Disenfranchised and disgruntled

En español abajo

It's election time in Spain again. Local elections - on which I've written in the past on here. Given what's happened in our town hall over the course of the term that's currently ending, this one's an intriguing affair and every vote counts. That's always the case in areas with low populations, of course, and it makes it even more important, if you're of a mind to pay attention to matters of politics, or complain about how things are run, that you exercise your democratic right. 

So I was slightly concerned when polling cards arrived for my partner and her sister, but not for me. Not to worry, I was assured. The vote's not until May 28th, they've only just started sending them out. It'll arrive. Well it turns out, dear reader, that it will not in fact arrive. Why's that? A very good question.

Last time round, Britain was still in the two-year interim period while the Tories negotiated the exit terms, a sort of pre-Brexit limbo that held things loosely in place and more or less as they'd been before the referendum. As a then-EU citizen, my right to live and work in any country within the EU was automatic. I didn't have to do anything beyond register myself as living in Viana do Bolo and that was it - I was on the electoral roll. Couldn''t vote in the general elections, though that right still extends to me in the UK for 15 years after moving abroad. But in the local council elections, where the things that affect my village's residents most immediately are decided, I could.

You can probably guess where this is going. The two-year interim period is over, and with that the automatic rights conferred on EU citizens are lost to those from outside it. I have been, without any notification, removed from the electoral roll along with every other British citizen living in Spain. I can still vote, but I have to request that I do so in every single election in which I wish to vote from now on. I was completely unaware of this fact, and I'm not alone in my ignorance; according to the BBC, of the 400,000+ Brits living in Spain, fewer than 37,000 have registered for these elections. Under 10%. I don't doubt that some of that will be down to indifference, laziness or a rejection of Spanish party politics, but I suspect a lot of it will be down to the fact that they simply didn't know they had to.

I'm not going to rehash my view on the idiocy of leaving the EU here. It seems, finally, that the people who either voted out of ignorance, or xenophobia, or desperation for change – any change – to the shitty way things were going, or whatever the hell their reasons were, are now realising it wasn't the right call. We've all seen the documentary on Grimsby a place that most certainly voted Leave out of desperation. Things, of course, haven't got better for these people - they've continued to get worse, with a cost of living crisis kicking in to accelerate that decline.

So I'll settle for saying that I'm still waiting for a single one of these mythical 'benefits' of leaving the EU to kick in. We've got blue passport covers again, and... what? The automatic rights of free movement, residence and employment within the EU have gone. Increased bureaucracy in both imports and exports exacerbating already significant supply-chain issues. Import duties on anything you buy from the UK and deliver to the EU, making anything coming from a British company so much more expensive as to not be worth bothering with. (Oh, and this is going to get worse soon. Soon we'll have to pay a Visa waiver to enter the EU, similar to what we currently have to pay to visit the USA.) Absolutely no decrease whatsoever - quite the opposite - in the number of desperate people trying to get into the UK illegally. (How the fuck did people think immigration was going to be affected in the slightest by leaving the EU? The legal immigrants we need, and who do jobs that Brits don't want to do any more, no longer feel welcome. And the illegal immigrants have considerably more urgent concerns to worry about).

And now, a little cherry turd on the top of the shit cake that is the whole clusterfuck, Brits who live abroad find their general lives more difficult, and over 90% of us in Spain won't be voting in this month's elections. So yeah, thanks, Brexit. Even though I've left the country partly in response to the insane, incomprehensible and idiotic referendum result, its consequences continue to fuck things up for me and everybody else.

De nuevo es tiempo de elecciones en España. Elecciones municipales, sobre las que ya he escrito aquí en otras ocasiones. Teniendo en cuenta lo que ha ocurrido en nuestro ayuntamiento a lo largo de la legislatura que ahora termina, se trata de un asunto interesante y cada voto cuenta. Siempre es así en las zonas con poca población, por supuesto, y eso hace que sea aún más importante, si estás dispuesto a prestar atención a los asuntos políticos o a quejarte de cómo se gestionan las cosas, que ejerzas tu derecho democrático. 

