What do you make of the Lib Dems being in government and to what extent do you still support them?

I thought the question would be of wider interest, so I have decided to respond in a full blog post.

My previous three posts about the Liberal Democrats on this blog may give some clues as to how I feel. If you haven’t read them before I recommend you take a look:

• Why a Conservative—Lib Dem coalition may not be a bad thing
• Tentative thumbs-up for the Conservative—Lib Dem coalition
• Letting my Lib Dem membership lapse

Actually, just looking at those headlines tells a worse story than is actually the case.

I have supported the Liberal Democrats for a very long time — long before I could even vote. But I was only a member for a very short period of time — less than a year.

I joined the party mostly because of my involvement with the Dunfermline Liberal Democrats, which I did to keep myself out of trouble before I found myself a job. But I didn’t use my membership very much. I voted in the Mid Scotland and Fife list selection. But beyond that, the annual subscription would just have represented money down the drain in exchange for a flimsy membership card. My decision not to renew was driven by apathy and laziness, not anger.

Why I am at ease

I am not angry with the Liberal Democrats. In fact, I am sure I am much more at ease with the situation than many Lib Dem activists are — for several reasons.

Firstly, I voted for the Lib Dems in May fully expecting them to go into coalition with the Conservatives. Going by the opinion polls, the parties’ positions, what the leaders were saying, it seemed to be clearly the most likely option. I was quite surprised that most others seemed to think it was impossible to comprehend. So I didn’t have the same sense of shock that many others seemed to.

I didn’t believe that the Lib Dems were “Labour plus fluffy kittens, minus Iraq War“, as a lot of people seemed to think. I support the Lib Dems because they are a liberal party. This is the complete opposite of Labour’s core ideology, which is of big government and authoritarian encroachments on civil liberties.

In case you can’t tell, I despise Labour. The idea of them being in power right now chills me. They don’t even know what to say in opposition, never mind what to do in government.

So I am happy that the Lib Dems made the best choice in choosing to go into coalition with the Conservatives (not that Labour were ever interested in joining forces with the Lib Dems anyway). The Conservatives at least have a more liberal wing, which is lacking in Labour.

Of course, coalition government is not easy — but it’s not supposed to be. By its very nature it involves compromise, and not all of them are comfortable compromises to make. But this is the nature of the situation.

Damaged reputation is a blow to liberalism

The most painful aspect is the damage that has been done to the Lib Dems’ reputation, which makes it seem less likely that the party will do well in future. This is a big blow to liberalism.

Promises have been broken. But they always are, even in good economic times, even with a thumping majority. Just look at Labour. The SNP Scottish Government has managed it too, although they have the excuse of being a minority administration. The Lib Dems’ excuse is that they are in coalition.

Sadly, it seems like the political culture here is not yet mature enough to tolerate the idea of making compromises. That is a shame, as it is also a blow to the campaign for proportional representation, which faces a big moment in a couple of months.

In general, I feel quite sorry for Nick Clegg. I think he has done a reasonably good job in a no-win situation, and I haven’t found much to be angry about yet.

But I wouldn’t describe myself as a supporter of the Liberal Democrats. As I have said before, governments are to be opposed, not supported. It is quite right that the Lib Dems are scrutinised in government. Not all of the scrutiny has been fair in my view, but I am not about to push against the scrutiny.

What am I doing that means I have so little spare time? I would say that it’s all because I currently spend so much time commuting to work (generally around three hours per day, or two if I’m lucky). But my chief means of entertainment while travelling, listening to podcasts, has also been causing me undue hassle due to the rising backlog sitting in my iPod waiting to be listened to.

I guess it’s lucky that one of the biggest problems in my life just now is the fact that I have too much interesting and fun stuff to listen to. But I have genuinely found it a tricky balance to get right, and am trying out creative ways to organise my spare time more efficiently as a matter of priority.

Having too many podcasts to listen to has been the case for as long as I can remember. It’s a bit like having an RSS reader, and before you know it, you have subscribed to so many RSS feeds that you never get them all read. This is okay as long as you don’t let anything get too out-of-date before you get round to it.

