So what actually did happen last Thursday?

No-one likes getting it wrong, least of all this blogger. So although we called the UK General Election right in terms of the winner, who would win the most votes and most seats, and the Scottish National Party landslide, a Conservative overall majority was just outside the bell curve of our possible results.

We apologise for this error. But when the basic data's wrong, what can you do?

Pick up on warnings, that's what. Of which there were plenty. Engage our political, historical, qualitative analysis - and our human antennae, not just our statistical training. The storm of numbers helped distract us from our gut instinct, which always had Ed Miliband - student politics, EdStone and all - completely and utterly failing the blink test of all true leadership. This involves asking: do you think, in your heart of hearts, that this is the team you want to lead you and the country for five years?

Well, no.

So now it's time to assemble some initial reflections - to analyse, to dissect and to understand. What else are academics for? This will involve a lot of hard work and heartsearching over the next year or so leading up to the Scottish, Welsh and London elections due in 2016, but a basic picture is beginning to emerge. What we can do for now is compare and contrast the warnings we should have heeded about the reliability of opinion polling with some of what we do know about the actual results.

In this vein, we offer you five reasons for the unexpectedly easy Conservative victory.

1. The SNP. This was the main near-term tactical triumph of the Conservatives' campaign. Those of us who've had our ear to the ground in England heard it all the time in person, and we quote: 'I can't stand that woman [SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon]. She's a new Mrs Thatcher'; 'the Scots are going to come and nick all our money'; 'I don't want to be talked down to by a load of Marxists'; 'why should we dance to their tune?'; 'if they hate us so much, why didn't they just leave when they had the chance?' It was the issue that cut through on the doorstep and ran right through the qualitative data as if it were a stick of seaside rock, the issue that made it through to the noise from the London news debate to ordinary people. It worked a treat, channelling the dark energy of Conservative strategist Lynton Crosby's fears and hatreds to a tee. He's done it before in Australia, of course, lambasting and demonising imaginary refugees who were supposed to have thrown their children into the sea, and helping the Conservatives towards respectability in 2005 with his 'are you thinking what we're thinking?' sloganeering. This time, imaginary hordes of thieving Scots played the same role. It was a stroke of nasty, manipulative, cynical and grotesque... genius. Labour's amateur hour herbivores didn't have a clue what hit them.

Strangely - and full marks again to Crosby for noticing this - this message worked best in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat marginals, frightening off middle-of-the-road English voters who were scared of the SNP dictating its own terms to a Labour government. The Liberal Democrats' complete and utter humiliation was the key to the Conservative majority. If Mr Cameron's party had only picked up the expected ten to fifteen Liberal Democrat seats, there'd now probably only be a minority government. What they did - and it appears that eviscerating their 'colleagues' was always part of the plan, even back in 2010 - was say to Liberal Democrat voters: 'you don't have the luxury of this choice, you have to save the country from the madness of the Celtic Fringe'. So they talked about the SNP in Cornwall and Somerset, about as far from the epicentre of Glasgow's electoral earthquake as you can get and still be in the British Isles. Disgraceful stuff, and a totally false prospectus: but also very, very effective.

2. Shy Tories. Hats off to the Number Cruncher Politics blog on this one, who saw it all with such clarity that we'll have its URL on permanent auto-update next time. This answer to our many conundrums reminds us of the Scottish independence referendum, which the polls also had neck-and-neck in the week before polling. 'No' won by 10.6%. That contest was decided by the 'shy noes' - people who would never consider putting a poster up in their window, but were determined to thwart the ambitions of what they saw as 'radical Glasgow'. The same types turned up last week to thwart the prospect of what to seemed to them like an unacceptably left-wing government that threatened to undermine the very bases of economic recovery: budgetary retrenchment, welfare reform and political stability. Remember, here, that many voters find it difficult to admit even to themselves, and to their close kith and kin, that they are going to vote Conservative: each voter is at war within themselves, and may not actually be dissembling when they refuse to answer pollsters' questions (or act differently to their expressed intention).

One very noticeable feature in this election was that many marginals in Middle England moved away from Labour, even as that party did a little better in England's North West and in London (hello, Lancaster and Ealing Central). Middle class families who'd always voted Labour simply switched to the Conservatives to avoid a left-wing combination of Mr Miliband's party and the SNP. These people probably considered voting Labour, or thought that they probably would, but swerved away in the last few weeks. There is a hint of late swing in a few pieces of the data - for instance, Lord Ashcroft's on-the-day poll (opens as PDF) which saw the Conservatives leading by four points, a gain from the tie that he had reported just before the voting. But that's not the main, or even a big, reason why the polls got it all so wrong. Most of us knew the shy Tories were in there, and we could easily read off the errors that polls had made in the European and by-elections over the past couple of years: but this was beyond even those (three to five per cent) errors. We thought that a bigger electorate would mean that the mistakes were ironed out. We were wrong, because the 'shy Tories' weren't just dyed-in-the-wool Conservative voters who didn't want to admit their choice to us: they were often 'Labour people' who were going over en masse to the Conservatives. That alone should chill Labour hearts over the ten to fifteen years of Opposition that they may well now endure.

