7 may 2011, a parliament of elections to analyse

I do admit to being a junkie, anorak, or whatever other pejorative term people use, about elections and indeed electoral systems, and so the uk this week was an interesting time. Firstly, scotland's still new electoral system came of age, delivering exactly what it was designed to confound: a majority for the scottish national party. This is a government decidedly to the left of london's, that will fight them on the beaches and in the fields defending scotland against cuts and other horrible "english" things, and now getting round to independence, the snp's founding idea, but the issue that dare not speak its name. This will now move slowly from theological debate to live political issue. Secondly, and noting that whilst scotland's part proportional system delivered a clear winner, england's "first past the post" gave us a hung parliament and a coalition, there was a half-hearted attempt at a referendum on the "miserable little compromise" of the alternative vote system, which was resoundingly lost. Surely no-one in the uk will touch electoral reform with a barge pole now for a generation. The evidence suggests that is good news for the two main parties, and the centre right conservatives in particular, who had a rather good day and, as jonny freedland says, saw another step forward for david cameron's hopes of dominating the decade. As for the centre left labour, their day was decidedly mixed. Although they certainly mopped up the weighty anti-coalition vote in the north, largely at the liberal democrats' expense, their inroads in the south were measured, and they were resoundingly beaten in scotland, as was ed milliband, leader of the referendum campaign if there was one, who proved hesitant, unpersuasive and no match for cameron. As personalities matter so much in our ever-increasing presidential politics (above all the snp's victory was alex salmond's), this raising of cameron's stock, and the lowering of milliband's, is perhaps the most lasting effect of a beguiling set of elections we anoraks will be poring over for months.