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I’ve been telling you for years, not weeks, that the southern English are the worst sort of electoral cowards. The sort that would run scared when faced with even the emptiest of threats (‘The SNP are coming! Lock up your principles!’); stand obediently to one side while the weak are bullied; the sort that would bow the knee to the wealthy when they’re told what to do; the sort that would glance furtively over their shoulders in the ballot box before placing an ‘X’ against the candidate that represented what their dim mind believed to be the best chance of preserving their neat little homes and their trimmed lawns and their ‘private do not turn’ signs.

What neither I considered, nor any pollster nor any analyst before or after last Thursday’s disaster for decency, was what Basil Fawlty would have called the bleeding obvious: that Liberal Democrat votes in southern England would return to the Tories.

For decades in our undemocratic democracy, all anybody who rightly loathed the Tories could do, if they lived south of the Severn-Wash line, was vote Liberal Democrat to register their hatred of selfishness, greed and bullying.

When the Liberal Democrats betrayed that enormous second-choice electorate and chose to sup with the devil in 2010, it set in train a movement neither I nor anybody else prepared for: the return of the protest vote to its Conservative home. For these were people who, in voting against the failures of a coalition that has worsened our economic position in the world and increased national debt and borrowing far beyond the wettest dreams of any Labour hopeful, were so stupid they decided to punish the servants, not the masters. In a climate where we were told everybody believed the old political system was finished and everybody wanted a change, the dullards voted for the same old lies.

This transition of Liberal votes to the Conservatives was the true creation of Cameron’s ‘success’. (Even Cornwall, to deep and lasting shame, got down on its knees and tugged its forelock to the Conservatives to bring to an end centuries of proud and brave independence in an absolute humiliation of cowardice.) It was not a positive vote for Cameron’s shabby policies nor even acknowledgment of his six weeks of threats and scare-mongering.

Look at the electoral map. Yellow in brilliant Scotland where the flame of social justice burns bright, where people are not afraid. Red in the north of England where they truly understand the full terrible meaning of Conservative politics. Red in the vast majority of the conurbations where a young, informed and intelligent electorate hopes for better than the politics of self, self, self. Blue in every other area – the market towns, the shires, the countryside, the places where people go to jealously hoard their lived lives and shore up decades of prejudice against enlightenment, against fairness, most of all, against foreigners and poor people.

Of course in the wake of such a setback it’s natural for anybody with a shred of decency, of belief in the possibility of a future for the human race, to despair – but we must not. We really must not.

There are reasons to be cheerful, my Brothers and Sisters.

Despite the full weight of the English media, despite a six-week campaign based solely on fear and threat (just like the Scottish referendum), despite a campaign devoid of policy, costing or morality, despite the urging of immoral corporate interest, despite all that might, the forces of darkness secured just over a third of 31 million votes.

It is tempting to look around you and imagine every face as the face of a selfish coward who voted for the Conservatives in secret last Thursday – but it’s not true. Just over 11 million people in this country are cowards and bullies; so it’s comforting to know they are in a minority shorn up by the forces of the establishment – the bankrupt first-past-the-post voting system, the right-wing media (and anybody who doubts that should look up last week’s papers) and corporate interest (and anybody who doubts that should look at just how hard, expensively and publicly big business fought for a Conservative victory).

A bankrupt system? The Electoral Reform Society’s analysis shows that of the 31 million who voted, 19 million of the total (63%) voted for losing candidates.

Half of the winning candidates won less than 50 % of the vote.

UKIP received 3.86m votes for the one MP elected to the Commons, the Greens 1.15m for their single MP, the wonderful Caroline Lucas. This compared with an average of 26,000 votes for every SNP MP, 34,000 for every Conservative, 40,000 for every Labour MP and 299,000 for every Liberal Democrat.

24.2% of seats in parliament (a quarter!) are now held by MPs who would not have been elected under proportional voting systems, as used in democracies.

Another blight on our ‘democracy’ is the existence of safe seats, said the ERS. More than half of us live in constituencies where the result was a foregone conclusion. A fairer, more proportional system would eradicate safe seats once and for all. Those who vote Conservative in Scotland have gone almost unrepresented, as have Labour voters in rural southern constituencies or Conservative voters in northern urban seats or Green voters everywhere.

