Okay so the deal is done, that’s it, we have a Coalition Government, David Cameron is Prime Minister and Nick Frickin’ Clegg is Deputy Prime Minister. Yes, really.

The manifesto, based on what the Guardian has revealed, is looking much, much tastier than I imagined we’d get from a Government of Britain. The Civil Liberties section looks especially good, including a ‘Freedom Bill’ or ‘Repeal Act’ (as we’d hoped). Looking forward to seeing the full detail about what that includes.

Bed now. Brain completely frazzled after these last 5 days. Trying to lower my own expectations, but the idea that this is going to be a pretty radical, reforming Government is back with a vengeance.

I note with some amusement that despite leaving the Lib Dems and trying to be an independent, non-partial blogger I’ve found myself accidentally becoming a Pro Government blogger – or perhaps the first Coalition blogger (Neither Tory nor Lib Dem, but supportive of the two working together). I’m not sure I like that. My objectivity is being compromised again, I can feel it.

Still, more on this tomorrow after I’ve slept, seen the proper details and begun forming a more rational opinion on the good and the bad.

Ultimately Labour has gone. I got my wish. I’m surprisingly happy.

Brown’s just told us he’s stepping down as leader of the Labour Party. Gordon Brown was THE sticking point between Lib Dem and Labour negotiations (as part of forming a rainbow coalition of the losers), and so, unbelievably, Barnacle Brown has in fact stepped down

Worst still, formal negotiations with Labour have begun, apparently. The major hurdle for the Lib Dems out of the way, there’s now talk of an instant, no referendum bill to bring in Alternative Voting immediately.

As depressing, disheartening, demoralising and soul destroying as it may be, I don’t think the Lib Dems, still stinging from the 1974 Lib/Lab pact where they failed to get PR, can refuse that. Not without getting a concrete offer of PR from Cameron.

Lib Dem MPs were given the power to make this decision to guarantee that if and when one of the big two parties ever tripped up again, they’d make no mistakes – they’d get PR or bust, no matter what.

If they think they can get away with jilting the Tories and that the electorate will forgive them for putting.. well..  their own party’s self interest ahead of absolutely everything else? They’ll do it. No question. Short of having to tolerate a referendum on bringing back the death penalty, there’s very little Lib Dems will turn their nose up at to get some sort of PR.

What’s tragically disappointing is that even as a member of the Lib Dems (at one point) even I didn’t pick up just how single minded this party is on this issue. Seems I didn’t see that particular memo. Talks between them and the Tories appear to have stalled on a few issues. The MPs are refusing to sign it off in it’s current form – now we know why. They claim that economic stability is their top priority. Quite simply I’m not sure I believe that now.

So sod civil liberties. Sod sorting out the deficit this year. Sod the plans to scrap ID cards and the Digital Economy Bill. As long as the sodding Lib Dems get their sodding PR, everything will be just fine, right?

So thanks, Gordon. You might just get the last laugh after all.

UPDATE: So the Tories, it seems, have offered the Lib Dems a referendum on AV, while Labour have offered a bill to give us AV immediately, without a referendum (assuming they can get it through the House of Commons, which isn’t exactly 100%). It’s their final offer, and if they’re saying ‘final offer’ publicly, that means it is.

They have to do this deal now, surely? Surely? Don’t they? Please?

If Cleggmania didn’t turn into actual votes for the Liberal Democrats, it did serve another function during this General Election: It froze out UKIP, the Greens and the BNP from the coverage. Caroline Lucas did win a seat for the Greens, thanks to ferocious local campaigning, but Brighton Pavilion was the only tiny piece of good news for any of the 2nd tier parties.

Even now, in the varied and diverse postmortem of this General Election, the disaster that’s befallen these parties isn’t getting mentioned at all. So, lacking anything else to write about I thought I’d mention it now.

Revealing for me was a fairly local result. In the BNP stronghold of Mixenden Illingworth in West Yorkshire, the Nazis came third. Third! It’s mostly housing association territory, so of course Labour won, but the Conservatives came second, much to my astonishment. There was a time when they polled only hundreds of votes there. In fact, this was the first council seat the BNP claimed in West Yorkshire, after enjoying visits from the full weight of the BNP campaigning machine.

A friend of mine had a run in with Nick Griffin at the time during what was a very dirty and aggressive bi-election. “You’re a Lib Dem?” Griffin is supposed to have said. “Your logo is yellow, the colour of piss.” My friend claims he replied, “No, it’s the colour of the sun.”

This personal presence from Griffin did win the area over, much to my dismay (because, it has to be said, I lived there at the time). Eventually the party machine moved on, leaving it to the local supporters and activists to continue the work, and, inevitably, the BNP support drifted away as the glamour and naughtiness of voting BNP faded, the reality of the same small number of names appearing on ballot sheets over and over again and the track record of the goons who do actually make it has sunk in.

This experience of wild, enthusiastic support for the BNP evaporating over time appears to be repeating itself across the country. In Barking, where Nick Griffin got the best result of any BNP politician with 6k votes, they lost all their councillors.

