PAYING FOR WHAT YOU GET?

The Lib Dems as part of the Con Dem coalition government have not just signed up to George Osbourne's savage public sector cost cutting exercise scheduled for October, they are going to have to sign up to helping to bail out their own party out of the financial hole they find themselves in. Some 20 Lib Dem staff have lost their jobs at Lib Dems HQ, the rank and file are facing a 15 per cent rise in their membership fees.

The emergency conference to approve the coalition deal with the Tories cost them the best part of £100,000. Now with potential Lib Dem support at the polls next year in Scotland (Parliamentary elections), Wales (National Assembly) and England (Local Government) looking to crash as a direct result of the coalition deal, not mention the cuts, and a potential electoral reform defeat / farce (take you pick) means that things may be starting to look grim for the Lib Dems.

What may make things more interesting is that the Lib Dem's may well be pretty skint - the Electoral Commission has revealed that the Lib Dems received £6.4 million but spent £6.6 million in the last Westminster election. As part of the Lib Dem austerity measures the party's membership fee is going to go up to £60 pounds. £60 pound to help fund potential electoral oblivion - that's value for money!

FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE LAST DAY...

All in all, it has been an interesting campaign, if rather a long one thanks to Gordon the Ditherer, having been selected back in the autumn of 2007, in anticipation of an autumn Westminster General election. Oh boy! Gordo I will bet that blunder has kept you awake night after night, not to mention the self induced economic disaster that happened on your watch! In truth I have never liked the word in this particular context as - 'watch' would imply some degree of activity, well any degree of activity!

I would say that on the whole it has been a clean well fought campaign, despite an increasingly desperate attempt by the New Labour candidate to inject some life into his failing campaign by having a pop at the Tory candidate in the last few weeks. Think if we (the other candidates) hear from New Labour lips the oily smoothly delivered phrase 'progressive consensus' one more time then we may not be responsible for our actions. The irony is that the current New Labour Party would not know a progressive consensus if it fell over one in the street!

Roll on close of poll, a bumper crop of new Plaid MPs - who will champion their constituents interests, fight for fair funding for Wales a fair deal for our pensions, our service men and women and our military veterans! Roll on a hung parliament! Roll on electoral oblivion to those MP's who were caught with their fingers in the till and electoral reform! Think Different, Think Plaid!

A LONG FINAL DAY

A long final day of this campaign, on the doors this morning and this afternoon - New Labour are not surprisingly deeply unpopular with the voters. It's quite interesting, the voters are not in a good mood at all - there is some serious venom (if not hatred) being directed at New Labour on a scale I would suggest with that directed at the Tories in 1997. It's not just New Labour though, the parliamentary expenses scandal has not gone away, people may not be so visibly angry as they were this time last year, but, that anger and discontent has not gone away. I think that Polling Day is going to throw up all sorts of surprises for all of the parties.  It's been a long day and its not over yet...

Not so much lame duck as dead duck...

We live in interesting times, having toughed it out with his internal (and not so internal) critics and from his increasingly beleaguered perspective, having dropped some dissenting fellow travellers over the side, Gordon Brown has survived to limp on. The reason why this is interesting is because having had an electoral pasting all Gordon can offer labour MP's is the less than palatable choice of hanging together or hanging individually.

In Wales for some of Gordon's motley crew that is not much of a choice, especially as 15 of the constituencies held by sitting Labour MP's were lost at the polls on Sunday evening. The note of quiet and despair that surrounded the handful of Labour activists at the count on Sunday evening was noticeable, I think that the next few months are going to be particularly interesting.