That Was The Election, That Was!

Well, that was one for the history books!

The General Election saw a small Conservative overall majority (something I had been privately saying was now a distinct possibility) and the loss of most Liberal Democrat seats – fifty of their 58 now gone.

My scientifically-modelled (such as it is: I don't really go in for making nationwide predictions) expectations were cautious to the point of pessimism, though still better for the Conservatives than any poll or betting market at some 295 seats, with only Harry Cole of Guido Fawkes fame making the same prediction.

In Scotland, the SNP took 56 of the 59 seats, interestingly leaving one seat each there continuing to be held by the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems. The expectation (mine and many others') that they would largely wipe out Labour north of the border has been even more devastatingly accurate than anticipated! The Conservatives had virtually no seats in Scotland to lose, which turned out to be a significant contributor to the asymmetric shifts during this election

Another such shift was in the target seats 'battleground', where the Conservatives took a fair number of their target Labour seats, whereas Labour failed to take more than a handful of their targets. Even the two most marginal such seats remained with the Blues, as did many more of their 106 targets. The Conservatives had concentrated on just forty target seats, and that focus aided their greater success, despite having significantly fewer activists and helpers on the ground.

Locally, the results have been exactly as I predicted – but only because, by now, the Conservative candidate for Rochester & Strood constituency – Kelly Tolhurst – had been able to make herself known more fully around the other eight wards in the 'patch' – rather than just her Rochester West presence as a councillor for the past four years.

This, as I said at the time of the by-election some six months ago, was the biggest ingredient in the equation at that time, as the by-election had, then, just been dropped on everyone with no time to work toward it. As I urged back then, the time to start working toward the General Election was immediately, right then – and to her credit and that of her team, they did just that. I then knew that the seat would be hers, and indeed it became so, and by a very healthy margin of 24k votes to UKIP Mark Reckless' circa 16k votes.

That was a good win, on so many levels!

Obviously, Tracey Crouch and Rehman Chishti held their seats easily, which was hardly a surprise. Poor Tristan Osborne, having door-knocked in Chatham & Aylesford for some weeks and getting the same response, reportedly had in effect resigned himself to abject defeat and has been reported as conceding that 'Tracey is doing an OK job as MP'.

The upshot of all of this is that the country now has a truly Conservative national government (despite what some try to claim) and all the drag of the past five years is now lifted away. Some will try to portray that as uncaring, a 'government without a heart' – but those who are both honest and intelligent enough to see past the Lefty spin will know that this is not so.

The breaking of the 'client State' will release the true potential of all our citizens who have true value, while protecting those who genuinely cannot contribute. These days, I fall into the latter category owing to age and health issues – though I still do not claim any benefits.

This election has done what I had been hoping for so long: it has made the next phase of our country's ascendancy back into the top echelon of the world's nations possible, and indeed highly probable, within just a few years.

Indications are strong that the international community has been waiting (dare I say eagerly?) for this, if anything even more strongly than they did five years ago, when the high probability of a Conservative-led government was the only prospect staying the hands of the big credit rating agencies who would otherwise have severely marked-down Britain's credit rating back in the Spring of 2010.

Now all we have in that respect (by the way) is a sliver shaved off our rating, purely symbolically (it was the minimum possible downgrade) to keep other affected nations happy, and only because of the Eurozone's woes that have impacted a chunk of our trading. In other words, none of that, slight though it was, has been because of any real deficiency here in Britain.

Thus the scene is set for what promises to be a very interesting few years immediately up ahead!