Thoughts Political...

So, the coalition gets down to real business with the announcement of cuts. Robert Peston offers some interesting analysis here of whether this will be good or bad for business and jobs. Following some actions of human rights, an enquiry into torture, scrapping ID cards, etc.. that I've found myself in wholehearted agreement with, there's more here that sticks a bit, although with the NHS only just announcing job cuts from savings introduced by Labour and the devolved regions able to defer the cuts for a year, it will take time to see how drastic the impact on frontline services will be - it will undoubtedly be heavy and will hit those worst off most. We will wait and see what can be offered in way of mitigation for this.

The Lib-Dem post-mortem
I've also been reading a few different ideas about what went wrong for the Lib-dems and why the polls got it wrong. Before launching into my own thoughts on this, it should be pointed out that they did increase their share of their vote from the last election and were the only party that increased their share of the vote from the start of the campaign. Its also worth pointing out that they are now running second in a lot more constituencies than they were before and for the first time in a long time have a share of power - so not exactly a disaster. But, what went wrong, in my opinion?

Tribalism -UK politics is still very tribal. It has been noted before that support for the Tories is often underestimated as more people stick to voting for them than are willing to admit it. The same is now arguably true for Labour. So when faced with an opinion poll more people find it easier to say they are voting Lib-Dem, but in the polling booth the old tribal instinct kicks-in.

Bad-luck - If you look at the seats that were very close - within a few hundred votes, the Lib-Dems lost more of these, falling just short than any other party - the Tories were the luckiest party in this respect. To illustrate this - Edinburgh South was the Lib-Dems 3rd or 4th targets needing to overturn a majority of just 400 votes. They got this down to 300 votes but it would now be their 6th target.

Labour didn't do well enough. - In some of the seats they lost they only suffered a small decrease in their share of the vote, in some they even increased it (look for example at Cambourne and Redruth), but a collapse in the Labour vote favouring the Tories allowed the Tories in.

Whether the coalition helps or hinders them next time round remains to be seen, but its interesting to note that in their key targets, for the first time ever, they will be challenging Labour in slightly more places than the Conservatives. (At least on current boundaries which will probably change by next time).

The relationship between the Scottish and UK governments.
Mr Cameron is taking an interesting approach to Holyrood - not only offering more tax powers, but also wanting to involve the SNP administration in EU negotiations on fisheries, etc... Aside from being a sensible move it also makes a political sense. Stopping short of independance, a strong SNP is good news for the Tories because its bad news for Labour (who can't govern the UK without Scottish support). I suspect that there may be a hope that they can strengthen the SNP administration and form a form a good working relationship with them, whilst simultaneously weakening the call for independance that will have been boosted by the Conservatives governing again. In other words, the message to Scotland is "we're not that scary, we can work with the SNP, so lets not scrap the Union. Oh, and by the way, give Labour a good kicking at the Scottish elections next year".