Mark Carrigan’s take on the UK elections is pretty close to my own:

… the apparent direction of travel for Labour will lead to some moderate improvements but in a way which fails to address the underlying problems in British society. The result would be five or ten years of Labour government but with an ever growing far-right better able to exploit the politics of environmental collapse. What we’re seeing in France now is, I suspect, where the UK is likely to be a bit further down the line.

I too am finding it hard not to gloat, just a little, at the disarray of the Tories. But it is exactly that urge to gloat that underlies the concern that Carrigan identifies above, I think: a victory in which your champion dresses themselves in the skin of your vanquished enemy is going to look rather less triumphal a few years down the line.

As such, it’s Richard Sandford who gets my gong (and provides the title for this post, which I copied directly from his) with this analysis of the campaign discourse as well as the result:

… only reporting on projections and speculations, as if they were facts, like the rest of the campaign: no serious discussions of policy, a short fortnight of monkey tennis ideas before Farage decided to stand, and then nothing but polls, imagined futures, in the media, until now. Futures offered without reference to visions or plans or present circumstances: just numbers, discussed instead of things that might happen. Arguments not about different presents that might influence opinion, or particular futures that might seem worth working for, just outcomes that are imagined to happen by themselves, in the absence of any action or commitments. It’s the weasel abdication of responsibility for everything, even imaginary futures, that I find so disgusting.

[…] The landscape of the next two elections is being laid out now. It feels as though the twentieth century has beaten the nineteenth, and we can – only decades late – get on with understanding what the twenty-first century might need.

Thin gruel, even for a peddler of hope such as myself… but hope’s the stone that starts the soup.