The single most important consequence of Thursday's voting is the sheer bloodiness of the bloody nose delivered to the Liberal Democrats
So many of the most potent themes of British politics came together for a few hours in Thursday's elections that the contests, and the simultaneous AV referendum, seemed as important as a mini-general election. Except that a general election has only one overridingly large story to tell – the new government. This week's Super Thursday, by contrast, produced such a bulging goody-bag of resonant local and national stories – the defeat of electoral reform, the nationalist triumph in Scotland, the nationalist setback in Wales, excellent news for the Conservatives, grim news for the Liberal Democrats, something in between for Labour – that it is hard to know where to start.
On any other day, the triumph of the Scottish National Party in winning an outright majority in the Holyrood parliament – the very outcome that the devolved electoral system was expressly designed to prevent – would take the palm. While the United Kingdom survives, however, the single most important consequence of Thursday's voting is the sheer bloodiness of the bloody nose delivered to the Liberal Democrats. The damage is truly shocking. One in three Lib Dem voters from 2010 abandoned the party. At least 550 councillors were lost and the party was bundled from power in cities like Newcastle and Sheffield. The Lib Dem presence at Holyrood was decimated and in the Welsh assembly is now vestigial. The writing is on the wall for many of the party's biggest names in the House of Commons. And the AV referendum, so central to the party's hopes of having something distinctive to show for the coalition, was swept away by two-to-one.
There is something for the Lib Dems to cling on to all the same: the 15% share of the poll is grim not catastrophic; council victories in Burnley, Eastbourne, Watford and elsewhere serve notice that this was not an all-out rout, while in Eastleigh (the seat of Chris Huhne) there was even some Lib Dem advance. Yet Nick Clegg now presides over the rubble of his party's 20-year incremental forward march through British politics. This defeat is the all but inescapable price to be paid for an all but inescapable decision to enter government a year ago. Much the same may happen next year too. The bottom-line is that a large swathe of liberal Britain, more than this party can afford to lose, feels abandoned by Lib Dem membership of a coalition which is overwhelmingly defined by the slashing of public services, the overturning of the health service and the about-face on tuition fees. Mr Clegg and his party must confront this or face a decade of marginalisation.
The contrast with the fate of the Conservatives makes this all the more dismaying. If liberal Britain feels abandoned, conservative Britain feels vindicated. The Tory vote held up. There were even some council gains. And AV was crushed. True, there were Scottish and Welsh setbacks yet again. But the party of David Cameron, George Osborne, Andrew Lansley and Michael Gove – the real architects of the coalition's core policies – went not merely unpunished but has been majorly rewarded. In some ways, the Conservatives have more to cheer than Labour, who should have done better, not just in Scotland, but everywhere outside its traditional heartlands. For Labour, feeling good about winning well in Wales and about attracting back voters who should never have been lost in the first place are the easy bits – Labour's eight-point boost since 2010 and its nearly 700 new councillors are in one sense the Gordon Brown departure dividend. The larger point is that Labour's electoral counter-attack against the Tories is still almost non-existent. Yet without a credible strategy for turning some Tory votes into Labour ones, Labour's hopes of governing again may remain stillborn.
Both Scotland and electoral reform also remain crucial to any future centre-left advance of any kind. Yet Alex Salmond's stunning SNP win – amazing under a proportional system as well as the biggest personal electoral triumph for any party leader since Tony Blair's 1997 Labour landslide – poses a double challenge to Labour aspirations: it threatens Labour's future Westminster election chances and if – big if – the SNP win their way on independence, it may mean the end of any Scottish MPs at Westminster at all. In the wake of the abject failure of AV to win public backing, meanwhile, many will conclude that electoral reform is off the agenda for a generation. Yet if British voters go on producing general election outcomes with which the two-party Westminster system cannot cope, electoral reform may get back on the agenda sooner than now seems likely.