However, the mild annoyance of having a huge backlog of podcasts became a major problem recently when, almost without noticing, I ended up being four or five weeks behind on almost every podcast I listen to. This became a major problem with the current affairs podcasts I listen to, particularly just after the General Election had taken place. They had almost all been rendered completely out of date!

So since the election I have been on a drive to listen to more podcasts, weed out the ones I don’t really like, and prioritise the more newsworthy ones. Before, I had around 260 podcast episodes downloaded but not yet listened to. Having unsubscribed from and deleted a few podcasts, I have got that number down to 170, where it seems to have stabilised.

It took me about a month to do it, but I have managed to catch up with all of the podcasts that I deem to be “current affairs”, and have even sub-divided this into high-priority and low-priority sub-categories. Apart from F1 podcasts (which have always been consumed fairly quickly), these are now listened to first.

Of the podcasts that are less centred around the news, I have split these into a ‘B’ and ‘C’ list. Bs are podcasts that either I really enjoy or I think I should listen to. Cs are podcasts that I have assigned the lowest priority to. I am on the verge of unsubscribing from some of these.

I start listening to these podcasts if there are no current affairs ones waiting, with one C being placed after every two or three Bs. Just now, the oldest of these is from way back on 2 April — ten weeks ago. It is certainly interesting to see whether or not I really miss listening to these podcasts.

It certainly feels like I have become a lot more organised, even though there are almost 40 hours’ worth of podcasts waiting to be listened to. And that is just in this list alone.

I haven’t even mentioned the comedy podcasts, which I listen to as part of a different routine. I listen to one Adam and Joe podcast per week (on a Monday, to cheer myself up, geddit?). Then during whatever bits of time I have on Monday or Tuesday I listen to Iain Lee or Barry from Watford. This is a huge backlog of its own, but because the Iain Lee ones are generally around 10 or 15 minutes long, it’s easy to squeeze them in here and there.

There is so much cheap (in fact, free) entertainment that there is simply too much interesting stuff to get through it all. I recently calculated that the amount of podcasts I was downloading amounted to 1½ hours of listening every day. No wonder I was struggling.

It is worth being a bit more discerning with how I spend my spare time. But it is always difficult to make the decision to stop listening to a particular podcast. I have been listening to some of these for three years now. But a bit like a favourite shirt that’s worn out, I’m not sure I can actually bring myself to chuck it out.

I see no harm in sharing my predictions. I won’t, however, share the rationale, because there isn’t much of one. My main prediction, though, has been that Labour will lose a few marginal seats. Feel free to download my seat-by-seat predictions, but the bottom line is as follows:

I think I may have been a bit harsh on the Conservatives. I would have given them two seats, but felt like being a bit cheeky by predicting that David Mundell would lose his seat, and that instead the Conservatives would win Dumfries and Galloway from Labour.

Apart from that, I have played it safe with my predictions. What do you think? Tomorrow I will look back and see how I did. Is it unrealistic to aim for 55 out of 59?

In case anyone is wondering, I won’t be around for much of this evening. Though I would love to be sitting watching the television coverage and posting sarcastic remarks on Twitter, I have decided to sacrifice the fun and will instead be actually involved in the election in the flesh, right into the wee hours. Hopefully the experience won’t put me off politics even more!…

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time the media got a tad over-excited when criticising Gordon Brown, only for it to work in Brown’s favour. Just remember back to the faux furore over his handwriting. Then there were the bullying allegations which could have been so damaging for Brown but ended up being more damaging for a charity.

It turns out that, although she perhaps is not a full-scale bigot, Gillian Duffy’s views certainly head towards that zone. Her anti-immigration rant was a pretty typical ill-informed platitude. The nadir was her asking “where all those eastern Europeans are flocking from”, to which the answer is, of course, eastern Europe.

Even so, this is nonsense the like of which we probably all hear every day, be it in an overheard conversation on the street or one of those mad phone-in bigot-magnets that radio stations love to broadcast every morning. In that sense, it was over-the-top of Gordon Brown to call her bigoted, although I would probably have been thinking the same myself.

I am sure that if John Prescott had done this, it would be widely seen as a vote-winner. As it is, this incident plays into media narratives about the gaffe-prone shambles of a man man who fails to empathise with voters and who has a Jekyll and Hyde character. But how many can seriously say they have never muttered under their breath about other people’s views being intensely wrong?

