Night of the losers.

From my point of view last night was a night where everything that's wrong with UK politics came together and all parties ended up as losers. I'm sure there are some out there who see it as a Tory victory grabbing 97 seats mostly off Labour, but in reality it was an epic fail as they didn't win a clear majority owing to Cameron's ineptitude in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Back in December he had what amounted to a 17 point lead, easily enough to get a majority but he fudged the Lisbon Treaty and all his dreams turned to dust as he now faces the choice of grovelling to Clegg about what parts of the Lib-Dem manifesto he thinks the Tories might be able to stomach. He also failed in Scotland, where there was no change in seats at all so the sour little Englanders and Scottish blood runs in these veins comments were to no avail other than possibly deciding a few more English not to vote for him. I don't think he really gets how much the Scots hate the Tories (and possibly the English) over the 1980's and the Thatcher myth they've built up to hide their own massive failure of socialist economic planning, after all it's much easier to blame a distant and not terribly liked nation rather than look to yourselves as to what you could have done better. There's even the usual blaming of UKIP going on amongst the Tory faithful as they see the close but no coconut constituencies slip from their grip because people like me were not going to vote for a party who they did not agree with just to oust another party they did not agree with. Richard North at EU-Referendum is compiling a list of these but I reckon the Tories could have had another 20 seats if it had not been for UKIP. The question of who is to govern Britain would then have been decided fairly swiftly. Will the Conservatives learn anything from that? I suspect not. Cameron could have killed off UKIP easily, he just had to offer a referendum, that he wouldn't tells me and thousands of others exactly where he stands on the EU and is why he lost potential critical gains.
For Labour too this was a terrible rejection of their core manifesto ideals, they held their own in Scotland for the reasons I stated above, but England and Wales rejected them and they no longer have a mandate to rule alone again having to run to Clegg to see what he'll stand for in order to try and run 2 countries that have shown their hatred of their faux socialism. That some of them don't even see it as a defeat says more about their addiction to power than their grasp of reality.
For the Lib-Dems even though they have ended up as power brokers this was a bad night as they lost seats yet increased their total vote by 1%, just not anywhere where it would do any good as they failed to even dent Labours core vote even in Scotland where they are the main opposition despite the claims of the SNP. They now face the possibility of going down in flames with the Tories or into electoral oblivion if they side with Labour, the UK public might be politically fickle, but we have long enough memories to get our own back in a following election.
The SNP too failed, Scotland remains exactly the same despite one of the most catastrophic Labour regimes in living memory, Salmond is no kingmaker after all, 6 seats is never going to be enough and doesn't bode too well in an independence referendum.
BNP failed yet again to make headway, their only consolation is that their share of the vote didn't totally collapse.
English Democrats, as above.
UKIP, probably prevented a Tory majority, but made little or no real headway even in Buckinghamshire, still the protest vote of choice for disaffected Tories, but not yet mainstream.

So, nobody really won and it gets interesting, I suspect any pact will not last long, I also believe that electoral reform wont get the nod in a referendum. So we'll get another general election within 2 years as the economic recovery and the cuts that have to come force a separation of the political parties again.

The only winner was England, we showed Labour what we thought of them, though I doubt the Tories will thank us by giving us a parliament, their leadership still takes far too many things for granted, which is another reason why they remain losers.