Nationally, the big three parties all lost. Labour lost a lot of seats, the Lib Dem surge lost them seats, and the Tories frittered away what had been a massive poll lead, and didn’t get enough seats for a majority. The only parties who won in terms of the voting were us Greens, getting our first MP, the Northern Ireland Alliance Party, who also got their first MP, and Plaid Cymru, who picked up a seat.

In the local elections, Labour were the big winners.The big three parties all benefited from the locals being held alongside the general, and Labour was the party which, as a result, gained seats. In fact, in some wards in London, this led to paper candidates tripling their vote, and shooting past parties who campaigned hard to double theirs.

For some good analysis of the national picture, take a look at Jim Jepps’ blog

Anyway, we now have a Lib-Con coalition. On the upside there are some signs that the deal has reigned in some of the Tories’ pro-rich policies, and we’ve got nice-looking things like the new Freedom Bill, which will revoke most, if not all, of Labour’s attacks on civil liberties. On the downside, are the savage cuts they’ll be making to public services. If you’re a Lib Dem member or voter who is unhappy about this new alliance, The Greens will happily offer you a new political home.

One more piece of post-election analysis that’s worth pointing to is from The Jubilee Centre, who reminds Christians why we’ve no need to panic about how bad the new government might turn out,
and that we still have a duty to pray for the the new government.

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Firstly, there’s the Vote for Policies site, which allows you to find out which party reflects your views on a range of policy issues. The Green Party is the most popular party on this measure (at 26.47% as I write this), so it’s a shame that the actual election result is very unlikely to reflect that.

Then there’s the Green Party’s make your own election video, based on our party election broadcast:

If you’re a Christian wondering whether or not you should bother with the election, then here’s 10 reasons for Christians to vote and a whole host of resources aimed at Catholics explaining why bother to vote.

There are a whole host of websites offering summaries and analysis of the different parties’ policies on various issues. However, I really don’t have the time to try to compile a useful list of them, so you’ll just have to go hunting.

And, finally, something amusing I stumbled across this morning is that, according to this article, the Tories apparently think that promising to give us “the power to plant trees” gives them some kind of credibility on environmental issues.

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I’m going to pull together a number of the policy announcements (yes, the Tories have policies for the first time since the last election) they made that show that the failed economics of the Thatcher/Major years are back at the heart of Tory thought. This post is intended as an overview of the whole thing, with links to more specific commentary elsewhere.

Firstly, Cameron said today that “more government got us into this mess”. He seems to have forgotten that “this mess” is a recession caused by banks exploiting a reduction in government regulation. The Tories also seem to have forgotten that the hole in the public finances is primarily due to the recession and can be solved by encouraging economic growth And shadow business secretary, Ken Clarke, wants to reduce regulation on business.

George Osborne seems to have adopted an economic theory apparently at odds with reality. He believes that high government debt levels are causing overseas investors to lose faith in the UK, when actually it seems as if investors are happy to back Britain. In any case, Britain’s level of public debt isn’t as high, in historical terms, as the big three parties are making out. Furthermore, talking about cutting public spending in the middle of a recession is somewhat at odds with what reputable economists will tell you. It took massive government spending to end the Great Depression of the 1930s, and attempts to curb it by cutting spending early on simply made things much much worse.

In the detail of his speech, Osbourne proposed reforms of the welfare system which would most likely harm the poorest. He wants to shift people from incapacity deficit to jobseeker’s allowance – thus cutting their income, but proposed nothing that would significantly increase their chances of getting a job. In fact, their proposals seem to be mostly a rehash of what already exists, plus an incentive to new small businesses that would disadvantage existing companies, hence undermining the goal of job creation. Given that there are already people who are unfit to work who have been refused incapacity benefit this comes across as somewhat heartless. And when you consider that, in the same speech, he effectively said that he would like to cut the new top rate of tax for those earning over £150,000 as soon as he possibly can, it seems even more so.

Another thing that seems to indicate that the Tories are only considering the rich is their council tax pledge – saying that the average family will save £200 on their council tax bill by imposing a council tax freeze means that the Tory definition of average is the richest 20%.

This last point, however, offers a ray of hope that they don’t mean all of what they say. If you’re trying to reduce a government deficit, then you don’t promise a de facto tax cut. In fact, if you’re serious about reducing the deficit then you should be proposing tax increases.

It’s also worth noting that many Tories on a local level seem to be taking the opposite track to those in Whitehall. Here in Coventry, for example, the Tory council are planning to waste one billion pounds on an incinerator that nobody wants. We can but hope that the Tories aren’t as committed to overly harsh cuts as they are trying to make out.