3. Pollsters' herding. Pollsters knew that they faced an enormous challenge this time. They were looking at a more fluid electorate, and a more regionalised, as well as socially fragmented, battleground. How to construct the samples? How to weight them by demographics, and past voting choice? It was a nightmare - and one that caught up with them on election night, when Labour's vote appeared to splinter all over the place - to the SNP, the Greens, to Plaid Cymru, and even to the Conservatives. Actually, it's becoming clear that Labour was always behind given the composition of the likely electorate. The resilience of a party's vote, and how many of their apparent supporters will actually turn up, is a very hard thing to measure, as ComRes research pointed out in the run-up to the poll. Basically, and very provisionally, we suspect that had young people voted in the same numbers that older people did, Labour's vote would have held up much better. They didn't, they don't usually, and they're unlikely to in the future. Get used to it. But many of them said that they would, and turnout levels as projected from polls were much higher than than they turned out to be in reality.

Slightly more worrying is the polling industry's tendency to huddle together for fear of getting it 'wrong' on the day. Labour pushed forward, not backwards, in the polling data from the campaign's last couple of days: a phenomenon that fooled many of us into thinking that the debacle wouldn't be as bad as 1992. Well, that was all a statistical artefact, created by pollsters tacking to the centre. There's plenty of academic evidence of herding, and it's intuitively understandable that no pollster wants to get too out of line. They're commercial organisations: drop a big howler, and you're likely to look silly and lose work. It's as simple as that. One pollster, Survation, has even bravely come out and admitted that it suppressed a voting survey that got the eventual result pretty much bang on - because it 'looked wrong'. This, to be fair to them, is not just a matter of commercial necessity. It's a classic example of 'anchoring' in action, reflecting the process by which human beings try not to stand out from the crowd, and find it difficult to shrug off conventional thinking and social norms. Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck? How exciting, everyone's saying it. I'll just put these contrary results to one side, then. Understandable: but deeply problematical, given how the polls shaped and then decided this election.

4. Labour's fundamentals. Let's be frank here. Labour's reputation on the economy was shattered in 2010, and has never recovered. That's the true reason why the fear of a government that would be both 'weak' and 'left-wing', partly because it was backed by the SNP, could gain such a quick strangehold on the public imagination. It was voters' underlying scratch-they-couldn't-itch all the time. This wasn't a foregone conclusion: Labour did not wallow quite so low in the water between the beginning of the economic crisis in 2007 and the last-but-one General Election. Britain's relatively rapid recovery in 2009 and 2010, partly achieved via the Keynesian policies and international activism of Messrs Brown and Darling, didn't seem to go down too badly among the public. Years of small public sector deficits (and a few of surplus), attended by falling debt-to-GDP ratios, meant that the Government had a bit of elbow room to tackle the crisis head-on. What really hammered Labour here was the way the debate was framed in 2010 - 'there's no money left' memo and all - once the coalition was able to say 'we're clearing up the mess of Labour's overspending'. Total nonsense, of course: but put together with Labour's leadership problems, this caused many voters to continually blame Labour for their hardships and struggles: a kind of 'shadow incumbency' that the party never really freed itself from.

Another problem Labour clearly had - and this was the mainstay of our initial reaction to the result - is cultural. They are 'too London', too metropolitan, too elitist. Many voters probably think Mr Miliband went to a private school, just like Mr Cameron (he didn't). Labour's leadership speaks in incomprehensible jargon, far from the depressed and left behind places where UKIP thrived. You know what? We thought, from all our data - every single spreadsheet and time series - that UKIP took the largest number of its votes from the Conservatives. In the end, on the day, they didn't. They swallowed up hundreds of thousands of traditional working class Labour voters, costing the party those marginal seats that even the relatively puny swing to Labour should have seen them gaining. That was the main difference between a Hung Parliament and a Conservative majority. And until Labour finds a language in which to speak to older, angrier, less well-educated white voters, it will continue to fail among these struggling socio-economic groups.

5. Dislike of coalitions. Coalitions are little understood among the public, and very few of them can offer a definition of what they are - or even how they work. Most are hostile to the very idea, and the whole Conservative-Liberal Democrat hookup in 2010 happened only via the chance of Gordon Brown being so unpopular, and so far behind, that many voters thought they could take the 'risk' of the Liberal Democrats and still get a new government. So it proved. But they were not converted to the idea of parties governing together. The stable coalition that Mr Cameron and his Liberal Democrat deputy Nick Clegg had managed might be all right - but the experiment was on probation, and the messy compromises and constant drum-beat of accommodation was tiresome, even on the relatively harmonious terms that the parties managed between 2010 and 2015.