What I find interesting, though, is that Mrs Duffy holds these sorts of views and yet describes herself as “a lifelong Labour supporter”. This is just yet another demonstration to me that Labour is not a compassionate party that cares about the worse-off people in society. A truly progressive party ought to welcome and applaud the endeavours of people who are so desperate to make their lives better that they will move to the opposite side of the continent to try and legitimately make it happen.

This gets to the heart of the real reason why this incident is damaging for Gordon Brown. It exposes the fact that Labour has long since given up the pretence of being the party that is in favour of the disadvantaged in society. Yet at the same time, it dismantles like a house of cards all of the efforts Labour has made over years, if not decades, to court the votes of bigots.

This is the party that likes to talk tough and act tough on immigration. It is the party that delights in putting up hoops of fire for immigrants to leap through. It is the party that introduced the bigoted points based system. It is the party that, in a bigoted move, restricted residents of EU member states Bulgaria and Romania from legitimately seeking work in this country.

Gordon Brown is the person who proudly announced that there should be “British jobs for British workers”. Well, today he’s said it all — Labour is the bigoted party.

The problem is that Gordon Brown has, probably for the first time I can remember, said something about immigration that I can actually agree with — but it wasn’t intended to be heard. That’s because while Labour likes to think of itself as the “progressive” party, its credentials in this area are in fact wafer-thin. If Brown thinks that expressing a mildly anti-immigration view is “bigoted”, he and his party will nevertheless do anything to gain the votes of bigots if it means they can get into power.

It interests me that one of Gordon Brown’s most extensive apologies today has been to members of the Labour Party in an email. Is it because he called them bigots?

This is due to a combination of factors. Partly, I became disillusioned with politics a couple of years ago and have not felt the need to write about it for a long time now. But it goes beyond politics writing.

Just now I don’t have as much spare time as I would like. Depending on whether I can borrow my dad’s car or I have to take the bus, I am currently spending between two hours and three-and-a-half hours a day commuting.

The spare time I have left is spent on other activities. Partly, that is finding somewhere closer to my work to move, so that I can build some more spare time into my life. Finding somewhere to live in north east Fife is not as easy as I would like, but I think I am getting closer.

I also lost a lot of my motivation for blogging, and have turned my attention to more relaxing pursuits. After around a ten-year hiatus, I have rediscovered gaming after my truly awesome brother got me an Xbox 360 for Christmas! I may blog more about that in future, but for anyone interested my gamertag is ‘doctorvee‘!

Anyway, the point is that blogging seems like so much hard work in comparison to unwinding pretending you’re Travis Pastrana. Those who follow me on Twitter may know that recently I had a minor bout of blog depression, when I wondered what on earth I should to about that blog I don’t bother to maintain any more. It had become less fun and too hard-going.

The problem was that I had begun to feel like everything I was writing was inflicting readers with something they didn’t necessarily want to read. This was exacerbated when I merged vee8 (my old Formula 1 blog) with doctorvee. I originally separated out the content because I realised that my F1 posts had such a different audience to the rest of my posts.

This was echoed in the responses on Twitter. Some people said that I should continue, although they personally skipped over the F1 posts. Others said that I should continue, although they only ever read the F1 posts.

I found it easy to get wound up about that sort of thing, but at the end of the day no one minds and certainly no-one dies. Part of the reason for merging the blogs again was to help me become more at-ease with that. But I got neurotic about overwhelming the blog with F1 commentary.

The problem was that I had turned this blog into something where I felt as though everything I published had to be a beautifully-written, 1,000+ word long potential Pulitzer prize winner. Quality control is good, but I had gone too far the other way.

My best blogging years were between 2004 and 2006, when I was more prolific, more spontaneous, and more hit-and-miss. The quality was lower, but the readership was higher, and I had much more fun that way.

So this is just a heads-up to say that I will be making an effort to nudge this blog back in that direction again. I have made a few subtle design changes to make me feel more comfortable about that (the main one being to reduce the font size of the post titles to make them less preposterous if I am writing about something frivolous or personal). There may be a few more to come as well — I will probably experiment.

The upshot of it is that there will probably be a change in tone around here. There will probably be more posts, and I will try to become a bit less squeamish about writing about myself again.

