Mark Casci: Crumbs of comfort from the election result nobody wanted

The snap poll was supposed to deliver a clear period of political stability for the country and provide a rock solid mandate for Theresa May to deliver Brexit.

Instead, following the most lacklustre and insipid campaign I have seen in my lifetime, the Prime Minister has somehow turned an unassailable lead in the polls into a hung parliament, charting the country even further into the waters of uncertainty.

The result afforded little comfort to company bosses already trying to make sense of a post-Brexit and Trump world in which increasingly the established way of doing things looks like a bygone era.

Predictably the Prime Minister has rightly come in for serious criticism for the catastrophe. Her campaign was set up from the outset as a request for her to be given a personal mandate for the next five years.

Seduced by high personal approval ratings, she arrogantly assumed the public would flock to polling stations to vote for her. Rather than speak to voters, or allow the public to make up their minds by debating with opposition party leaders, she spent the campaign robotically repeating the “Strong and Stable” mantra despite the mocking it engendered.

But let us not forget that while the Tories did not win a mandate, neither did Labour. While Jeremy Corbyn defied the expectations of everyone other than his infatuated supporters or inner circle, the fact remains that Labour has now lost three elections in a row and now faces being out of power until at least 2022.

Given the successive failing from politicians nationally and locally I found myself questioning why it is that I and the rest of the country keep expecting them to deliver solutions for us.

In the last 12 months alone we have seen one Prime Minister fail to win a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU with a pompous “we know best” approach.

We have seen a chancellor humiliatingly forced to abandon alterations to the way National Insurance contributions were managed within days of delivering his first Budget.

We saw another Prime Minister making the unprecedented move of U-turning on a manifesto commitment during a general election campaign.

And, in our own region, we have seen political leaders of all parties put selfish partisan interests ahead of the region in failing to strike a devolution deal, failing where our colleagues in Manchester and elsewhere have succeeded.

From this low ebb let me assume my best “glass is half full” approach to life and offer these facts as solace.

For one, we are a prosperous, advanced and agile economy that has much going for it.

Secondly, May’s loss of a majority means that hard Brexit looks to be off the table. An offering to Brussels which gives our businesses decent access to the Single Market now looks nearer, a prospect that will warm the hearts of all but the most ardent Brextremists.

Thirdly, the prospect of a second referendum on Scottish independence referendum looks to be kicked into the long grass for good, with the decline of the SNP’s standing north of the border inextricably linked to its reckless stance on the issue.

Finally, as with the EU referendum, the turnout in this election was high, with young people in particular voting in numbers not seen in generations. Hopefully this will translate into increased political engagement from both younger and older people, who can bring new and innovative ideas to national matters to refresh and replace some of the stale, muddied and incompetent thinking that is causing so much political torpor and damage to our country.