The defeated Liberal Democrat Andrew George, whose dim voters in West Cornwall discounted his 18 years of excellent service as a very good constituency MP, said: ‘The Tories now have absolute entitlement to govern this country but with less than 25% of the electorate having voted for them i.e. nearly 76% didn’t support them! They may have a parliamentary mandate, but they don’t have a moral justification to rule as they please.’ Moral justification, however, is not a phrase understood by any Conservative.

As ever, and as George suggests, the narrative you hear from the media – ‘Cameron’s great triumph!’ – bears no relation to the truth. The Tory vote grew 0.8% from 2010, the Labour vote 1.5%. But the real success stories were the growth in support for UKIP (9.5%) and Green (2.8%). Of an electorate of 46.4 million, 15.478 million voted for the bad guys (Tories, the racists of UKIP, the bigots of the unionist parties in Northern Ireland); more than 15.7 million voted Labour, SNP, Green, Liberal Democrat and other left of centre parties. Yet the minority scoops the jackpot. In terms of share of the vote, right and left both scored close to 50%; is power then shared to represent the wishes of the electorate? Of course not.

Though the media narrative tells us the right has secured the death of liberalism, it is the Left that is the majority, by votes and (just) by vote share in this benighted kingdom. Yet the system decrees that the Bufton Tuftons of the English shires shall have dominion. You are not permitted to consider that.

There is now an unarguable case for electoral reform. Most people I know in Cornwall gritted their teeth and voted Liberal as the only possibility of defeating the vile Tory cowards and bullies; but what if we had been able to vote with our conscience? The Greens would have more than one MP. Mebyon Kernow would have Parliamentary representation, and why not?

Of course the establishment will fight to preserve a system that delivers power to the Conservatives and their backers in business and the media, for it is in the financial interest of the establishment to do so. Having bought democracy, business and the media has absolutely no intention of returning it to its previous owners.

So it will be hard to achieve change.

But we most hold close to our broken hearts the awfulness of the outcome of this election and reflect that the establishment – the media and the Tories and the business elite – were even prepared to break up the United Kingdom to retain a cold callous grasp on Westminster. They invoked the threat of Scotland voting democratically for the left as a terrible threat to the nation, and in doing so achieved the supreme irony: the near certainty of a collapse of this unUnited Kingdom. What sort of people are they, that they would depict the democratic wish of an entire nation as a threat to democracy? Desperate people, that’s what sort, desperate people who will one day reap a grim harvest, and that’s the hope we must hold.

The left is not defeated; in truth, the centre and the left won the election, spearheaded by the people I am so very, very proud to call my countrymen, the Scots. (One relative replied to my ‘Wasn’t the Scottish vote brilliant?’ with a dry ‘No it was not. It was a terrible disappointment. One Tory got elected’).

Huge trouble lies ahead for the right – splits over Europe, the economic threat of the right’s opposition to the EU, the prices Cameron will have to pay to bigots and racists to survive. As the hideousness of their uncosted, expensive agenda becomes clear, opposition will grow. Andrew George: ‘If you’re wealthy, privileged, anticipate a large inheritance, have more than one home, are a land speculator, want to hide your wealth from the taxman, believe that much of the ills of society are the cause of foreigners, gypsies and others, and that the poor have only themselves to  blame you’ll be pleased with the new Government. However, if you are poor, sick, disabled, a young person seeking hope for your future, poorly  housed, dependent on public services, work for or are passionate about the NHS or even a  creature who’d prefer not to be pursued to their death across our countryside just for fun then  you have much to fear during these next five years.’

But all the Tory policies outlined there will provoke anger and a search for opposition. So the left must hold true; it must ignore the calls of the right for it to move to Tony Blair’s Tory-lite position.

Listen, again, to Andrew George: ‘Last Thursday’s result demonstrated more clearly than anything else why those who share a broadly ‘progressive’ agenda should seek to work together rather than fight each other to a  standstill and just let the Tories into power’.  That’s what Nicola Sturgeon suggested, and what Milliband, to his shame, foolishly rejected – an understanding that nothing is more important than an alliance of decency to keep the right’s hands out of the till. I hope she and Andrew George, from opposite ends of the country, can persuade everybody in between of the necessity for this progressive alliance.

There is still hope, Brothers and Sisters.

And if hope fails, we can all move to Scotland.