The very fact that the race appeared to be neck-and-neck for so long made most Britons pause in the ballot box and say: 'do I really want a minority Labour administration backed up by the SNP and the Welsh and Northern Irish Nationalists?' The only answer to that was no: that seemed like an even more unstable and chaotic mixture than that the country had 'enjoyed' for five years. So voters acted accordingly, offering Mr Cameron the one single tiny path that he could ever have found to even the very small majority he enjoys today. We always like here to see elections as the effecting of the will and wisdom of the crowd. This time, we can sum it up like this: 'chaos or competence'. Which, funnily enough, was precisely one of the Conservatives' main election slogans.

All of this has come as some shock to your average cafe-dwelling leftist. They thought that a new world was coming into being: a multi-party continental fantasyland, in which parties would have to work together, in which voters would choose based on a buffet of different policy options, in which a 'left alliance' of all anti-Conservative parties could seize power, enact voting reform and generally make the world a softer, greener, more pluralistic place.

It wasn't. The two biggest parties' vote did not fall: it rose. The United Kingdom Independence Party won exactly one seat - exactly the same as the Greens. The SNP are now irrelevant to the ruthless and effective deployment of power at Westminster, having played just precisely that role that Mr Cameron allocated them in his own drama. He will now discard and ignore them for five years. The Conservatives are now firmly in the box seat: they will repeal the Human Rights Act, enact boundary reform, bring in their absurd 'English votes for English laws' scheme, stuff further (and ruinous) financial financial devolution down the throats of Cardiff and Edinburgh, silence the trade unions, and generally rule the roost for some time to come.

Until, that is, Labour wakes up from its university city dreaming, and starts to represent that deep England that took such fright at the SNP.

We advise you not to hold your breath.

Labour were always coming to this terrible place

Right, now that the UK General Election is out of the way, we can say what we really think, rather than just darkly hint at our true opinions.

This election was lost from the moment Labour elected Ed Miliband (above) as its leader.

And it has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK Labour Party. No explanations about differential vote share, no heralding of unlikely gains, no blaming the Liberal Democrats, can hide it. Labour has been wiped out in its Scottish heartlands, gone backwards in Wales, failed to make any progress at all in England. It now faces an existential crisis, hemmed in by the Greens to the Left, threatened by the United Kingdom Independence Party for primacy among white working class voters and fatally undermined by the Scottish Nationalists north of the Tweed.

Now it's important not to get too overwrought about this, though we're going to have a go in a minute. Bear with us and, never fear, there'll be some heated rhetoric. Anyway. Labour has lost before. It was reduced to a rump when its leader joined a National Government in 1931. It was hammered in 1959, when the Conservatives increased their majority for the second time in a row. It was routed in 1983 by a triumphant Mrs Thatcher. Each time, the party got up off the floor, dusted itself down, and eventually came back to power.

There aren't many Clement Attlees, Harold Wilsons or Tony Blairs on the scene these days, but you never know - Labour could strike it lucky, one of the key gifts of timing and personnel that's one of the strange, unacknowledged alchemies of representative politics. All the sociological and cod-structural philosophising in the world means nothing compared to just having a credible leader, a trusted economic plan and a plausible front bench team. Academics who wrote Must Labour Lose? in 1960 thought that Labour was too 'working class', too 'old fashioned', too 'stuck in its ways', and wedded to the union link, to win any more contests with the Conservatives. They were soon witnessing one of the party's modernising heydays under Wilson, winning a bare majority just four years later - and a landslide victory in 1966. It's all in the credibility.

Unfortunately, this time Labour didn't have any. If we look at any measure of 'best Prime Minister' or 'most competent on the economy', Labour's Ed Miliband-Ed Balls combo has trailed David Cameron and George Osborne throughout most of this Parliament. And has any Opposition ever won an election trailing on both those measures? No, you bet your house it hasn't.

The most painful thing is that this has just been so, so obvious from the start. The Historian happened to be at an (unglamorous) academic conference when news came through of the younger Miliband's election as leader of the Labour Party - all the way back in 2010. His reaction? To smash his head into the chair in front of him and say 'well, that's ten years in the wilderness, then'. A Labour leader elected by a potentially unconstitutional cabal of unions, breaking their own rules on what they included with the ballot papers, and organised by Brownite apparatchik Charlie Whelan, foisted Ed on Labour - and the party was then too nice and too loyal to push him out.

And lo, the years in the wilderness shall come to pass.

