facts of this election has been the chaos at polling stations where all over the country people have been queuing for hours and have still been deprived of the right to vote because they could not get into the polling stations by 10.00 pm. In some places people had queued for 3 hours and still not got to vote. Is there any end to the incompetence of the people who run this country? Here we are reduced to the status of a banana republic unable to organise the simple matter of an election by providing enough polling stations and officers. In spite of hundreds of thousands of extra workers employed by the government over the last few years, this simple task was beyond them. It seems that some polling stations even ran out of ballot papers; others didn't even have up-to-date electoral rolls. The excuse is that the turnout has increased significantly. No it has not. It is up by 5% or 10%. We expected that and in olden days turnout was over 80%. How did we cope then? This really is the most staggering failure of local government. Many politicians have complained over many years about voter apathy; now when the numbers of voters goes up they cannot vote. Some returning officers should be sacked. These days they are paid gold-plated salaries and they should carry the can for such embarrassing failure. Should a country that cannot arrange for voters to put crosses on forms be allowed to have nuclear missiles?

I think tomorrow Gordon Brown will resign with dignity and the old warhorse will retire to the back benches. He is a decent man who did many good things over the years and was the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer in history. God knows who will lead the Labour Party. David Miliband? Alan Johnson?? Ed Miliband??? Harriet Harperson?????????????........ It all sounds like a horror comic. And alongside them David Cameron and George Osborne will be trying to learn how to navigate the boat and to help their rich friends. Still Lord Mandelson should be OK.

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