VOTE NOW!

This vote was really about the next elections in 2007, when you've got a reasonable voting system to play with. Without PR and with Middle England’s ongoing love affair with New Labour’s neo-Thatcherite economics, nothing was ever going to change.

Blair was going to keep the English Shires comfortable, so so much disquiet over the odd bout of torture wasn't really enough to shift people en masse.

With Kennedy peching about the country with a bottle of scotch in his jacket pocket there was always going to be a safe-haven for the chattering classes to register their distaste at Blair's descent into barbarism, safe in the knowledge that the inspirational Liberals would never actually get anywhere near power.

The SNP increased its number of seats to six with wins in the Western Isles and Dundee East.
But winning these off Labour was the main point – the first time this has happened on 31 years. Elsewhere Labour voters deserted them for the Lib Dems in protest and tactical voting.

What this means is that there's a whole new area opened up. Anyone can and will take seats off Labour.

Hopefully the exercise will have positive effects in the future. People who are normally pre-programmed to vote Labour as a reflex reaction have tried voting for someone else. It felt good.

But the West of Scotland is the where the problem lies. It remained resolutely Labour. People clinging on against all the evidence in the belief that this group of policy wonks, technocrats, and right-wing functionaries have some commitment to, or connection with ‘the working class’.