Why? Because Ed's message was totally, utterly and completely wrong from the start. Not in terms of those old Labour bugbears, Left and Right, but in terms of applicability, believability, empathy and language. At a time when voters feel very distanced from 'the Westminster establishment' (whatever that is), he spoke of 'predistribution', of 'the squeezed middle', of 'the cost of living crisis'. Not of actual people's actual lives, in their own words and language. No. Just some pretty phrases.

Basically, Ed Miliband is a representative of one type of governing class mentality - academic, university-based leftists who live in cosmopolitan towns and cities and read The Guardian. Which is pretty much the only type of area where they made any progress yesterday. It wasn't him and his manner, his nasal delivery, his slight gawkiness and awkwardness. Voters don't care about that sort of stuff if you've got a good message. No. It was the idea that you can win from the Kinnockite Left by calling for higher income and property taxes, while at one and the same time posing as a 'Blue Labour' outfit that wants to limit immigration, clamp down on welfare and boost defence spending. It didn't and doesn't make any sense: it's the sort of clever-clever Janus-faced debating society stuff that a professional, a Peter Mandelson or an Alistair Campbell, would just obliterate before it got off the drawing board. Talking about equality and redistribution isn't necessarily bad for your electoral health, in and of itself: but it needs to be couched in language that strikes a chord with voters.

As it was, Labour could never sell such a pudding to run-of-the-mill marginal waverers. It was left desperately trying to suck in non-voters and never-were voters in the last days of the campaign, which may have succeeded in pumping up their opinion poll figures, but was never going to be a success on the ground. We all sensed it, and Labour HQ knew it most of all.

Ed never grasped the fundamental immaturity of this attempt to be all things to all people - and the need to speak about this country's undoubted economic unfairness in everyday terms and stark language rather than deploying words straight out of an economics textbook. He was still at it today, in stark contrast to the light and shade of Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg's frank and multilayered plea for liberalism's continued relevance. Mr Miliband basically stood there and said that his strategy was the right one even as he resigned in total defeat. Well, no, actually, it wasn't. Because the voters didn't agree, and they're the boss.

Substance: fail. Language: fail.

You could have read it all here. In 2011 we said that Labour should be further ahead in the polls. We noted bitterly how badly Labour did in the 2011 Scottish, Welsh and local elections. In 2013 we ruled out the possibility of Labour winning an outright majority, in 2014 started to worry that Labour might do even worse than 2010 and that Labour was in sight of a catastrophic meltdown, concluding at last that the Conservatives were going to be the largest party and that Labour would lose the election.

We could claim credit, but you'd have had to be incapable of political sense on almost every level not to see what was coming. Not the scale, no: that is a surprise. But Labour losing? That fate was sealed all the way back in 2010, when the fundamentals of a vacillating, incoherent, indecisive and above all academic rather than visceral, emotional and vividly appealing approach were set in stone.

So, toytown Labour, with all your politics dons and theorists and pontification: take your self-indulgence, and indulge it somewhere else.

How will economic historians judge this UK government?

So, now that this Parliament is over, how will economic historians judge the Government's policies?

Well, if we're any judge here, pretty harshly. The Conservative - Liberal Democrat coalition went all out to shape economic policy around a political falsehood - that Britain was 'on the verge of bankruptcy', that 'there was no money left', and that Labour had 'overspent'. So they spent the first two years of their tenure making all the wrong noises if they wanted the economy to recover - exactly the same mistake (if you want a non-partisan viewpoint) that Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and George Brown made when they arrived in Downing Street during October 1964, duly proceeding to shout about how bad Britain's trade balance was to paint the Conservatives as a bunch of incompetents - and in so doing making things worse.

Don't get us wrong. Clearly spending reductions were required. But the Coalition set off like a rocket, trying to get the UK into total budgetary balance in one Parliament. This was never going to happen. It was a total fantasy that did a great deal of damage to the UK's financial reputation. And all for what? To preserve the country's triple-A credit rating, which we lost anyway. Then, in 2012/13, seeing how disastrously things were going, Chancellor George Osborne (above) performed one of the most skilful and successful U-turns of all - going straight back to Labour's plans for the Parliament of 2010-15, while claiming that they had been his 'Plan A' all along. Well, they weren't. He fell back on Plan B, as his increasingly monotonous and unconvincing repetition-by-rote of this particular intellectual fraud make quite clear. It was only then that the economy started to grow - proving that the critics of 'cuts' had been right all along.

And the worse thing about all that? Before Mr Osborne discovered his recent zeal for big infrastructure projects (High Speed Rail 2, for instance), and before he started talking about Manchester as a 'Northern Powerhouse' all the time, the main thing that the Coalition cut in the first half of its tenure was infrastructure spending - at least proportionately. At a time of historically low interest rates, when demand was sagging and Britain was crying out for some replacement work on its creaking roads and rail network, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats actually cut physical investment. Well, super work.