Por eso me preocupé un poco cuando llegaron las papeletas electorales de mi pareja y su hermana, pero no las mías. No hay que preocuparse, me aseguraron. La votación no es hasta el 28 de mayo, acaban de empezar a enviarlas. Ya llegará. Pues resulta, querido lector, que no va a llegar. ¿Y eso por qué? Una muy buena pregunta.

La última vez, Gran Bretaña aún estaba en el período provisional de dos años mientras los conservadores negociaban las condiciones de salida, una especie de limbo pre-Brexit que mantenía las cosas más o menos como estaban antes del referéndum. Como ciudadano de la UE, mi derecho a vivir y trabajar en cualquier país de la UE era automático. No tuve que hacer nada más que registrarme como residente en Viana do Bolo y ya está: estaba en el censo electoral. No podía votar en las elecciones generales, aunque ese derecho me sigue amparando en el Reino Unido desde 15 años después de trasladarme al extranjero. Pero en las elecciones municipales, donde se deciden las cosas que afectan más inmediatamente a los vecinos de mi pueblo, sí podía.

Probablemente adivinen adónde va esto. El periodo transitorio de dos años ha terminado, y con él los derechos automáticos conferidos a los ciudadanos de la UE se pierden para los de fuera de ella. He sido, sin notificación alguna, eliminado del censo electoral junto con todos los demás ciudadanos británicos que viven en España. Todavía puedo votar, pero tengo que solicitarlo en cada una de las elecciones en las que desee votar a partir de ahora. Desconocía por completo este hecho, y no soy el único en mi ignorancia; según la BBC, de los más de 400.000 británicos que viven en España, menos de 37.000 se han inscrito para estas elecciones. Menos del 10%. No dudo que parte de ello se deba a la indiferencia, la pereza o el rechazo a la política partidista española, pero sospecho que gran parte se deberá a que simplemente no sabían que tenían que hacerlo.

No voy a repetir aquí mi opinión sobre la idiotez de abandonar la UE. Parece, finalmente, que la gente que votó por ignorancia, xenofobia o desesperación por un cambio -cualquier cambio- en la mierda de cosas que estaban pasando, o cualesquiera que fueran sus razones, se están dando cuenta ahora de que no era la decisión correcta. Todos hemos visto el documental sobre Grimsby, un lugar que sin duda votó "Leave" por desesperación. Las cosas, por supuesto, no han mejorado para esta gente, sino que han seguido empeorando, con una crisis del coste de la vida que ha acelerado el declive.

Así que me conformaré con decir que sigo esperando a que se haga efectiva una sola de esas míticas "ventajas" de salir de la UE. Volvemos a tener fundas azules para el pasaporte y... ¿qué? Han desaparecido los derechos automáticos de libre circulación, residencia y empleo dentro de la UE. Aumento de la burocracia tanto en las importaciones como en las exportaciones, lo que agrava los ya importantes problemas de la cadena de suministro. Derechos de importación para todo lo que se compre en el Reino Unido y se entregue en la UE, con lo que todo lo que proceda de una empresa británica será tanto más caro que no merecerá la pena molestarse en comprarlo. (Ah, y esto va a empeorar pronto. Pronto tendremos que pagar una exención de visado para entrar en la UE, similar a lo que tenemos que pagar actualmente para visitar EE.UU.). No ha disminuido en absoluto, sino todo lo contrario, el número de personas desesperadas que intentan entrar ilegalmente en el Reino Unido. (¿Cómo coño pensaba la gente que la inmigración iba a verse afectada en lo más mínimo por la salida de la UE? Los inmigrantes legales que necesitamos, y que hacen trabajos que los británicos ya no quieren hacer, ya no se sienten bienvenidos. Y los inmigrantes ilegales tienen preocupaciones bastante más urgentes de las que preocuparse).

