They Said You Was Hung

Returns are in from Britain's parliamentary election, and the net result? No party has a clear majority, but the Conservatives have a 306-seat plurality. Labour has 258 and the Liberal Democrats have 57. So how will the horse-trading play out?

There are three main mathematical possibilities:

1. The Tories and Lib Dems could form a government.
2. The Lib Dems could ally with Labour instead, but at least two other parties would also have to join in.
3. The Conservatives could theoretically form a government without the Lib Dems, but would need at least four other parties to do so.

Would these miscellaneous other parties side with the Tories or with Labour? I'm not sure. The largest other parties are regional parties like the Scottish National Party (6 seats), Plaid Cymru (3) of Wales, and Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party (8; traditionally Tory) and Sinn Fein (5).

But by far the biggest playmaker is Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats. Clegg, a proponent of proportional representation, had indicated that the party with the most votes (i.e. the Tories) should get to occupy 10 Downing Street. But the Lib Dems seem the more natural ally of Labour.

What will happen? My prediction (and chance to look silly) is that the Tories will form a coalition with the Lib Dems after promising electoral reform. We shall see.

The Sinkable Gordon Brown

As if public discontent with Britain's burgeoning national debt did not spell enough problems for Gordon Brown and his Labour Party, Brown was caught calling a voter "bigoted" after a short exchange earlier today. His comments were caught as Brown talked to an aide in his motorcade, not realizing that his mic attached to his lapel was still on. The woman did not even say anything that bigoted besides a short aside on Eastern European immigrants. Judge for yourself:

Brown apologized, but, well, look at what's dominating BBC News's election coverage:

The crazy thing is that, according to most polls, Labour will win a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, even though polls are placing Labour third in the popular vote. (British MPs, unlike in other parliamentary systems, are elected by district, like the U.S. Congress.) It is likely that neither Labour nor the Conservatives will win an outright majority of seats, leaving a hung Parliament.

One of the parties must then form a governing coalition with the third-party Liberal Democrats. Although the Lib Dems' ideology would fit better with Labour than the Tories, the Lib Dems' platform includes instituting a proportional voting system. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has even said, "It is just preposterous the idea that if a party comes third in the number of votes, it still has somehow the right to carry on squatting in No 10." Either way, it should be an interesting election come May 6.