But as you can see from this post, I still can’t resist allowing the word count to go sky high!

Thanks to everyone on Twitter and Facebook who offered their support and advice about where I should take this blog.

Right now the polls say that the Conservatives are roughly eight points ahead of Labour. It’s not all that tight, but you would expect the Conservatives to be doing better given everything that has gone wrong under Labour’s watch.

It’s been clear for a while that voters dislike Labour, but they can’t bring themselves to be convinced by the Conservatives. As a result, the Conservatives are really just a small disaster away from being just a handful of points ahead. And thanks to the corrupt voting system in operation, even if the Conservatives lead by a handful of points, Labour will still win the election.

It’s a prospect that frightens me, because just imagine what Labour would imagine they could get away with if they could still be in government this summer. But I think it is an increasingly real prospect. 2010 is the new 1992.

This is because somehow, despite being one of the most hated people in the country, Gordon Brown always manages to end up on the good side in any story.

I can probably count the number of people that I know like Gordon Brown on the fingers of… one finger. You would think that if you had to conjure up a nothing story that painted a person of your choice in a bad light, the person you would choose is Gordon Brown. Yet, anyone who tries to do it just messes it up.

This bullying story reminds me very strongly of the story a few months back about a “disrespectful” letter that Gordon Brown sent to Jacqui Janes, the mother of a soldier who died while serving in Afghanistan.

The expectation was that everyone would be outraged by Gordon Brown’s callous disregard for British soldiers’ lives. I am sure Mrs Janes envisaged herself being the hero that bashed the final nail into Labour’s coffin, while The Sun was rubbing its hands with glee at the prospect of “wot wonning it” for the Tories again.

In the event, Mrs Janes and The Sun massively overplayed their hand. Instead of being outraged, peopled ended up just feeling sorry for a man who was trying his best, but was hindered by his notoriously poor handwriting and the decreasing quality of his eyesight.

Now, a genuine story about abuse in the workplace has ended up being all about the way a charity is run. Surely Labour cannot believe their luck in this respect. Christine Pratt, co-founder of the National Bullying Helpline, probably dreamt that she was being some kind of modern-day Nelson Mandela when she publicised information about users of the service that was supposedly confidential. Instead, she has faced criticism for this inability to engage brain before sticking the boot in.

You can only imagine that a child-like head rush goes through people who get an opportunity to criticise Gordon Brown like this. It is a shimmering open goal — a massive bullseye target on the world’s biggest bahookie. It is understandable why someone might get a bit too excited at this prospect.

It is a bit like a child riding a roundabout. The kid thinks it would be really great to ride the roundabout as fast as humanly possible. Not only will it be immense fun, but everyone will think you are a hero for managing to go so fast on the roundabout. Instead, what happens is that you end up being sick on yourself, and looking a bit stupid.

There is still a story about Gordon Brown, but only a little bit. The fact is, the revelations about the Prime Minister’s behaviour are not exactly surprising. Mr Brown’s strange behaviour, temper tantrums, and penchant for being violent towards inanimate objects, have been a fairly open secret for a while now.

The macho, bullying culture has been just about the only consistent thread that has run through New Labour since its inception (that is, after all, why Malcolm Tucker has been such a successful character). If these “revelations” about bullying were truly damaging information, the damage would have been done already.

And in fairness, if you were asked to guess which person in the country gets the most angry in his job, you would probably say the Prime Minister, wouldn’t you? It would be a shock if the manager of your local Tesco bawled at his employees on a regular basis. But you’d think anyone working for the political leader of the country would sign up in the full expectation that tensions might be heightened from time to time.

The key reason why this is playing into Gordon Brown’s hands? It is not despite the fact that he’s hated so much. It’s because he’s hated so much. It’s just not cool to kick a man when he’s down. It is, after all, a bit like bullying.

This year’s party conference season has now finished, and attention turns to the General Election that will held some time between now and June. What that really means is that everyone’s thoughts are turning towards the prospect of the Conservatives being in power.

Many people now seem to be treating a Conservative election win as more-or-less a foregone conclusion. This is despite the fact that they still have slightly underwhelming opinion poll ratings. The Conservatives are not exactly getting an enthusiastic reception. It’s just that the other parties are disliked even more.