Y ahora, como guinda del pastel de mierda que es todo este lío, los británicos que viven en el extranjero tienen la vida más difícil en general, y más del 90% de los que estamos en España no votaremos en las elecciones de este mes. Así que sí, gracias Brexit. Aunque he abandonado el país en parte como respuesta al demente, incomprensible e idiota resultado del referéndum, sus consecuencias siguen jodiéndome las cosas a mí y a todo el mundo.

Lotteries

This entry, on what is a deeply depressing morning for many millions of Brits, myself included, is going to be a curious mixture of politics and Spanish Christmas habits.

I wake up this morning scarcely recognising the country I've left behind. An election in which former mining communities like Blyth can collectively forget what life is like under a large Tory majority, in which Dennis Skinner's seat can turn blue, in which the final nail is being busily polished for Scotland's membership of the Union, feels fundamentally at odds with how I've always pictured the British nature.

That's not to say this couldn't be seen coming, as shocking as some results like the ones I've mentioned above may be in isolation. My partner has retained a resolute optimism that minds had changed since 2016, that our departure from the EU would ultimately never happen. It's an optimism I've never shared. A right-wing dominated press, owned by an ever-smaller group of billionaire barons, has been busy sowing xenophobic seeds which have sprouted healthily in the north of the country. Genuine belief that getting out of the EU and the supposed drop in immigration that would entail would make for a better future gave us the referendum result in 2016, and those people want what they voted for. They still seem to believe the lies they were told.

It's come down to that, in my opinion. Brexit has so divided the country, that it alone would have been enough to hand this election to the Tories. This was another referendum in all but name, but if you also throw in the constant vitriol the likes of the Mail and the Sun - still comfortably the biggest-selling papers in Britain for all that circulation is down everywhere - have thrown at Corbyn in personal attacks, you've got a Labour leader that many people regarded as unelectable to add to the anti-EU sentiment. Hence the total clusterfuck we have to digest today.

The crumbs of comfort have to be looked for with a microscope. My home city Brighton remains a little island of red and green in a sea of southern blue. The good people of Liverpool have not forgotten their abandonment by the Thatcher administration, and kept the city red. (Chin up, Hels.) I'm oddly pleased for the Scots. Separatism is anathema to me, but the fact is that they will now absolutely hold another referendum on leaving, they will absolutely vote to leave after the promises made to them if they stayed were (of course) broken, and will then remain within or rejoin the EU. So this separatist movement at the same time stands for unity - just with Europe, not Britain. A pretty damning indictment and admirably respectable.

If I hadn't already left, I'd absolutely be looking for a way out now. An increasingly isolated, deep-blue Britain tied ever-closer to a United States possibly still led by Trump is a dystopian future I'd want no part of. Those people to whom getting out of the EU was more important than, for example, not selling off the NHS - does anybody, anybody, seriously believe the Tory promises on that score? - will be the ones who most surely reap what they've sewn. You can bet your arse that the patrician class will be able to afford the drugs, won't have to wait in corridors, won't die of neglect in an American-style health 'service'. Maybe then, when it's too late, people will realise what they've done.

How do I pick myself out of the slough of despond that's in danger of settling? Ham and hampers. Obviously.

When I head to Britain for Christmas on 19th December, the enormous difference between how it's done back home and how it's done here will again strike me. There are, of course, a few lights strung across roads here. But it's nothing like even a small village of Viana's size would do in Britain. Nor do you see lights twinkling in people's homes, suspiciously perfectly triangular 'trees' outlined in their windows. It looks, basically, a lot less Christmassy. There are signs, though.

