The results are in, Tory Majority. Much of the UK will be asking itself how the polls got it so wrong.
Now that the election is over, we’ll be told that it’s just time to ‘heal the divisions’ and ‘suck it up’ because ‘democracy has spoken’. That’s if we’re told anything at all.
Consider; this was an election the outcome of which you couldn’t split with a guillotine. It was an election billed as the tightest of modern times. Polls hadn’t shifted in months. So what happened on the day?
Cameron’s noose – that object so beloved of hangmen, which strikes mortal fear into the condemned.
Human brains are funny things. We can be told all sorts of stuff, but we don’t believe it until presented with the news/act/fact that’ll bring it home. Two simple examples can be used to demonstrate this, the condemned and the smoker. The condemned usually manage not to think much about their future, or relative lack of it, until the final little while. Seeing the noose brings home everything, that last walk, the trepidation builds. For tobacco users, it will always happen to someone else, until it happens to them, then they usually wish they’d made different choices.
At this year’s GE, Middle England was presented with tales of an ‘Ajockalypse’, and in a comedic way it struck home, but wasn’t really taken seriously.
When many of Middle England’s swing voters walked into the booth however, they saw the horror of ‘Ajockalypse’ on that ballot paper – like the hangman’s noose, it was staring them in the face. For them though, there was an easy reprieve, just hold your nose and mark the paper somewhere else, praying that enough others would do the same that you’d be granted a permanent stay of execution.
It worked.
Middle England voted for the pain of five more years of ‘austerity’.
Middle England voted for ongoing demonization of the poor.
Middle England voted for disgraceful treatment of the underprivileged.
Middle England held its collective nose and voted for unfettered Toryism.
Middle England voted for Nuclear weapons; for bombs before bairns.
Middle England voted for ongoing creeping privatization of the NHS.
Middle England voted to go with the only significant party not promising constitutional reform.
Middle England voted to hurt itself.
Middle England did this because it was, quite simply, more afraid of ‘Ajockalypse’ than all of these issues combined.
Scotland must suffer it, because it’s what Middle England wanted. Faced with a perceived immediate disaster by ‘Ajockalypse’ and a more prolonged but incremental pain, Middle England chose unrestricted Toryism as the way to save itself from Scottish influence.
Middle England chose unidentified but certain and savage cuts. Cuts that have been guaranteed but not specified as to where they’ll fall, because it was convinced it was preferable to the certainty of ‘Ajockalypse’.
It really doesn’t matter how anyone examines the facts, at day’s end, both Labour and Tory campaigns were woeful, the polls told us this too. The only thing which really separated them was ‘Ajockalypse’.
On May 7th, 2015, Middle England decided it couldn’t suffer ‘Ajockalypse Now’, it didn’t realize that with that choice, it’s guaranteed it; it’ll just never acknowledge it as such.
David Cameron won an election – he squandered a state to do it.
History will teach, ‘Ajockalypse’ will be the word that finally condemned a union.
David Cameron will ultimately go down in history as the Prime Minister who won a referendum only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It will only rate a footnote, if that, but the strategies Cameron pursued were designed by an American, Jim Messina, an American who has absolutely no concept of an already fractured Union, an American who doesn’t care for it. Jim Messina is an American who’s interest in his personal stock, in ‘chalking up another in the win column’. Anyone who doubts that only needs to look at his actions before and after the result.
Jim Messina won’t be the one to suffer though. He’ll just go home to America.
While David Cameron will rightly bear the blame, he employed the man after all, there’s a lesson in employing folk from outside the franchise to meddle within it.
David Cameron will try to heal the rifts, slap sticking plaster on the wounds. History will show he might as well have tried to put out the great fire of London using a teacup dipped in the Thames, for like that conflagration the firestorm of constitutional upheaval will now just have to burn itself out. As to Cameron, he might just find himself unaware he has already chained his legacy to the stake.