Something that the Tories have going for them at the moment is the announcement a couple of weeks ago that The Sun will be endorsing them at the next General Election. Truth be told, I was surprised on the one hand that they hadn’t already announced it. On the other hand, I was surprised at how early they had announced it. After all, it gives them plenty of time to change their minds between now and the election.

The Sun tends to back a winner, even though it is probably more of a case of being a weather vane rather than any sinister string-pulling from Rupert Murdoch. A few people I have spoken to think that it’s out of order for The Sun to be advising its readers how to vote. Maybe so, but the freedom of the press is vital to our democracy and they should be allowed to put it in their paper if they wish.

Some people note that people who buy The Sun are probably not buying it for sober and authoritative political analysis. That is true. But I actually think the Conservatives are a perfect match for The Sun. David Cameron and George Osborne would look great on Page 3. They are, after all, a massive pair of tits.

Putting aside whether a tabloid endorsement is something for an aspiring government to be proud about, what should we make of a potential Conservative government? Some on the left contend that no matter how bad Labour are, the Conservatives will always be worse. I do not quite agree with that.

If you ask me, the one thing scarier than a potential Conservative victory is a potential Labour victory. After all, given the turmoil of the past few years, just imagine what Labour would think if they could get away with it all. They would probably literally think that they could get away with actual murder. The thing is that they probably would get away with a lot — more than the Conservatives would anyway.

It has become common for people to say that Labour and the Conservatives have become similar to each other as far as policy goes. I don’t really agree with that. They are quite similar, but with Labour you get bonus ID cards and biometric anal probes. All-in-all, I doubt that a Conservative government would automatically be worse than another Labour one.

The most disconcerting thing about the Tories is not that they seem particularly nasty, but that they seem pretty vacuous at the moment. It may be a cliché to say that most people don’t know what David Cameron stands for. But you do get the sense that their manifesto will resemble some backs of envelopes and cigarette packets stuck together with Sellotape.

During all the talk recently about televised leaders’ debates, David Cameron seems to be the more eager between him and Gordon Brown to appear. But you wonder quite what he will find to say. With the lack of policies, I can half imagine him responding every time he is asked a question by saying, “that’s what she said!” It will probably make about as much sense.

For a lot of people, the Tories are the enemy because they are posh. Cameron and Osborne are the notable posh figures in Westminster, though Boris Johnson also comes in for a fair bit of stick on this front.

Some Conservative politicians are indeed quite ludicrously posh. For some people, this prevents them from representing the voters of Britain adequately because they lack empathy with the man on the street. But for me, a politician’s background is irrelevant. What matters is their capability for the job.

I have to confess to having a bit of a soft spot for Boris Johnson. I need to watch what I say here. I have been told off before for having an opinion on Boris Johnson because I am not a Londoner, so in fairness it is none of my damn business.

But I did once have the opportunity to vote for Boris Johnson. That was when he attempted to become Rector of Edinburgh University when I was a student a few years ago. He was the early favourite, but an intensely negative campaign from the student politics establishment played heavily on his posh image. This ensured that Boris Johnson not only failed to win the election, but he actually came third out of four candidates.

I should point out that Boris was not my first choice in the election. My preferred option was the former Scotsman editor Magnus Linklater, who finished second.

So who did we get as Rector instead? A man called Mark Ballard. I know what you’re probably thinking: who on earth is Mark Ballard? At the time, he was a Green Member of the Scottish Parliament. However, the general population was not quite so enamoured of him as the student population was and he has since lost his seat in the Scottish Parliament.

I have actually met Mr Ballard a couple of times and I can certainly say that he is a very pleasant chap. But ultimately he is a bit of a nobody, certainly in comparison to somebody like Boris Johnson. I mean, at Edinburgh University we could have had London’s Mayor as our university’s figurehead. As it was, we got someone who was rather worthy, but rather anonymous and a bit dull.

I don’t suppose there is necessarily anything wrong with that. But the mantra of “anyone but the Tories” surely isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It seems as though the promise by Sky News to televise a debate come what may — even if the debate was between tubs of lard — has forced everyone’s hand, broadcasters and political parties alike. It seems as though now it is going to happen, with the involvement of all the major broadcasters. It also appears as though the three main party leaders are on board (albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm).