The most obvious ones are in the bars, which sell lottery tickets for the big Christmas draw. For some reason, Spaniards go completely crazy for the lottery at Christmas. Tickets for the biggest one are given as gifts, with some bizarre superstitions about not giving one from a different area to somebody who's gifted you a ticket from their area. The tickets all have the numbers already printed on them, you see, and are different everywhere you go. So you have people buying them everywhere they stop in Spain to make sure they've got loads of different numbers. OK, fair enough. Except. Ex-cept. Each of these tickets costs €20, and is known as a 'décimo'. That's because holding the winning number entitles you to a tenth of any prize that ticket may win, as they're sold in perforated sheets of ten. So you'd have to buy all the tickets of a particular serial number, costing €200, to take home the whole prize. These tickets are sold in their millions, despite the fact that on any given weekend the Euromillions jackpot can be bigger than the Spanish Christmas prize, the tickets cost a tenth of the price and if you happen to have the only ticket with the winning numbers on it, you keep the lot.

There are cheaper ways to get involved. All the bars also raffle off hampers, or legs of ham similar to the one I won in the half-time raffle at the football. The hams are tempting enough, but the hampers are absolute monsters. Clipped on the left-hand side of the image of this one is a grown man's coat to give you some idea of scale:

It has to be tied to the ceiling at the top,
to stop it collapsing under its own weight.

The way this works, you usually pay between €3 and €6 for an entry, depending on the size of the prize, and take a two-digit number from 00 to 99. Your name goes on a poster against that number, and if the last two digits of the big Christmas lottery match your two, congratulations, you've won the chance to wrestle the bastard home.

I shudder to think what me and my partner, the two of us already overweight, would do with one of these if we win it. Confronted with so much chocolate, biscuits, alcohol and top-notch ham, and dealing with a new year that will see the dawn of the post-EU, Tories-doing-what-the-fuck-they-want Britain, I've got a horrible feeling it'd all be gone by Easter. And that's being conservative. With a small c. A very small c.

Implosions

Even a quick look at the political landscape in Britain right now reveals the seismic changes that have already been brought about by last Thursday’s result. I'm a very, very long way from a political expert, so can only say it as I see it, but it all rather suggests that the front each party presents to the electorate has been tissue-paper thin all along. I suspect that would surprise nobody (and could fill an entry all of its own), but it’s nonetheless a bit worrying.

On the one hand, the Tories are going through a leadership election that was always going to happen if the vote went against Cameron. The declared runners at time of writing are few, with likely candidates like Boris Johnson* and Jeremy Hunt announcing they’re not running. but even so - you know it’s grim when you’re looking at the selection and thinking to yourself ‘I hope Theresa May wins’. And she’s been backed by ‘Corrible’ Hunt – I’m sure she’s delighted.

Obviously though, being instinctively a lefty, it’s Labour’s leadership issue which most concerns me. I confess to having felt mixed feelings about Corbyn specifically – it’s not easy to support a man the majority of whose parliamentary party is against him, simply because it makes things easier for the Tories at a time when their own divisions should be being exploited.

That said, ultimately those MPs are (supposedly) elected to represent their constituents, and many of the rank and file Labour Party members who voted for him in large numbers come from those constituencies. So overall, I think the PLP should shut up and get behind a man who has a clear mandate from the membership and would likely win again in the event of any formal leadership challenge. Indeed the Labour Party membership jumped specifically before his election, with many joining so they could vote for him. Those members haven't gone away, as the rising membership of Momentum demonstrates. The Parliamentary Labour Party should not be distancing itself from the very people who put them there, even if they disagree with many of them on the specific issue of the EU. Corbyn’s support of Remain may not have been convincing but he did support it, at least publicly. He did what was right when it mattered – the PLP should do the same.

The biggest concern for me in all of this is who’s likely to exploit any political vacuum caused by the splits on both sides. Usually the centre ground would benefit from such problems, but the Lib Dems are still reaping the whirlwind of their own voters’ ire after they coalesced with the Tories, so that’s not necessarily the case now. That leaves the worrying possibility that more extreme parties, of whatever persuasion, stand to gain from the chaos. Imagine a general election where the Tory vote is split or lowered because they’ve lost the support of Remain voters in London and elsewhere, the Labour party has split in two, dividing their votes with them, and nobody wants to vote Lib Dem. What you’ve possibly got then is a very low turnout and UKIP and others improving their share of the vote dramatically.

