Britain’s Tories registered a surprise comprehensive victory at the polls yesterday, with the Conservative Party securing an outright majority to form an exclusive government.

The UK’s experiment with coalitions was briskly swiped aside as the Liberal Democrats imploded, losing a huge chunk of support, rendering it to becoming somewhat irrelevant. Cleggmania, which took the UK by storm five years ago, is well and truly dead and the outgoing deputy prime minister has resigned.

Ed Miliband also proved to his party that they chose the wrong Miliband. Although the pollsters put the Labour Party neck and neck, the Conservatives beat labour soundly by a good five percent. Miliband also resigned as leader of the Labour Party. It is clear that Labour must reform its leader selection process before electing its next one. The union system simply does not work.

UKIP’s Nigel Farage, affable as he may be, also announced his resignation as he failed to get elected, with the party winning only one seat. The result also exposes deficiencies in the system because despite garnering close to 4 million votes, UKIP could not translate them into more seats, while the Scottish National Party garnered only 1.5 million votes, yet secured 56 seats. While the Conservatives will be feeling rather triumphant, it is clear that the ever evolving British political landscape has changed once more, with the SNP being a force in their own right.

And that brings us to the Brexit question. Before the election, Prime Minister Cameron had promised that he would hold a referendum on whether Britain should continue with its membership of the European Union, or whether it should make a clean break. That would allow it to draft its own policies on migration – a move which sapped some of UKIP’s support base.

Cameron said the referendum will be held by 2017 and following yesterday’s result, some senior EU figures are starting to question whether the bloc should start considering some changes to the union in order to accommodate Britain.

As things stand, it would not seem likely that the UK would vote to leave the EU. Businesses in particular are terrified by the issue of having to go  through so much red tape to trade with the Continent should Britain opt to exit. London’s financial district has also expressed extreme concern that it would no longer be a world player and a finance hub. People in general too, still feel that they are part of the European project.

But as we know all to well with our own experience of referendums, nothing is ever a foregone conclusion. 2017 is a long way away and many things could happen until then, especially given the continuing phenomenon of migration, with many Africans trying to seek a  better life in the North of Europe, Britain being one of their favoured destinations.

The pollsters also got this one drastically wrong. Until the eve of the election, the two main parties were still neck and neck, but something was obviously not accounted for. The surge of support for the SNP was probably one of them, as was the drastic fall from grace of the Liberal Democrats.

Cameron has surprised everyone, probably himself too. Labour is probably kicking itself as it realises that while Miliband ran a tight campaign, the party would probably have fared a lot better if it had chosen his brother, David, rather than Ed.

It’s all water under the bridge now, but before long, the UK will be in campaign mode once again as it gears up for its 2017 referendum. Interesting times lie ahead.