UK elections are always fun to watch for a number of reasons. For one, you don’t have the holy rollers mucking everything up. For another, it’s a short sprint of a campaign with strict limits on campaign broadcasting so you don’t get hammered with the samn damned ads every commercial break. And really, it’s a different and interesting form of governance that I can watch without that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, because it’s somebody else’s problem.
And right now, that problem is David Cameron’s. He’s gaining ground. The threat of UKIP appears to have been somewhat overstated, and Labour is crashing hard and fast, and the LibDems are paying the price for having allied with him – but the Scottish National Party, if the polls are to be believed, is about to take every single seat in Scotland bar maybe one. Which means Cameron may yet get to go down in history as the Prime Minister who presided over the dissolution of the United Kingdom.
It’s bad for everyone, really. Labour relied so heavily on Scotland for support in recent years that the fallout from its Unionist stand during the referendum has really and truly poisoned the well. The LibDems enabled a Tory government without getting anything its own way and have been well and soundly thrashed by what should have been their base, and may be on the verge of electoral annihilation. UKIP’s share of the vote is spiking without giving them any actual extra seats. And for all that, the Conservatives may yet fail to book a majority in their own right.
Long story short: this election was a powder keg under the UK political system, and the British people grabbed the plunger and slammed it down with both hands. Now things get interesting.