That doesn’t bear thinking about, but the referendum result has generated such turmoil in politics in Britain right now that it’s the kind of hypothetical scenario that we have to.

*Has it all got a bit real for Boris, such that he suddenly doesn’t want anything to do with it? He and Gove looked like rabbits in headlights in the direct aftermath of the Leave victory, and it’s since become clear that they’d done not an iota of planning between them for such a result.

Consequences

I've always been a proud Englishman, but that pride is not bound up with the usual motivations for it, or expressions of it, that typify such an animal. I've always, for example, absolutely detested the flag-waving, tub-thumping spectacle of the last night of the Proms. Instead it's come from the fact that I've always thought us an island of open minded, tolerant, modern-thinking, creative, culturally significant people.

That belief has, obviously, taken something of a dent these past few days. Immediately on hearing the referendum result, my reaction was pretty sanguine. Just accept it and get on with it, I thought. But what's been happening since then has served only to make me think that, frankly, we're a nation of idiots. Look at this piece in the Indy, for example. The morning after the vote, and only once the result had been announced, there was a surge in Google searches for what happens if we vote to leave. I'd thought, rather naively as it turns out, that this is the sort of thing you looked for before you cast your vote. Accepting that some of these may have been worried Remain voters fearing the worst, if you don't even know what it is you're voting for, should you really be in the damn polling station in the first place? I guess it's possibly because many Leave voters were busy fretting about being robbed by a conspiracy to alter the results by erasing the pencil marks beforehand. Perhaps they didn't have time to actually consider the other stuff.

Then there's the quantity of spoiled ballot papers - over 26,000. Of course the bulk of those are people making some form of personal protest, but over 9,000 of these were rejected for both boxes having been marked. What the fuck? How much more simple does it have to be to enable people to vote correctly?

The post-vote response of some people has been startling, too. A workmate told me that more than one of his friends had said they 'didn't think their vote would count'. Apart from wondering why they bothered to vote in the first place if they genuinely believed that, you again have to ask how they thought this process was going to work if some votes counted and some didn't.

There's no room for voter remorse, and no point arguing the result. No matter how huge the petition grows for another vote, it's pointless and doomed to failure because it's asking for retrospective legislation. There was one vote, and it's done.That's how democracy works - the people have spoken and now have to deal with the consequences. Consequences that we're seeing all too quickly. An apparently broken PM resigning, the only thing he could do in the circumstances. The Parliamentary Labour Party rebelling against its leader and, in the process, showing that it doesn't think the same way as the bulk of its voters - in the north at least - because Corbyn, who better reflects what those northern voters think, was too lukewarm in his support of Remain. The prospect of Boris Johnson or Michael Gove taking over at Number 10, in the process giving us an unelected leader that I rather thought was the type of thing the Leave campaign were against. The two of them may at least have managed to sound gracious in victory, but it's hard to ignore that they were doing so when a nice spot in Downing Street had just opened up.

We're also seeing the first noises being made in what could ultimately lead to the break-up of the supposedly United Kingdom (what a joke that name looks like now, given the enormous division in voting). The Scots were already pissed off about the failure to deliver on promises made after their own devolution referendum. They're positively livid now. And what's going to happen on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic? Surely they're not going to want to return to the days of patrolled borders, checks to get across etc, which would be horribly reminiscent of the Troubles they've worked so hard to leave behind.

Meanwhile, Leave are busily distancing themselves from much of the stuff they'd campaigned on. The £350million claim, for example, which I described as already discredited in my previous entry, has now been called a 'mistake' by none other than Farage himself. The version of Britain for which Leave voters thought they were voting never existed, and never could. I wonder if they're beginning to realise that for themselves now.

I confess that, living in Lambeth, with its second highest pro-Remain vote in the country behind Gibraltar, I'd been optimistic that it would go the way I wanted. I hadn't seen a single Leave sticker, window poster etc, in my area. It was difficult, as that's all I was seeing, to see it going against Remain. I thought people would vote with a 'better the devil you know' nervousness about what would happen if we left. I was very badly wrong.