The emerging consensus about the Conservatives' last long period in office is that some of the micro-economic reforms effected were necessary and productive - but that macro-economic policy was often mad, bad and dangerous to be near (in 1980-82 and 1988-92, for instance). This time things are rather similar. There have been some interesting (but expensive and complicated) initiatives to try to lever foreign direct investment into UK research and development clusters, to match dynamic developing countries' desire to find places to invest with the UK's dire need for spending, and at least to ringfence the science and research budget at a time of great budgetary stringency.

It's in most ways a miserable performance, with employment buoyed up by absolutely miserable labour productivity that means that Britons are stuck doing jobs they would rather not. What a story, eh? Unemployment fell, because everyone had to work the coffee machines that continentals can work on their own.

There are some points of light, and the Chancellor must get at least some marks for reversing engines when he was clearly taking the economy off a cliff. But it's thin stuff to set against two years of wasted efforts - and a host of micro-economic mistakes that can only be put down to crude populism at best, and sheer nihilism at worst. University tuition fees that'll cost more than leaving well alone would have done. Getting in private contractors to run large chunks of the welfare system - including a Work Programme that didn't work, a Universal Credit that crashed and burned and a Work Capability Assessment that seemed to spend more money re-running tests and punishing people than actually helping people find meaningful work.

What would we give this government? Three or four out of ten - a generous mark that shows just how soft we've become in our old age.

But you know what? It'll probably be just about enough to carry on in government after next Thursday. The line about 'cuts' being 'necessary', pressed home by an obedient press, worked - as Labour leader Ed Miliband's grilling on the BBC's Question Time last week demonstrated all too well. Labour will probably have to regroup in Opposition, around a new leader, having lost most of its seats in a previous heartland - Scotland. The only consolation will be that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, won't have much of a mandate (or a majority) either, even if he can rely on the Liberal Democrats and the Democratic Unionists to back him in a confidence vote.

No-one ever said that life was fair.

A fractured Parliament could be an opportunity for a more adult politics

British politics is in a muddle. It has not been so unstable since the confusing 1920s, when Labour and the Liberals competed to be the main anti-Conservative Party on the left, and when the Liberals propped up a Labour government (even though it had come second in the December 1923 election) - a period that only came to an end in a dire economic crisis and an all-party National Government.

But perhaps there's an opportunity here. For 'Westminster', that much-maligned clique of 'politicians' and 'governors', to acquit themselves well.

For it's becoming clear that the House of Commons (above) that will be returned at this General Election will be a mixed bag indeed. We know - or think we know - a lot about what's likely to happen. The Conservatives will very likely be the largest party. Labour will make some progress in English marginal seats, particularly at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. The Scottish National Party will wipe most of their opponents off the map - and possibly, given their polling strength, off the face of the earth.

But that'll mean that politicians will have to act like grown-ups. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats might well not have enough votes to govern any more, except as a pair - though regular readers will know that this blog believes that a continuation of the current coalition is the most likely outcome of this election. They may have to call in Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionists, and perhaps 'phone the United Kingdom Independence Party for some help once in a while. On the other hand, it may be that a Conservative-led administration just can't emerge from the House of Commons, because there are 323 or more Opposition MPs dedicated to blocking them. Then Ed Miliband, Labour's leader, will just have to take up the burdens of office, even though Labour are some way shy of the Conservatives' seat total - and whether he likes it or not.

Now let's not get carried away. All parties are not equal. The Liberal Democrats' alliance with the Conservatives has seen them acquiesce in all sorts of needless cruelty. The Work Capability Assessment that has seen thousands forced to work beyond their physical and mental capacity; the disability benefit 'reforms' that have gone so spectacularly awry that thousands of Britons have been left waiting for what is rightfully theirs; the Universal Credit welfare system that is such a disaster that its death will swiftly follow the General Election; the 'bedroom tax' that has cut people's income just because they have a spare room (and can't find smaller accommodation, even if they try). This Government's treatment of working people has been worse than disdainful. It's been nasty, brutal, intimidating and swaggering. It's one of the reasons they're struggling with actual voters - a revelation that would help the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats no end, if they just opened their eyes.

Turning to other parts of the Commons, the SNP's economic prospectus is deeply injurious to their credibility - and they know it. It's such thin stuff that they've been trying to get away from it themselves over the past few weeks, downplaying all talk of Full Fiscal Autonomy or Responsibility for Scotland with the vague assertion 'well, it'll take years anyway. Why worry?' Any rational economist can only despair. But their very realism in this respect gives grounds for hope. The SNP know that Full Fiscal Autonomy isn't happening, and that they need to de-emphasise independence as well until they can win a Scottish General Election in a year's time. They may not even go for a second independence referendum (which they may well lose anyway) during the lifetime of that Parliament. In the meantime, both the SNP and the other Nationalist parties can all get on with some actual governing - including widening the base of the Scottish economy so that it doesn't depend on oil, gas, whisky and banking.

