We are still picking up the emotional pieces in the immediate morning after the disaster before. Dazed, confused, barely able to appreciate the long, insurmountable task ahead. But if, amid the actual chaos, you want to understand why the election result is such a grim and terrible thing, check the stock market.
The “markets”, that celestial sphere of imagination and speculation where no actual goods are sold, reacted with nervousness before the election results were in, as the “markets” feared a Labour victory. They need not have worried.
Cameron’s smarmy victory calmed them all down and offered a happy finish, and all the bad guys got rich. The luxury property market for foreign investors; the large corporations who employ slave labour; the arms dealers; the private rail companies; the foreign-owned utility companies. See how many times you let out a triumphant cheer and effect an air-punch when you learn that Sports Direct, which has 15,000 of its employees on zero-hours contracts, added £95m to its share price overnight; the private rail operator Stagecoach added £140m to its stock market value as the “threat” of putting the East Coast mainline back into public ownership vanished; Babcock International and BAE Systems, war hawkers by appointment, celebrated the disappearance of the “threat” to Trident with rising share prices to the tune of £460m added to Babcock’s; shares in estate agents Savills, the London-based Foxtons and “upmarket” housebuilders Berkeley jumped upwards; surprisingly British-owned energy giant Centrica went up 8%; RBS and Lloyds added £5.5bn to their combined value (the Tories plan to sell their shares in both) and “cheers” were heard on the trading floor of the City when Ed Balls lost his seat (mind you, I cheered too, for different reasons); perhaps most galling of all, useless outsourcing companies G4S and Serco all benefited on the stock market as the Tories are gung-ho for farming out more public services to private companies, who will fuck them up; oh, and Ladbrokes, those arm’s-length destroyers of men, added £96m, as Milband had been planning to cut down on the number of fixed-odd “betting terminals” allowed in betting shops – and a continued Tory Britain will guarantee more people desperate for money, the bookies’ best customers.
That’s who’s going to benefit from five more years of this. If you’re happy about that, fine. Actually, no, if you’re happy about that, fuck off.
See you at the bottom.
Never Knowingly Underwhelmed 
Andrew I’m feeling your pain on this one. Never have I experienced a more depressing election night, not even back in 1992. The fact that the majority of the UK electorate have decided that Cam’ron the Bullingdon Bully Boy Bastard warrants another five years of fucking mayhem is bad enough. However, the fact they’ve only gone and given him a fully-endorsed mandate seems beyond masochistic. Up here in Scotland there seems to also be a schizophrenia of sorts as whole swathes of the population have suddenly, and rather belatedly, decided that Westminster needs to be taught a lesson. Might have been more productive for Scotland to have just gone its own separate way back in September. Instead there now appears to be a situation emerging in which the Scots will be the demon seeds of all bad shite in Cam’ron’s second term – in the same way Clegg was effectively a cut’n’paste catch-all for all the ails of the coalition. Clearly nowhere near enough people have actually read Owen Jones’s THE ESTABLISHMENT: AND HOW THEY GET AWAY WITH IT, and if they have and are still voting for this odious shower of asset-strippers capitalist-selfishness has clearly migrated over from the U.S. with an ever-increasing zealotry.
As a pessimist the result at least didn’t prove me wrong.
With all the talk of hung parliaments, my fear was that there’d be a huge swing to “others”, but with the obvious and expected exception of the SNP that didn’t really happen. In a way that makes it worse because the Tories still have a majority regardless. And obviously Labour could have won every seat in Scotland and it would have made no difference.
The result seems to me as divisive as it is decisive. Perhaps it’ll wake a few people up. If you want the Tories out then you have to vote and you have to vote for someone who realistically is going to beat the Tory candidate. If that means there being more than 8 Lib Dem MPs in Parliament, I grudgingly accept that that’s a price worth paying.