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At that conference today, Gordon Brown made a very good speech. If the Prime Minister could get his presentation this good all the time, and the Labour Party follows suit, then Labour has a fighting chance of doing a John Major and winning the next election, albeit by a slim margin. However, I thought I’d pick out a few bits of the speech that particularly caught my attention. The negative tone of much of what follows doesn’t mean that there wasn’t much in the way of good stuff in the speech. It merely means that there’s a lot more to say about the stuff that I have concerns about.

The section that most caught my attention was when he was talking about the economy and the environment. Both are key issues, and both are fundamentally interwoven. He made some very good noises on the economy, condemning the market fundamentalism that drives Tory economic policy, and talking about preventing “great British businesses go[ing] to the wall”. The problem is that it rather marks him out as a hypocrite. Although Labour have been less Thatcherite than the Tories were, free-market principles rather than human beings have still been the driving force behind New Labour economics. And as for preventing great British businesses from going to the wall, we’ve seen both iconically British names (Woolworths) and strategically important industries (wind turbine manufacture at the Vestas plant in the Isle of Wight) abandoned by the government.

Gordon also talked about how “our future economy must be a green economy”. He talked about how the UK was supposedly a world leader in wind power, green cars, clean coal, and carbon capture, and talked about creating a quarter of a million new green jobs. Clearly he likes the sound of the Green Party’s Green New Deal – which would deliver jobs whilst greening the economy. However, the reality of Labour’s position doesn’t add up. Whilst British researchers have made important contributions to the development of many green technologies, we are hardly a world leader. We now only have one – very small – factory producing wind turbine blades in a country with immense potential for generating wind energy, for example. His talk of low carbon zones suggests a lack of ambition. Surely the point of greening the economy is to make the whole of the UK a low carbon zone.

Gordon’s environmental credentials were further undermined by the fact that he attacked the Tories for not being committed to nuclear power. Yes, nuclear power creates fewer carbon emissions than coal, oil, or gas (though it is not, as is often thought, carbon-neutral to run a nuclear power station). But it creates a whole raft of other environmental problems, as well as security ones. There are less costly and more effective alternatives to nuclear power to help bridge the gap to a future powered by renewables, but Gordon clearly doesn’t support them.

On civil liberties, there were some good noises. The PM no longer intends to collect extra information on us for biometric passports, and won’t make ID cards compulsory. We can but hope that the need the big three parties feel for budget cuts leads him to shut down the whole pointless (unless you want to become a Big Brother State) and expensive scheme. Unfortunately, this is unlikely, as he believes that the ID card for foreign nationals is now working. He didn’t expand on what the work in question was, or how it’s changed things from when they had to have passports (which have the same information on them, anyway…)

He also talked about the need to end nuclear proliferation. We can hope and pray that he decides to scrap our nuclear weapons, rather than just shove the same number of nukes onto three, rather than four, submarines.

He also said some encouraging things about electoral reform. The right to be able to recall MPs is welcome in principle, though the rules about when it can be done may set the bar too high. A move to Alternative Vote is another positive move in that direction, though it isn’t a great step up from first past the post in terms of giving representation for smaller parties in proportion to their nationwide support. To be truly proportional, a constituency-based system needs to include top-up seats of some description. The move to an elected house of lords is also a step in the right direction. Though I will, at times, miss the existence of peers who are not bound by party politics an elected house of lords – if elected under a proportional system – will help provide a good counter-balance to government and ensure that the voices of, say, the 1 million people inclined to vote Green in the Euro Elections will actually be represented at Westminster.

Of course, even if Labour win the next election, they may not actually implement many of the policies outlined in this speech. But at least Gordon’s proved that they can still talk the talk.

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In fact, even the Tories’ core activists appear to be having doubts. There are quite a few Tory activists who want to see Nigel Farage take Tom Bercow’s seat in Buckingham (see, for example, the comments here). Apparently they think that he’s “too new Labour” which, given that new Labour is virtually indistinguishable from the Tories in policy terms, doesn’t bode well for David Cameron’s future.

Labour are, likewise, in disarray – knowing that they are on course to lose the next General Election, and fighting each other, rather than fighting to change their collective fortune.

This means that smaller parties like the Greens, have a massive opportunity for breakthrough. Green membership is growing, our share of the vote went up by more than anybody else’s in the European Elections – and did so across the country, and we managed to quadruple our share of the vote in the Norwich North By-Election. In fact, we are more popular amongst those thinking of switching their vote than the Tories.

The best example of how much difference having highly motivated activists on the ground makes is Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign. The most important factor in his win over John McCain was the massive emphasis he placed on having activists on the ground. Every other aspect of his campaign was built around his ground game.

If we can get those who voted for us to become members and activists, , if we can equip them to be effective campaigners in towns and cities across the country, and if we can direct their efforts to the wards and constituencies where they will have the greatest effect, then we have a good chance of becoming and remaining a major player in British politics and getting much of our policy agenda enacted.

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