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.

Running out of stuff to sell, George?

I've written on here in the past about the dogmatic determination on the part of the Tories to sell off absolutely anything. Anything they don't want the bother of running, anything they think they can make some quick cash from, anything they can use to please the Thatcherite economists in the party, is ripe for selling.

Now, it seems, even our rights can be sold off. This piece of nutcasery is the latest example of the sort of thinking that goes on in the Cabinet, and further evidence that they simple cannot think of anything but money. Money will sort everything out - if only employers could treat people like chattels, free to dispose of them as and when they see fit and for whatever reasons, then there'd be more businesses starting up and more jobs available. Terrific!

Of course, given the likely Ts & Cs on those jobs, and the type of people you'd be working for if they only started a business on the understanding that they could just ditch you whenever they felt like it, who's going to want those jobs? Perhaps we should set a price on our dignity as well, maybe we could sell that off, and then feel free to go and work for these Victorian-style workplace despots the Tories apparently so admire.

We're talking about loss of redundancy cover. Loss of the right to fight unfair dismissal. Doubling the amount of notice of return to work from maternity leave. Other details are patchy. And companies, while unable to force existing workers to sell their rights, would be free to offer only those terms to new employees. This is, frankly, absolutely staggering.

Over-reacting? Think of the money? Not only is this piece of lunacy another tacit admission of the failure of their economic policies (people are so desperate for money that they'll sell off their basic employment rights! Yay!), but what bloody good are shares in a firm which has sacked you and gone bust, only to then rise again as a Phoenix company? Not an inconceivable outcome.

There must be rank-and-file Lib Dem members (and voters) with their heads in their hands at the moment. How did they ever end up in bed with such a crew of right-wing, thoughtless, uncaring, patrician nincompoops as these? This would be laughable if it were not quite so insidious. Osborne, not that he ever feels any such emotion of course, should be hanging his head in shame. Even if he can't see the moral wrong in these proposals, surely, surely he could have seen how they'd be received by normal working people? I despair sometimes, I really do.