The elections held in the UK on Thursday 3rd May were a farce. Hundreds of thousands of votes in Scotland were taken out of the system because new electronic scanners failed to recognise accurately what voters had written on their ballot papers. There is now to be an inquiry. I suppose that until or unless it is decided what to do with those votes we cannot be sure that the final outcome is wholly what the voters wanted. If the unused votes confirm the pattern of the used votes then it is clear that Tony Blair has been given a big kick in the backside and the Scottish Nationalist Party has emerged as triumphant, now enjoying the rare experience of being the largest Party in the Scottish Parliament. To achieve a working government, however, they will still have to create a Coalition with another Party or Parties. The SNP's declared intention is to hold a Referendum by 2010 on whether or not Scotland should secede from their 300-year old union with England and become an independent Country.
Adding to the farce cause by the high-tech counting system was the confusion over two different ways of registering a vote on a single ballot paper: for the Scottish Parliament you had to place a cross against one candidate as constituency MSP, and another cross against a regional Party List candidate. For the Scottish local council votes the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system was being used, so on this part of the ballot sheet voters were expected to write 1,2,3 etc. etc. against candidates in order of preference.
Labour also did badly in the Welsh Assembly elections and the Welsh Nationalists (Plaid Cymru) put on a reasonable showing. To continue in power Labour will have to form a Coalition with another Party or Parties.
In England the local council elections produced major losses for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but only modest gains for the Conservatives.
Across the UK as a whole the results are a complete mish-mash and we now hold the distinction of having a greater variety of voting systems all operating at once than in any other country. I always said our "First past the post" system was undemocratic and should be replaced by something more representative - some form of Proportional Representation, or at least the Single Transferable Vote - but what Blair's government has come up with over the years is a hotch-potch of systems for different regions and different elections. On the 3rd May there were no fewer than four different voting systems in operation.
I wonder how much more stupid we are going to get.
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