The end of the issue? Of course not. This is just the beginning of the matter. More details will need to be fleshed out. What format should such a debate take? Will there be a number of separate debates? And what about the role of smaller parties?

I am normally fairly ambivalent about calls for televised political debates. Those politicians who call for such a debate usually do so because they perceive that it would advantage them.

Someone like David Cameron will go for it because he is a confident performer, the momentum is behind him and the media appears to have declared him the winner already. Someone like Gordon Brown will reject it because he does not come across so well on television. This time he has been forced into it, partly because of Sky News’ promise to “empty chair” him if he didn’t, but also because refusing to appear would further the idea that Brown is a coward with poor leadership qualities.

The prospect of a televised political debate fills me with dread rather than excitement. I doubt it does much for democratic accountability. Part of me suspects that vain politicians just crave appearances on the television.

No doubt we will be served up a rather unedifying spectacle, like PMQs on steroids. I predict Punch and Judy politics a-plenty. Most likely, as with Question Time, it will be a platform for the most appalling demagoguery, complete with an audience that will clap like seals at any old nonsense.

Most of all, I think the idea of a leaders’ debate just misses the point. While it is useful to know what the major party leaders think, focusing on leaders too much is damaging to the health of our parliamentary democracy. Once again, there is a clamour to bring to Britain a feature of US politics which is a square peg in a round hole.

Televised debates are highly popular in the USA. But that is because the format is practically ready-made for the US political system. For one, the US system is a Presidential system, meaning that voters actually do elect the country’s leader. The US system is also a truly two-party system, with two Leviathans totally overshadowing any minority candidates. This makes it easy to adopt a one-on-one, head-to-head debating format.

Even though the televised debate is more-or-less a perfect fit for a US Presidential election, the format’s success is a matter for debate. In years gone by it may have provided some election-defining moments. But as I recall, the debates involving Barack Obama and John McCain, and Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, hardly set the world alight.

So what on earth makes anyone think that this gimmick will suit British politics? It seems like just another outcome of politicos’ obsession with America. It seems like the idea of someone who has mistaken his DVD box set of The West Wing for real pornography.

Our Parliamentary system doesn’t — or at least shouldn’t — place so much focus on party leaders. Very few voters will actually have any sort of say on who the Prime Minister is. I will have the option to vote for or against Gordon Brown, but only because I happen to live in his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. I will have no say whatsoever on David Cameron or Nick Clegg.

And what of the smaller parties? In the UK, broadcasters are required to be impartial in the run-up to an election, meaning that legally broadcasters will find it difficult to lock out the small parties. Even if these other parties have little or no chance of forming the government. Even if most viewers will not be as interested in hearing from these parties.

The most noise is being made by the SNP. They are threatening legal action if an SNP representative is unable to play a part in a televised leaders’ debate.

The SNP may have a point. Even though they have only a handful of MPs, and are only contesting seats in a portion of the UK, they have a lot of support in that portion. They are not a loony fringe party. They are in fact in government in the UK. Viewers north of the border will certainly be interested to hear what the SNP have to say in the run-up to the election.

At the same time, their presence may be a distraction from the real purpose of the debate, which is basically to watch the potential future Prime Ministers partake in a spot of verbal mud-wrestling. It is, after all, a “leaders’ debate”. Despite all his ambition, Alex Salmond is highly unlikely to be the next Prime Minister, as is Angus Robertson.

Yet, what if there is the prospect of a hung Parliament? The collapse in Labour support has not been met with a real surge in support for the Conservatives. With so many parties having moderate levels of support, it is conceivable that a party like the SNP could play a king-maker role.

There is no easy answer. This is the core problem with the idea of a televised debate. It might be good for a simple, true two party system such as the USA’s. But for the UK’s more subtle and diverse politics, it won’t fit quite so well.

Yesterday, the BBC’s coverage began on the premise that it was “too close to call” or that, if anything, the SNP had squeaked it. Jim Murphy was making his excuses early (and doing a fairly good job of it, it has to be said). Coming towards midnight, it became clearer that Labour had won. The SNP were saying they hoped to have halved Labour’s majority.

