Cameron's victory is the triumph of small town England

Looking at the results of yesterday's train wreck of an election, the only bright spot is that the reactionary alliance of Tories and Liberal-Democrats actually lost seats last night. In the previous parliament Cameron's majority was over forty, but now he can only command 331 seats out of the 650 who sit in the house. It's a majority, but a much reduced one. On the other hand, last time the Lib-Dems could be relied upon to curb some of their master's more venal instincts, but now we have to rely on the Tory far right to kick up a fuss now and then. Sadly, so long as they are given some red meat in the form of cuts to benefits, and strong talk on Europe and immigration they will probably be quiescent.

Looking at the English results alone, the conclusion is inescapable that if you live in an English city or urban conurbation then you still have a Labour MP, but if you don't then you have a Tory. The Lib-Dems have been reduced to six seats in England, as both Labour and Tory ganged up to destroy their pretensions to being a serious national force.

The bad news in England is that Labour really is the party of the urban areas and the Tories represent everything else. Cameron does not just command the support of the leafy market towns and bourgeois suburbs,  he also has the crappier new towns and seedier suburbs in his column.

The denizens of places like Nuneaton and Harlow and the myriad other constituencies that  most big city leftists have never even heard of let alone visited, turned out in their droves to make sure that their little bit of prosperity would be preserved whilst they pissed on the people below them.

England is now a land where the politics of petty grievance reigns; where the people care less about the super rich raking it in at everyone's expense and more about sticking it to the claimants, the immigrants and the Scots. The feeling in those places seems to be that if they can't have something then nobody else should either.

Cameron played the small minds of those small town people like a maestro. He encouraged them to believe that Scotland was raking it in at their expense, and the only reason why they couldn't get a bigger car park for their just purchased, nearly new Ford Mondeo, was  because they were being taxed to the hilt to pay for Scotland's goodies.

The political scientist in me has to congratulate Cameron and the Tories as a whole for that campaign, but as a human being I have to say they both he and his voters leave me feeling in need of a bath.