After the elections....

I've been waiting to do a post on this blog following the elections until the political picture became clearer in both Scotland and Edinburgh - but it seems pretty clear that won't be for some time yet!
So a few brief comments meantime - first, I'm obviously delighted that Malcolm (Chisholm) and Sarah (Boyack) got back in - they both deserved to! And secondly, at both local and Scottish level, it's clear that noone party can claim they've got a mandate for government. That's true for Scotland. It's even more true for Edinburgh, where even though Labour still got most votes, just, the LibDems actually got more seats - and the Tories got more votes than the SNP, but the SNP got one more councillor - but the real message is that the people have chosen 4-5 parties to have a say in the running of the city!

I hope that the politicians of all the parties show the maturity to recognise that this is what the voters have said - in both Edinburgh and for Scotland, we can either have a logjam; or four years of confrontation; or getting down to business where there is broad agreement amongst the parties. (See question 2 which I asked at Tuesday's Scottish questions in the House of Commons).

The other big story of the elections was the fiasco about spoilt votes, and I was able to raise that in Parliament this week. (My question is half-way down the link). I'm also going to be raising the issue with the Electoral Commission next week.