Even with that knowledge, the scale of Labour’s victory when it was finally announced amazed me. The SNP hadn’t even halved Labour’s majority. In fact, Labour’s vote actually went up from the 2005 General Election result. The only real consolation the SNP can have is that the swing was 5% from Labour to the SNP. Even so, that looks minuscule compared to the swing of 22.5% achieved just a few months ago in Glasgow East.

There are all sorts of reasons why the SNP will be disappointed with this result. First of all, Glenrothes must have been a target seat for them anyway, even before this by-election was announced, with the SNP having won the similar Fife Central seat in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election. When Labour was in its trough of popularity, the SNP must have thought Christmas had come early.

Labour’s campaign had seemed like a total shambles. I do not live in the constituency so I haven’t seen any of the literature, but I have heard some bad things about it. Sarah Brown’s well-publicised visit to Cardenden was a complete botch job, and Gordon Brown’s visit to a cafeteria wasn’t much better.

Labour did not need a superstar candidate either. Lindsay Roy is a very nervy and uncomfortable performer on the television. However, it looks as though that actually played into his hands. Labour emphasised the fact that Lindsay Roy is not a career politician, and his track record of being out in the “real world” helping out Fife’s schoolchildren must have gained him a few votes.

As an aside, I doubt that Lindsay Roy actually wanted to become MP. He certainly didn’t look overjoyed at having won, and even after it was clear that Labour had won his body language seemed pretty negative to me. I have heard it said that Lindsay Roy wanted to retire from headteaching anyway and that he saw this as the ideal opportunity to get an early retirement. He probably thought he had no chance of winning.

There is also the fact that the SNP Scottish Government was still in its honeymoon period. Some people are reluctant to say that the honeymoon is over, but there is no doubt that this is at least a slap in the face.

Let us not forget that one of the SNP’s flagship policies was designed to please Fifers in particular. The SNP must have thought that the abolition of bridge tolls would have secured a few votes in Fife. Glenrothes in particular is within comfortable commuting distance of both Edinburgh and Dundee, meaning that many residents will be frequent users of both the Forth and Tay Road Bridges. The fact that the voters of Glenrothes in particular have given the SNP the cold shoulder is a major snub.

Nationalists may counter that Fife is fertile territory for Labour. Time and again I saw pundits on the television saying that Labour benefited from a “halo effect” spilling over into Glenrothes. Fifers, apparently, are proud that Gordon Brown is Prime Minister.

Let me just say, as someone who has lived in Fife all my life, that this is a complete load of tosh. Since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, I have never heard anyone say that they are proud that the PM is a Fifer. In fact, I have sometimes heard people wonder out aloud how it could possibly be that Kirkcaldy can have such high unemployment when the Prime Minister represents the constituency. (I once heard someone say, referring to the perceived unwillingness of Gordon Brown to help his local area, that Kirkcaldy has the highest rate of unemployment in the country, although I doubt that.)

Fife is not Labour loopy. Yesterday there was the opportunity for three of the four constituencies in Fife to be represented by a party other than Labour, leaving just Gordon Brown’s seat in tact. That didn’t happen. But the fact is that the Kingdom of Fife has the capacity to elect any one of three parties. As such, Glenrothes’s decision to vote for Labour should not simply be batted away because it was supposedly as “safe seat”. According to Alex Salmond, there is no such thing as a safe Labour seat these days, and Glenrothes certainly wasn’t one for the reasons outlined above.

The SNP may complain about the negativity of Labour’s campaign. But they should be alarmed that it worked. In retrospect, the decision of the SNP to select Fife Council leader Peter Grant as candidate must be seen as a major tactical error. The Labour Party was able to tap into some real dissatisfaction that people have with Fife Council at the moment.

Because of the complexities of this situation, it is not exactly clear what message the voters were sending out. There is no doubt that there was a message of some sort. But was it a verdict on the Labour government in Westminster? Was it a vote of confidence in Gordon Brown? Was it about sending a message to Holyrood? Or was it about punishing the leader of Fife Council?

Whichever, the SNP should take this seriously. I have no reason to doubt that they will, and the reaction from SNP members’ blogs is sober and reflective (see, for instance, Richard Thomson). There was some real evidence that the SNP were becoming complacent with their position. In the run-up to the election it was looking as though the SNP was giddy on power.