How much of this was due to the freeze out in the media? And how much did the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats benefit from a very welcome absence of hysterical, “YOU MUST VOTE LABOUR TO KEEP OUT THE BNP!” messages?

UKIP, too, seemed to have had a very disappointing election judging from the stream of very glum looking faces on Election Night coverage.

Perhaps Alix Mortimer is right to suggest that Cleggmania was the reason the Lib Dems still have at least 57 seats, instead of being crushed into oblivion by the biggest squeeze on non-Tory, non-Labour votes for years?

There’s no doubt that without the debates, if this had been a normal election, the media would have focused on the threat to Tories from UKIP, the threat to Labour from the BNP and, in doing so, have given both parties the publicity they crave. The story could so easily have been “voters to punish the big three for expenses scandal” but as it happened it was those individual MPs that chose to stand for re-election with a blemished record that got a very specific, targeted booting.

If the predictions about the future of the Lib Dems in a post-coalition world hold true, we could be returning to an era of real two party politics. What next for these minor parties, struggling not just to make some sort of breakthrough but now, it seems, find themselves in a fight for their survival?

UPDATE: What’s the price of failure? For UKIP, it was £237k in lost deposits. The Greens threw away £151k and the BNP pissed £133k of hard earned fascist pounds up the wall. H/T, Matt Wardman via Twitter

So Brown’s just given a little speech to the cameras outside Number 10. The gist was this: Clegg and Cameron should take all the time they need to try and do a deal. Take weeks. Take months. Take years! But, when you’re done Clegg, come to me: I’ve got a little present for you and I think you’ll like it.

Ultimately Brown has to resign and recommend Cameron to the Queen for Cameron to become Prime Minister. Even if Cameron’s screaming blue in the face, “I can form a Government! I can form a Government! We’ve done a deal with the Lib Dems!” Brown can still turn around and make them wait… wait until he’s had HIS chat with Clegg.

Yes. The constitution really is that crazy.

You might have come to the conclusion that I actually missed the Leader’s Debate and decided to just make up a load of rubbish instead.

And, in fairness, you’d be right.  Truth is attempts were made to watch it but we all rapidly lost interest, preferring instead to engage in an activity I believe is called, “socialising” in a “pub” consuming something known as “booze.”

Only a week to go before the elections now, and then we can all be put out of our misery.

Or can we?

The company I kept last night wasn’t exactly going to be enthused by the efforts of Clegg, Cameron and Brown having just been to a meeting at the Adam Smith Institute where Perry De Havilland, Tim Worstall and Guido Fawkes thoroughly depressed us about the shite state of affairs in British politics at the moment and the simple underlying truth: No matter which party forms a Government, we’re going to get a very, very similar Government to the one we currently have.

It’ll be largely social democratic in nature, with a huge public sector that’s desperately trying to compensate for the weak private sector to give the illusion of a healthy economy.

Libertarians like me argue that the weakness of the private sector is in no small part due to the overwhelming redirection of national product into the public sector, and so waiting until the private sector sorts itself out before rolling back the public sector is a) Mental b) Wrong and c) Going To End In Tears.

The Government, you see, is currently overspending above and beyond what it takes in tax on an epic scale, and all three leaders say they want to sort that bit out. All well and good, but none will address the perversion of Keynesian thought that got us into this mess in the first place. Even Keynes thought the absolute maximum tolerable proportion of Gross National Product to be spent by the state was 25%… and we’re approaching 47%. In parts of Britain the public sector is 70% of the local economy which puts Soviet Russia to shame. We’re trying to keep a fire going by throwing on £50 notes with one hand, and buckets of water with the other.

And, in short, this is why there’s not enough jobs. There’s simply not enough stuff going on, so we have millions upon millions economically inactive, and an ever smaller number of businesses and people to pay for the ever growing public sector. This isn’t sustainable, or desirable, and truth is that the only choice is stop doing it or be stopped. That’s the choice.

One bit of the debate I did catch was Cameron saying, “it’s not good enough to borrow money from the Chinese to spend on goods made in China” which I think is a spot on summary of the underlying disease at the heart of our economy, and perhaps why he “won” the debate in the end. In our distant disillusionment, did we miss a leader who actually seems to get it? Perhaps he does… but what’s his solution? How far is he willing to go?

The challenge for the next Government (as set by the three leaders) is simply to get public spending down from “let’s just hand the keys to the IMF” to “catastrophically expensive.” But even if the deficit could be reduced to zero overnight, the Government would STILL be consuming too much of the National wealth. And that? Well, we can’t vote to do anything about that. That bit we’re stuck with. Before Brown sent the public financies to hell the parties used to squabble over one or two billion worth of spending… now they’re squabbling over a difference of about £6bn instead.

Just because all three parties are talking about cutting the deficit doesn’t mean economic liberalism is experiencing some kind of renaissance. It just means things are probably much, much, worse than we fear.