We could go on. No doubt we will. But even though potential partners may be few and far between (the Liberal Democrats have announced that they don't want to work with the SNP and UKIP, and Mr Miliband has ruled out any talks at all with the SNP) accommodations of some sort - even if implicit - will have to be reached. Money Bills have to be passed. Civil servants have to be paid. Threats to peace and security have to be met. The country has to be governed.

It need not be an existential crisis, as the more excitable elements of the press have pretended. We've been here before, between 1976 and 1979 - a period of some achievement (and, in the end, some disaster) when the UK came back from the IMF loan and the sterling crisis of 1976 with some vigour and vim. Jim Callaghan wouldn't have had any truck with curling up in despair, washing his hands of leadership, or getting his hands dirty with a load of behind-the-scenes deals (please pick the image and metaphor you like the best). And neither should we.

We should plunge out into our new politics with enthusiasm, saying 'well, the people have dealt us this hand - let's get on with it'. If there is a Labour-led government, for instance, why not have MPs from different parties on different Cabinet Committees? Why not stop pretending that the next stop is an overall majority (because without Scotland, in Labour's case it almost certainly isn't)? Why not inch forward, vote-by-vote, measure-by-measure, argument-by-argument? Let's face it, it's not as if we need more legislation anyway. Why not try to make the United Kingdom work, including the SNP and other Nationalists as the legitimate British parties that they are and always will be? It's got to be better than the hateful-in-tooth-and-claw attack dog politics we've seen from the Conservatives in recent weeks, including the poisonous attacks on the SNP that seem likely only to hasten the end of the Union itself.

This more mature, more kaleidoscopic, more adult politics would send a message. That even in these twilight days, with the United Kingdom in what may be its dying fall, the British can still do things right.

Let's hope we can manage it, shall we?

A housing association right-to-buy: one of the worst policies ever ends up dead on arrival

Now the UK General Election's hotting up a bit, isn't it? Three UK party leaders, all on the precipice of a kicking in different ways. A (possibly) unbelievably successful Scottish National Party on the brink of a once-in-a-lifetime epochal breakthrough. A government (and an Opposition) on the edge. Well, exciting stuff - if you like politics.

But we're still going to go through the fine print of the actual policies that are constantly being 'offered' to the electorate - and there some real stinkers in here, you mark our words. 

One of the most rancid of the roadkill offerings is the Conservative Party's extension of a 'right to buy' to the Housing Association sector. It's a dud. It won't happen. It'll get junked so quickly in post-election negotiations with the Liberal Democrats that you'll never hear of it again - a bit like all those wiggly lines in Chancellor George Osborne's recent excuse for a Budget.

Let us count the ways that this one is a dud. Oh, let's just start with the fact that the Government doesn't own housing association stock, and it'll probably have to change the law to give itself rights over someone else's property - a deeply un-Conservative and un-Tory approach that will only get them into more and more detailed trouble as they nationalise a great big slice of the country's housing stock.

Let's continue with the fact that this looks likely to do absolutely nothing to meet our real crisis - the lack of housebuilding. As the National Housing Federation has made quite clear, the uncertainty and the upheaval involved might set plans back, not drive them forward. For Housing Associations are usually not-for-profit organisations who rely on their income and surpluses to attract new investment, as even a Conservative Housing Minister has admitted privately. Seize some of their assets, for an as-yet-to-be-decided subsidy from the Government (which probably won't materialise anyway), and you might fatally disrupt their capital flow. Who wants to invest in a business that has a Housing Minister (we use this emotive term under advisement, because a member of the clergy has already uttered it) actively stealing its money? Businesses don't like it, because it wastes money and spreads uncertainty in just the same way as all the other hard-to-credit ponzi schemes we're bombarded with at the moment - as any glance at the 'right' to withdraw your pension funds, Pensioner Bonds and inheritance tax cuts will tell you. It's wide open to fraud and abuse. It's a crude electoral bribe to swing voters in key areas. It makes no sense even in its own terms. 

It might be popular with tabloid newspapers. But Housing Associations themselves hate the idea, because they know it puts the whole sector at risk. Most Londoners, where the housing crisis is at its most acute, are less than keen, to say the least.

It has long been the Conservatives' aim to build up a fourth sector of the housing market - something to fill in where owner occupation, council housing and private renting don't work or aren't appropriate. The sector is what one might call the Big Society in action. Anyone remember the Big Society? Anyone? Keith Joseph, Conservative Housing Minister in the early 1960s, tried to shore it up against the formidable opposition of the Treasury and the Inland Revenue, suspicious of such unorthodox methods - and of engagement with the 'third sector' as a whole. Joseph raged to a colleague at the time: 'you cannot want to contemplate an endless vista of extending municipal ownership any more than I: but that is what we do contemplate if we cannot set up an alternative’. Alas, his ambitions went unheeded, and decisive moves to help Housing Associations had to await the 1980s and 1990s. All those ambitions, all those desires to build up a more complex and granular society of sharp shooters - Toryism personified - are now being threatened. For a few votes. Just like the Union itself, every time Conservative spokesmen think there might be a cheap rabble-rousing cheer in bashing the Scottish National Party.

