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Posts Tagged ‘hung parliament’

As widely predicted, the UK woke up to a hung parliament yesterday morning. No political party had gained a majority in Thursday’s UK parliamentary election.

I did what I intimated I would do in my last blog post – I spoiled my ballot paper by writing some choice comments on it detailing what I thought of the poor calibre of candidates I was being asked to vote for and the fact that I feel that the whole parliamentary system in the UK needs a kick up its backside right now with too many people feeling totally alienated and that their views are not being adequately represented.

I have been not at all surprised by the result – the Conservatives have the most MPs but without managing to muster more than 50% of the parliamentary seats meaning that they don’t have an overall parliamentary majority, Labour are second, 50 or so seats behind the Conservatives – as the sitting party they have succeeded in destroying the faith of a lot of their traditional supporters (myself included) so were in line for being on the receiving end of a protest vote, which is effectively what happened, and the Liberal Democrats have trailed in a dim and distant third, not managing to turn their potential in the opinion polls into actual votes at the ballot box – no change there then.

The booby prize has definitely been won by the Liberal Democrats, because their leader Nick ‘sit up and beg’ Clegg can now say to the two main parties ‘what are you going to offer us to throw our hat into the ring on your side?’ They don’t really deserve to be in this position of power given their truly pathetic showing in the polls, but, there you are, that’s how the system works.

So it seems we are in for at least a few more days of wheeling and dealing before we know whether we have a weak power-sharing coalition in place to govern the UK, or whether we go back to the polls to do it all over again (which is probably the more unlikely of the outcomes).

We shall see.