Really surprisingly cheerful

Perhaps you don’t need reasons to be cheerful. After all, everyone lost, so everyone also won.
Hurray!

But while you amuse yourself with trying to work out how we can possibly now get a functioning government, and who in any of the parties could be a credible prime minister, let’s not lose sight of three big, permanent, positive things that happened last night, in descending order of certainty.

1. UKIP. It is over. We’ve never had a serious far-right party in this country: and we still don’t. Nuttall in Boston succeeded in getting over a tenth of the vote of his Tory opponent. The Tories are faithfully fulfilling their main historic purpose: squeezing the nasty people out. Would someone please sit the Daily Mail down quietly and tell them?

2. Peak Nat. This is over too. I wish that Ruth Davidson’s surge hadn’t taken out my old friend Eilidh Whiteford, but the law of gravity has caught up with the SNP. No indyref2. For those of us who like being British, this is good news: we get to keep our country.

3. There is now neither a parliamentary majority nor a democratic mandate for a hard Brexit. How those facts translate into stopping one is another matter, but they will I imagine have a stubborn significance.

Plus a fourth thing. It’s nice that turnout, especially among the young, was up, and that will have all sorts of salutory effects, but I am more taken by the fading of regionalisation. A few years ago we were talking of the north and south of England as if they were different countries, and of Scotland as if it were a different continent. The 2010 election – in which England and Wales sloshed all over the place, and Scotland saw not a single seat change hands – implied political cultures that were really drifting apart. Now we have stronger Tory surges in their traditionally weak areas – the north of England and especially Scotland – and stronger Labour surges in their traditionally weak areas in the South. No uniform swings, of course, that would be tedious: but it is just possible that we may still actually be a single country.