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I'm heading to bed now, but I have to say, it looks like Labour *and* the LDP are getting hammered. Labour have lost nearly a third of the seats they held and the LDP have lost a substantial number, though they've picked up a few. Still nearly 200 seats to declare, and there will doubtless be some kerfuffle tomorrow over the places people weren't allowed to vote, but it looks like just what the pundits were guessing this afternoon: a swingeing win for the Tories, but not swingeing enough for them to govern by themselves. I think a coalition government will emerge, Tory and Whig, and Labour will go and sit in the corner for a decade. My guess is that there will be a new Labour Party leader after this...

UK election thoughts

Well, on the whole, I think it's what everyone expected. The one thing that's striking in purely political terms is that Labour did so poorly that it's nearly impossible for them to form a coalition that would hold a majority in Parliament. Given that the DUP are never going to combine with Labour and that Sinn Fein never take their seats, even if Labour somehow forged an alliance with the LibDems, that might not be enough to drag them into majority.

Of course, the other thing that's striking is that while the LibDems look to have gotten 23% of the vote and increased their national percentage from the last election, they actually suffered a net loss to only 9% of the seats in the Commons. Clearly the electoral system is broken and needs reform if the views of the British people are that badly represented.

The big problem with *any* political process, of course, is that the people who design and implement deeply unpopular policies, or who simply implement questionable policies very badly, are still the ones running their party (until after a serious election loss), so there's rarely a way to say "I don't like the guys who've been running things, but I want people who will do what they *said* they were going to do, instead of people who've _announced_ they're going to do the opposite." I imagine if Old Labour, or Future Labour, or anything other than New Labour had been on the menu, the Tories wouldn't have made the huge inroads they did. It seems that the New Labour move away from the old socialist policies and near-Soviet economic theory of the 1970s and 1980s, the preserved all the elements of government intrusiveness that people dislike about that model without doing any of the things (effective economic management, financial regulation, protecting public health and safety, providing necessary public services, building a strong and cohesive society) that socialism ought to be able to do.

Instead, now we'll have the Conservative Party that openly worships big business, hates government service programs, and is just as intrusive, if not moreso, into citizens' private lives. :-(

And, on a tangential subject, does anyone really believe that UK Trident serves a practical purpose in this day and time? Wouldn't scrapping it and cancelling its replacement save 5% of the national defense budget and serve as a masterful example of first-world disarmament without imperilling the UK's safety one iota?

30 Poems: Numbers 7, 8, and 9--A trio of modern Scottish poets

I've been falling behind on my poetry project. Work has that tiresome way of occasionally wanting you to, well, work. Cramps the artistic style, you know. Well, not as much as having no job does, for sure.

Anyway, here's a rather entertaining poem I encountered just this afternoon, casting about for something to include ( Read more... )

( and here's another )

( and one more )