So - and I realise this is sour grapes, since that bitter taste in my mouth must be coming from somewhere - over 17 million people, plus the 28% who couldn't be titted to vote on the most important matter in our lifetimes - have forfeited their right to complain about what happens in future as a result of this vote. They've made the bed, it's just a pity that the young, the Scots, the Northern Irish, Gibraltarians and Londoners, the majority of whom all voted to Remain, will all have to lie in it with them.

And that pride in being English I was talking about? Well, during the General Election people turned out in their droves in Farage's constituency, some of them openly saying they were voting tactically specifically to keep him out. That's the sort of thing I was talking about making me proud. It's a pretty good thing they did, because his lack of class in victory was quite incredible. Then there's this sort of thing. I don't feel a great deal of pride at the moment. I feel ashamed, to be honest.

I can even get biscuits into an entry about the referendum...

It's been, again, a long time since I made an entry here, but the third-ever national referendum in Britain, and one held on such a fundamental matter, seems suitably weighty a subject on which to return.

At time of writing, we're perhaps eight hours, and certainly less then 12, from knowing the final result of the vote that seems, thanks to the ludicrously negative and bitter campaigning, to have taken forever to arrive. I had to queue to cast my vote this morning, which suggests a high turnout, so at least all the effort both sides have put in may have been worth it from the point of view of voter engagement.

It does seem to have been something that people genuinely care about. Mooching around a farmers' market in Oval recently - very good chorizo Scotch eggs to be had there - there was a civilised debate going on between two fairly eloquent reps, one from each side. This was being amplified though speakers so the whole market could hear, and indeed there was a decent smattering of people sitting listening. This debate, though perhaps atypical of the campaign as a whole in that the speakers were at least civil and didn't interrupt each other, instead alternating at the mic, still threw up some ridiculous claims from each side that were all too typical of what we've been hearing over the past few months.

The Leave campaigner, for example, trotted out the standard bollocks about the £350m fee we pay every week to the EU, a number long since discredited since it makes no account of either the rebates we receive or the mitigating benefits we're paying for - see this rather marvellous piece from John Oliver for a much better response that this layman can come up with. In turn, the Remain campaigner retorted that for every £1 we spend on the EU, we get £10 back. She offered absolutely nothing by way of evidence for this number, merely giving her opponent the rope with which to hang her. This was somebody on the same side of the debate, broadly speaking, as me, but who'd still managed to make me snort with derision at what she'd said.

Overall, the two rather nicely summed up the biggest problem with what amount to the sticks with which each side has beaten the electorate lately - there's been nothing genuinely convincing from either side. As far as I can tell, the Remain campaign has largely been about all the crap that could fall on our heads if we pull out. While I can, of course, see that, couldn't they have focused the main thrust of their argument a bit more on the positive, rather than treating them as some kind of side show? The Leavers' argument, however, can pretty much be summed up as 'Hurrumph. Bloody foreigners.' Not even close to good enough, lads.

It's only fair to point out that, as somebody whose partner is an EU citizen who came here a long time ago, and who hopes to move permanently to Spain with that partner, my own position would be rather simple even without all the 'facts' that have been spat at us during the course of the campaign. My partner has worked without a break ever since she got here, and has certainly paid more tax than I have during that period, offering considerably more to our society with her career in teaching and the charity sector than I ever have with mine in advertising. We'd like to live in Spain but come and go to Britain and elsewhere as we please. We'd also like to do this without having to get married, or either of us taking the other's nationality. So to me this is a no-brainer before either side even put their case to me. 

I like to think, though, that I'd want something a bit more substantive than 'if the immigrants would only sod off everything would be OK' to make up my mind, even if I weren't living with one. But in the event that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to go on, I still think there'd be a way to decide. Let's imagine you had, for whatever reason, not the slightest knowledge of what each side was campaigning for. Not an inkling. You've been living as a hermit for ten years so for all you know, it could be about whether chocolate digestives should be banned from having a layer of caramel added between the choccy and the biscuit base - you just have no idea what's going on.