The whole imbroglio appears to have originated with Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, one of the usual suspects when it comes to spreading dunder-headed, forehead-slapping, blundering chaos across Whitehall over the last five years. Hopefully his officials - and anyone the Conservatives have to negotiate with after emerging as the largest party in May - have got some counter-proposals up their sleeves, because living with this one won't be pretty. 

Now we shouldn't get carried away here. This is a symbolic policy, a re-tread or re-heat of those popular tunes hummed by Conservatives in the 1980s - the last time they won a durable five-year Parliamentary majority, by the way. It's the ghost of a memory of when they were popular - rather than just tolerated as a bunch of apparently necessary tough-guy accountants. Not that many tenants will take up the offer - certainly nothing like the 'up to 1.3 million' that the Conservatives announced. It'd be more like a few tens of thousands, on any measure. But it's still not a real runner - over-complicated, legally questionable, not all that helpful in addressing the real problem, and conducive only to uncertainty, confusion and backsliding.

Please take this policy away, someone. Anyone. It's so undercooked that it's basically a slice of pure poison.

Inheritance tax cuts are a cruel swindle

So, as the UK General Election hots up, the Conservatives have announced that they want every couple (and it is always 'couples' they talk about) to be able to pass on £1m in property, entirely untaxed, to their offspring.

It's a deeply misguided policy, though one on an established pattern. It's just the same kind of flawed policy-making that opened the Help to Buy scheme to all-comers - further inflating the pass-the-parcel housing bubble that seems to be all that the British economy does well. It's exactly the same naked bribe (with the voters' own money) that has given us 'pension freedom day' - a free-for-all with defined benefits pensions that will see retiring Britons subject to fraud, mis-selling and confusion. Before they return home to the taxpayer, shame-faced that they believed any government after the private pensions catastrophe of the 1980s and 1990s.

Because this new wheeze is funded by reducing richer pensioners' tax-free pension allowances (if you believe that it's being funded at all). The Whitehall that giveth with the one hand taketh away with the other.

What will be the consequences? Well, a more complicated Inheritance Tax regime that introduces distortions where simplicity (just raising the threshold as a whole, for instance) would have been better. Probably there'll also be further house price inflation given that this distorts the tax system to make owner-occupied property more attractive, yet again, causing older Britons (possibly wrongly) to scramble toward the buy-to-let market with their pension pots rather than an old-fashioned savings account. Just as Mortgage Income Tax Relief used to - and was abolished by a Conservative Chancellor for just that reason. London will be further hollowed out as a place where normal people can live and work, since that city's where most of these changes will actually happen. And social inequality will be boosted, given that wealthier parents will be able to give tax-free cash to their children - who will have done absolutely nothing whatsoever to earn it. Want to save for a pension? Don't bother: wait for your parents to die instead.

All to benefit the perhaps 10% of the population who would be drawn into this Inheritance Tax net (on death) by the end of the next Parliament. The richest 10% of the population, naturally. While the Government focuses on £12bn on welfare cuts for the poorest. This blog is not given to expostulation. It's dedicated to reasonable analysis. But this is breathtaking regression redistribution, and it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

You would think - wouldn't you? - that the real priorities for cutting taxes should be National Insurance, now far out of line with Income Tax thresholds and therefore probably a drag on job creation. Or maybe a cut in the basic rate of Income Tax, which would similarly reward work. Or perhaps assistance for small-scale savers with government matching funds - not the raise in the ISA limit to £15,000 and the creation of a pensioner bond, which (just like this announcement) help the richer and the older at the expense of the younger and the poorer - exactly the people who'll have to drag the United Kingdom out of its low-productivity equilibrium trap.

But no. Because we're in an election you won't get rewarded for, oh, let's be old-fashioned here and call it working and saving. You'll get rewarded for having wealthier parents who happen not to need a lot of expensive long-term care. You'll be rewarded on the basis of pure chance - exactly the opposite that we need if we're to reward thrift, hard work and self-reliance. What an un-conservative (and un-Conservative) idea - one, incidentally, that has professional financial advisers hanging their heads in utter despair.

The worst thing? It'll probably work, for although the actual change being announced won't affect many estates, older voters' aspirations and fears are being touched on here in the most visceral way. It worked before, in 2007, when now-Chancellor George Osborne (above) used an Inheritance Tax cut announcement to forestall Gordon Brown's planned early election. It'll probably boost the Conservatives in the polls again, as they start waving billions of pounds around, safe in the knowledge that the voters think they're better at managing the economy frugally than the other lot. It's a win-win: until the post-election tax-raising hangover begins.

