UK Politics

It would appear by the time we all head off to bed tonight the Conservatives under David Cameron will have or will be very close to a deal with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats to secure David Cameron as the new Prime Minister of Great Britain.

As a Labour voter (though not a strong Labour supporter) I can only hope the Liberal Democrats as the Conservatives partners in government can temper their recklessness with regards the economy and planned public sector spending cuts. I’m not holding my breath though.

I wish Gordon Brown well and hope he finds the success he sought as PM in whatever he does next. It could be worse Gordon, you could be David Cameron trying to hold a weak minority Conservative government together during the worst global recession since World War II.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has today announced he will step down as Labour leader just as soon as the Labour party can arrange a new leader: he mentioned he hopes the new leader would be in place before the Labour Party Conference which is 4 months from now.

What this means is if the Conservative party can’t secure an agreement with the Liberal Democrats and instead Labour forms a rainbow coalition government with the Liberal Democrats and other parties, Gordon Brown will be PM until a new Labour leader is voted in by the Labour party.

I wonder who the next Labour party leader and possible PM will be?

Possible new Labour leaders could be:

David Milliband
Ed Milliband
Harriet Harman
Ed Balls
Alan Johnson
Alistair Darling

Or maybe the Dark Lord himself Peter Mandelson :-)

With meetings between Senior Conservative and Liberal Democrat frontbenchers at the Cabinet Office apparently going amicably are we looking at an unlikely Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government allowing David Cameron to oust Gordon Brown as Prime Minister?

Hard to believe with all the niceties we are seeing in the news between the Tories and the Lib Dems right now with for example William Hague (Conservative shadow foreign secretary) referring to his Lib Dem colleagues, that a few days ago David Cameron was scaremongering that hung parliaments result in weak governments and the end of the world is nigh :-)

If David Cameron is right about hung parliaments I guess we are about to get either a weak minority Conservative government or a weak Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government: I can not see any government involving Labour, it would be such a long shot.

I’m going to throw out an idea mainly for Labour supporters to discuss, though I know it won’t only be Labour commenter’s :-)

Considering Labour’s been in power 13 years, we’ve had two disastrous and very expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ~10 years of economic success followed by 3 years of economic strife (not Labours fault per se, but they didn’t plan for bad times and you know how unforgiving the British electorate are!), political scandal after scandal bringing what the British people think of politicians to an all time low and still Labour secured 29% of the popular vote and 39% of the 650 seats.

Considering all this strife under a three term Labour government that’s looking tired that’s quite an impressive result.

The UK general election 2010 results are in. Below is a table of results for all political parties that gained at least one parliamentary constituency.

What a complete surprise that the Liberal Democrat rise in the polls did not equate even to a significant increase in the share of the popular vote and actually resulted in a 5 seats loss!

General Election 2010 Results

I’m traditionally a Labour voter, but recently I’ve found myself drawn to the Liberal Democrats. After the live TV leaders debates I’m hoping for a big swing to the Lib Dems from the Conservatives to keep the Tories out of government for at least another 5 years.

The most recent polls shows a hung parliament with who will have the most seats (Labour or Conservatives) not clear despite Labour polling in 2nd or 3rd place in most polls! This is despite the Conservatives having more of the popular vote than Labour and the Lib Dems.

I see Labour and Lib Dems as similar on many policy areas and could see them working well together in a coalition government. Don’t believe what the Conservatives and some in the media say that coalition governments don’t work, there are examples of strong coalition governments around the world.

With a hung parliament looming and the most likely out come being a coalition government with the Lib Dems being the king makers, what will the Lib Dems expect for their support?

Gordon Brown has already offered the Alternative Vote System, which isn’t a proportional representation form of voting system and is unlikely to be enough to secure the Liberal Democrats support if they find themselves in a position of power (maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity for the Lib Dems).

What the Liberal Democrats really want is true proportional representation in the form of the single transferable vote system.

What is the Single Transferable Vote?

The single transferable vote system is quite complicated, so I’ll try to simplify the description!

The current parliamentary constituencies would be changed to allow for multiple candidates to run an area, similar to what we see in local elections and the EU elections where we might see a mix of candidates running a constituency rather than just 1 MP.

Most ‘official’ election 2010 opinion polls point to the Conservatives gaining the highest percentage of the popular vote, however the poll on this site with almost 100,000 voters shows the Lib Dems with the highest popular vote.

What most recent election polls also show is it’s highly unlikely the Conservatives win the 2010 election with an outright majority (minimum 326 seats/MPs), AKA we are most likely looking at a hung parliament on May 7th.

History tells us political polls can be completely wrong, so what would it mean to Britain if the Conservative Party formed a majority government on May 7th?

If the Conservatives Win on May 6th

I believe we will see massive cuts in government spending, an age of austerity as Cameron put it. I anticipate the Tories hiding the cuts by calling them efficiency savings, but they will be cuts and they will be to front live services.