But you've come back from your little hole in the desert ground, have realised from the hubbub that this is important, and need something to key on before you cast your vote. All you'd need to do is take a look at some of the standard bearers for the respective campaigns. They've given us nothing more useful to go on, so that's as good a criterion as any. So, let's see...

On the Remain side you've got the leaders of the main political parties, a lot of high-profile business leaders and quite a few celebrities. Not exactly the champions you'd send in to joust for your honour, but hold on - have a look at this lot on the other side. Yes, there are business leaders on this side too. But... Gove. Boris Johnson. Nigel fucking Farage. 

Quickly! Give me that pencil. Decision made.

Reflection

So a couple of weeks on, then, and the first noises are already being made about 'changing Britain's relationship with Europe', Nigel Farage having to applaud, to his own apparent surprise, from the sidelines in the meantime. With a referendum on that relationship with Europe surely now a matter of time, Cameron is making it pretty clear from the first days of this government what it is that people have voted for.

So what happened? Has the country lurched to the right? Is everybody simply voting with their wallets, as I've maintained has been the case since the Thatcher years, now the economy seems to be improving? And why did the fully expected bashing meted out to the Lib Dems seem to benefit the very party they were being punished for getting into bed with?

The only predictable bit was what happened to the Lib Dems. As I wrote here some time ago, vote Lib Dem, get Tory, was never going to wash with anybody who'd put their cross in that particular box last time round. Paddy Ashdown's infamous claim that he'd eat his hat if their showing was as bad as exit polls suggested and Clegg's tearful, apparently shell-shocked resignation speech seemed to suggest that the retribution they suffered came as a horrible surprise to them, if nobody else.

You might have expected Labour to be the main beneficiaries of the collapse of the Lib Dem vote, but that's not what happened. The votes all seemed to go elsewhere - the gigantic swing to the SNP in Scotland, for example, decimated Labour in an area where the Tories only had one seat at stake anyway. And to anybody not voting Tory, the south of England makes for depressing map making. Head south from London and only my home city of Brighton & Hove breaks the blue monopoly. Those disaffected Lib Dems certainly didn't vote Labour.

For those of us not of a politically blue persuasion, there were still highlights, still things to please. The main one, of course, was the defeat of one Farage, N., in Thanet. There's no arguing with the number of votes UKIP gleaned overall - a worrying and slightly depressing sign that many Brits may well be blaming all our problems on immigration and a possible, if seemingly implausible, answer to that question of where the Lib Dem votes went. But their winning of only one seat, and Farage's failure to take his, are cause for some hope. Farage's predictable u-turn on his resignation, though, demonstrated that he'll still likely feature on the newly blue political landscape, even if it's only as a mouthy observer. George Galloway losing (and by 'losing' I mean being completely thrashed) Bradford West was also to be celebrated. Abominable man.

Where now for Labour? Realising, five years too late, that they should have elected the other Miliband, should prove sobering to the rank and file. David Miliband always had more charisma than his sibling, and his brother's campaign, essentially moribund, reflected that lack. In this era of personality politicians, where image is so much more important than manifesto promises that are no longer worth the paper they're printed on, he simply never inspired people. A genuinely fresh face is needed. I'd rather hoped my own MP, Chukka Umunna, a man seen as a rising star of the Labour movement and, importantly these days, regarded as pro-business and not too left wing, would be the new leader. He pulled out, though, feeling the need in the process to deny that an 'unwelcome press story' was his motivation for doing so. Odd.

Whoever they do choose this time, they have to get it right because they've got a lot of ground to make up - we've now got five years of Tory control with a small, but workable, majority. Five years during which the Labour leader will have to prove him/herself as a plausible alternative to the incumbent PM, probably campaign on a hugely important issue like EU membership, and try to find at least some common ground with a party which wants to break up the Union as it stands, if any credible opposition to the Conservatives is to be offered.