But it's wrong. And it's wrong on the soundest and the most austere of grounds: it encourages idleness, encourages speculation, lessens clarity and certainty, further erodes the pensions system. We could do with spending the money elsewhere.

Three party leaders looking into the abyss

The main emotion you can see in UK party leaders' eyes right now is fear, for all the parties are heading for defeat.

Labour is saddled with an unpopular leader that is the number one reason voters give on the doorstep for refusing to back Labour's early return to power (though his numbers have started to get a little better). That party's still widely blamed - with some justification - for the economic crash of 2007-2008, though again here recently its position has somewhat improved.

The Liberal Democrats are tarred with the tag of 'traitor' and 'liar' for entering into coalition with a right-wing partner, and tearing up all those pledges about abolishing university tuition fees that they made with such aplomb in 2010.

So far, so obvious. You didn't need us to tell you all that, did you? Except that the fear, and the defeat, are everywhere. The United Kingdom Independence Party thought that they held a winning ticket, riding a wave of discontent about mass immigration and the European Union. Their polling numbers have been gently falling all year. The Green Party enjoyed a 'surge' when it looked as if they would be excluded from the party leaders' debates. Then their leader blew it, caving in so spectacularly that no voter could ignore it.

The sense of universal defeat is indeed endemic, but it's especially evident in the Conservative camp. That's strange, when you think about it, because they are on course to the largest party after the May 7th General Election. But everything they do shows what they really think of the electoral landscape. The Prime Minister announces that he will not lead his party into a third election, betraying his need to hold off his rivals with the constant proximity of a leadership election. The Government launch a ridiculous comic-opera coup against the Speaker of the House of Commons, in case they need more control over the Commons' chair in a balanced Parliament. The Prime Minister puts in a robotic, dial-down-the line performance in the main televised leaders' debate, looking for all the world as if his heart's not in it any more. The Conservatives have started hammering the Scottish National Party, all the better to fire up the SNP in Scotland and to drive increasingly Scotophobic English voters away from Labour south of the border. Are the Conservatives any longer a unionist party? Not really: such are their dire circumstances that, as usual, they seem to be willing to do anything, and say anything, to cling onto power. Even tear up their supposedly 'prized' unionism.

The smell of decomposition, and of desperation, is in the air. When the electoral smoke clears, Labour will have been defeated, perhaps awfully routed, in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats will have lost half their seats. The Conservatives will have gone backwards. UKIP will not have 'broken through'. The Greens will be lucky to add one seat to their present single MP. Only the SNP, riding the wave of that remarkable insurgent 'Yes' movement from last year's referendum, will be able to smile - and even they might feel a bit of a come-down if they 'only' win (say) 40 seats, so high are expectations at the moment.

It's actually revealing to look at this election as a 'wisdom of crowds' problem. Think about it. What do the voters really, really think and want, as a whole? Close your eyes. How would they go about achieving it? We can furnish some examples: in 1997 the electorate really, really wanted shot of a Conservative administration they thought had become old, stale, corrupt and self-serving. So they voted for just about anyone to get rid of them - reducing the Conservatives to a rump the size of which they had never even dared fear in modern British politics. In 2001 they wanted Tony Blair to finish the job he seemed to have successfully started - yoking economic capability and economic growth to a sense of social conscience. In 2005 voters wanted to punish Mr Blair for the Iraq War, plus any number of off-beam policy failures (think: not reorganising Railtrack in time to avert disaster). But they didn't find the alternative - a renewed period of Conservative rule under Michael Howard - very appealing either. So they chose to give Mr Blair another chance, while drastically reducing his majority. In 2010? Well, voters liked the look of Mr Cameron, but still distrusted his party. So they gave him a limited pass to the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster, provided he checked in with those nice Liberal Democrats every day. And so on - and on.

What do voters think now? Well, basically that politicians have had their day. That they're a self-appointed elite of power-hungry manipulators who, if not exactly in it for themselves, certainly don't know or care how normal people live. What do they want to do? Make sure that all the leaders suffer.

From this it's only one small stepping-stone away from our conclusion: the voters will impose a very balanced, almost deadlocked Parliament in which no one bloc, let alone any one party, can enjoy the perquisites of office. To punish and to bind 'the elites' they think don't listen to them any more. In which they'll have to creep forward, day-by-day and vote-by-vote, without any certainty or rest. Given the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, they may well have to live within that unpleasant prison for five long years. Serves them right, most voters will think - until they want immediate and decisive action in a crisis, and find it acutely lacking.

That's why all the party leaders, with the sole exception of the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon, are looking into the abyss right now.