Alex Salmond’s supreme confidence was completely misplaced. And his attempt to attach himself to Barack Obama’s election as US President was crass in the extreme. Voters can smell this sort of thing a mile off, and I’d be amazed if it didn’t cost the SNP votes.

It is no longer enough to rely on the dissatisfaction with the Labour Party that many people have. With Labour’s vote having gone up, it’s pretty clear that they benefited from some serious tactical voting, with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems being squeezed. If this election shows anything, it is that while Labour are unpopular among many voters, the SNP are also loathed among many others.

A word on the Lib Dems, who must be very disappointed. For the second Scottish by-election in a row, they have come in fourth and lost their deposit. Glenrothes is practically sandwiched in between two Lib Dem constituencies — Dunfermline and West Fife and North East Fife. While there is no reason to automatically assume that the Lib Dems should therefore win Glenrothes, they must be disappointed by their complete inertia just now.

It is tough for smaller parties in by-elections anyway. But the current political climate cannot be doing them many favours. Despite PR, Scotland is beginning to look a bit like a two party system. In the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections, one of the biggest changes was the almost complete disappearance of the small parties. Now it looks as though both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are wilting in a highly charged political atmosphere that pits the SNP versus Labour, leaving little room for much else.

Julie Hepburn:

David Mundell’s comment sent shivers down my spine… Even if they don’t have a single Tory MP elected in Scotland… they still think they have the right to impose policies upon the people of Scotland that they have rejected at the polls.

Yes, but the only problem with this is that they do have the right to do that. A UK General Election is just that — a general election for the whole of the UK, whether the SNP likes it or not. That means the seats are totted up for the whole of the UK and whoever has the most seats forms the government. A pretty simple concept.

It’s the same concept that applies in elections to the Scottish Parliament. Seats are totted up for the whole of Scotland and whoever is in the best position to form an administration does so.

While the SNP are always quick to jump up and down to point out the Conservatives’ alleged unpopularity in Scotland (which isn’t really true, but I’ll let that slide for now), they are always a great deal more reticent about the geographical differences that occur within Scotland as well.

Images stolen from the Scottish Politics website

The above maps show the results of the 2007 Scottish Parliament election. On the left is the constituency result, while the map on the right shows how the regional votes were cast in each constituency.

It is pretty clear that there is a distinct difference in voting patterns between different parts of Scotland. Broadly speaking, the further north and the deeper into rural areas you go, the more likely the SNP are to win. This is especially emphasised in the case of the regional vote where voters are more likely to vote for the party they really support rather than tactically voting. Meanwhile, the central belt still heavily voted for Labour, particularly in the west.

Does this mean that the SNP is just a bunch of northerners foisting unwanted policies which have been rejected by voters in the lowlands? I don’t think so. But Julie Hepburn’s logic, all too prevalent among nationalists, would conclude this if only it was not so hypocritical.

As I said, the Scottish Parliamentary election is a Scotland-wide election and whoever gets a plurality of seats across the whole of Scotland wins. So it was right that the SNP ended up forming the Scottish Government. The SNP will quite cheerfully accept their right to govern the whole of Scotland.

By the same token, if the Conservatives win the most seats in the next UK General Election, they will be well within their rights to form the government for the whole of the UK. That would include Scotland, no matter how much foot-stamping the nats do. Neither case sends a shiver down my spine.

Meanwhile, the SNP often tries to make out that it speaks for the whole of Scotland. That sends a shiver down my spine.

I am not trying to say, as the nationalist logic goes, that the central belt and the south should pursue independence because of these geographical differences. Such differences between different parts of any area will inevitably form. Look at any election map for any country, no matter how large or small, and you will doubtless see certain trends. These could be along urban / rural lines, differences between coastal and inland areas, north / south divides, east / west divides, or whatever.

Is this an ideal situation? Far from it. Adopting a federalist structure can go a long way to mitigating these effects and that is part of the reason why I am a federalist.

Unfortunately, the SNP is not a federalist party. You can see this in their strange “local” income tax policy which could hardly be less local. Despite their rhetoric about bringing government closer to the people, the SNP is a centralist party. It wants to take powers away from other levels of government and concentrate them all in Holyrood.

The “problem” of having a party foisting unwanted policies in areas where those policies were rejected would hardly be solved by the SNP.