A Reflection on the Election

As you might expect, I am not happy at the result of the General Election. I felt a sense of foreboding at Thursday's return of David Cameron and his merry men and women. They have already shown what they intend for the future of this country, and now have the means to do it - despite not having as large a majority as they would have liked. For the worst-off in Britain, a lot of pain is on the way.
But - more of that later. So much has been said and sung about the Election that it is difficult to find anything original to say, but I still think there are areas worthy of comment.
One blindingly obvious aspect to comment upon is the remarkable failure of the pollsters and the pundits to predict the Tory victory. Only a week ago, we were being assured of a minority government. Oh, dear... Nevertheless, they were proven to be only too accurate in their predictions for Scotland. It appears that the polling companies are deeply embarrassed at what happened, and are going to hold their own enquiry into why they got it so wrong. Peter Kellner, the YouGov president says that the public have been deceitful with their voting intentions. He has said that politicians  "should campaign on what they believe, they should not listen to people like me and the figures we produce".
That makes very good sense. Too much sensitivity to opinion polls can lead to vacillation and abandonment of principle, if carried too far. Still, perhaps we should be glad that we are still capable, as an electorate and as people, of surprising our politicians. It shows that winning elections is not simply a matter of manipulating people, but a matter of winning them over by persuasion, argument and sincere conviction.
Another area of interest is the soul searching that is starting to happen in all the other parties except the Conservatives and the SNP. Labour, LibDems, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and UKIP seem to be settling down to furious internal  investigations and, as we all know, three party leaders have resigned. Well, Plaid Cymru, the Greens and UKIP need look no further than the electoral system itself; if we had PR, these parties would have more MPs. As for the LibDems, now reduced to a rump, the obvious answer to the question: "What went wrong?"was their coalition with the Tories. Their recent decimation was predicted five years ago after their notorious U-turn on tuition fees, but they did not listen. It shows the truth of the old saying: "He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon". In this case, no supping at all would have been the best course of action. It's easy to be right with hindsight, I suppose, but the Lib Dems now face a huge uphill task to restore their electoral fortunes. I hope they do, as some of their ousted MPs were fine workers for their constituencies - and I would never vote LibDem.
As for Labour, the explanations are already being floated. I agree with David Blunkett, who told the Guardian:
 “If we have lost this election, we lost it from 2010 when in the six months from 2010 we failed to nail the lie that the Labour government had been responsible for the global meltdown and everything that happened in the US, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, was the Labour government’s fault.”
He is right - Labour was far too passive in the face of such attacks, and should have refuted this accusation decisively.
But there was another type of attack which, in my opinion, Labour could have used, and the Conservatives certainly did, and that is what Social Europe calls "Negative Campaigning". One early, nasty, example of this happened back in 2013 when the Daily Mail tried smearing Ed Miliband's father by saying Ralph Miliband was a Marxist who hated Britain. This scurrilous article in the Mail, more appropriate to anti-Semitic Nazi newspapers of the 1930s than any British newspaper of any period, only just stopped short of accusing the whole Miliband family of being Jewish Communists.
A less nasty, but equally negative attack by the Tories was their poster campaign warning us of how, essentially, Labour was about to sell out England by going into coalition with the SNP.
Whatever the truth of this, and other accusations, they seem to have had considerable impact, perhaps even influencing some voters to change their voting preference.
I think that Labour should have reacted to the Tory campaign by focussing upon the depredations  that Tory policies have already had upon the lives of ordinary people. The growth in the use of food banks, for example, as well as the rise in homelessness caused by the Bedroom tax and other factors, the use of unqualified teachers in schools, all could have provided material for a very effective "negative" campaign. The implication these things could get worse might have made a significant impact.
Lastly, Mr Cameron and his party might not be smirking for long. As "Spiked" has commented:
"Yet what does the Tory victory amount to? The party has increased its share of the vote since 2010 by just over half of one per cent – from an unspectacular 36.05 per cent to 36.7 per cent. Some polls had the Tories on that sort of mark during the campaign, while the ‘poll of polls’ tended to have them hovering around an average of 34 per cent. That extra couple of points hardly looks like any dramatic ‘late breakthrough’."
Besides this, Mr Cameron will almost certainly find the pressure of his restored role more intense than he seems to expect. He must reshuffle his cabinet, and all the issues mentioned above - the ones that Labour did not, with mistaken chivalry, exploit - not to mention a rampant SNP presence in Parliament,will start to crowd in upon him. In about a year or so, if the non-governing parties regroup, Messrs Miliband, Clegg, Balls and Farage might have something to smile about. The poor, of course, the people who go to food banks, who lose their homes because of the bedroom tax or because of rent increases, who work on zero hours contracts, will not be smiling at all. Like I said earlier, a lot of pain is on the way.