Politics

Scottish Review : Alf Young

Alf Young Politics

Published 10 May 2010 · Updated 27 February 2026 · 4 min read

Scottish Review : Alf Young - Scottish Review article by Scottish Review

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The summing-up

Alf Young

The votes are almost all counted. The television exit poll, its findings widely derided in the early hours of this morning, was bang on the money. Nearly 30 million of us voted and boy did we deal all our politicians a mean hand. They’ve all lost something. We’ve left them with a political landscape across these islands that all of them, sleep deprived and weary, are struggling to comprehend.
     Voters came back to Labour in Scotland, but, in England, the same party suffered its biggest reverse in 80 years. The SNP stood still. The Lib Dems found that a bout of Cleggstasy can leave you with the mother of all next-day hangovers. And the Conservatives, so confident an outright majority would be theirs, fell short of the decisive mandate they craved. Their dalliance with the Ulster Unionists deprived that party of its last seat in the province. The DUP leader at Stormont was booted out in the wake of a family scandal.
     It is one of the enduring mysteries of a participative, open democracy that 30 million people can put their individual crosses on a piece of paper and inflict such finely-honed retribution on those who besmirched the name of parliament with their expenses gravy-train and can’t collectively level with us about the pain to come, post-recession, to fix our battered public finances. And that despite the system proving incapable of allowing all who wanted to vote yesterday to exercise their democratic right to do so.
     The horse-trading has already begun. Labour seeks to engineer a realignment of what it calls the progressive majority in Britain, by offering the Lib Dems a concrete deal on a new voting system and other constitutional reforms. David Cameron, already under blogosphere attack from the hard-liners in his own party, is promising Nick Clegg ‘a big, open and comprehensive offer’ that could, it seems, extend to a formal Lib Dem-Conservative coalition.
     What might he have in mind? Vince Cable installed in the Treasury in place of George Osborne perhaps? Cameron’s statement has introduced some red lines – over his approach to Europe, immigration and keeping Trident. But there are concessions on schools (in England only, of course), reform to the tax system and more support for the poorest in society. On one potential deal breaker – reform of our electoral system – the Tory leader is offering another all-party committee of inquiry in the present voting system. Is it enough to seal a deal?

That inquiry looks like a lame re-run of the Roy Jenkins commission under New Labour in the late 1990s. It ended up mouldering in Tony Blair’s in-tray. And would the Lib Dems really do coalition business with a Tory Party which promises no compromise on Europe, a party which, in Nick Clegg’s stated view, sits with ‘nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists and homophobes’ in the European parliament? Could the Lib Dem leader keep his own at-times fractious party in line, if he did a deal on the terms David Cameron has advanced so far?
     There again a deal with Labour, even one based on early voting change, carries its own dangers. Whatever way you look at it, across the UK as a whole Labour lost this election. And Clegg’s oft-stated distaste for the prime minister makes it hard to see how a coalition of the losers, as the Tories and the media cohorts would style it, could earn popular legitimacy.
     Of course the Lib Dems, as a party, risk losing even more if they walk away from a chance of real electoral reform. Their campaign, which promised so much after that first televised leaders’ debate, ended up returning fewer Lib Dem MPs than in 2005. Nearly 7 million Lib Dem voters produced little more than one in five of the MPs Labour’s 8.6 million votes garnered. That’s still a constitutional outrage, whatever way you look at it. Will Nick Clegg really walk away from the opportunity to change those discredited rules of the game?
     Now that the people have spoken, the party leaders have very little time to respond. Greece is in turmoil, the eurozone tottering. A fragile recovery from recession could so easily slip into reverse. As I noted on Thursday, this may have been the election to lose. Now, without an outright winner, Cameron, Clegg and Brown are all called upon to act in ways that show they understand the mood of voters and can balance party interest against a greater challenge. We are entering a May weekend which could eventually go down as one of the most significant in our long history.

Alf Young