Should David Cameron regret campaigning against AV?

In May 2011, as part of the deal that brought together the coalition government, the UK was asked if it wanted to change its electoral process to use the Alternate Vote system as opposed to the current First Past The Post.  Recall that the AV system involves voters ranking the candidates, and essentially eliminates the bottom candidates and redistributes their votes until one candidate gets above 50% of the total.  For a number of reasons, some based on merit and some based on other things, the idea was rejected by a margin of more than two to one.

In the lead-up to the referendum, the Conservatives were campaigning to keep FPTP, while the Liberal Democrats were the driving force behind AV.  However, over the last year, we see that UKIP has been taking a considerable share of the votes away from the Conservatives.  So was opposing AV a mistake on the part of the Tories?

Five things we learned from the UK local elections

Last Thursday, elections were held throughout most of England to elect county councils.  These particular councils were last fought in 2009, when Conservative popularity was at its peak.  This meant that the Tories had a very high starting point, controlling 28 of the 34 councils being contested in England.  Despite them losing the popular vote (at least according to BBC figures), they were still able to control a majority of the councils up for election.  The UK Independence Party (UKIP), though, has reached record support, taking nearly a quarter of the vote and over a hundred council seats.

So what have we learned from these council elections?