Well, this is going to be interesting....

[tiggymalvern]

Not the first hung Parliament of my lifetime, but definitely the first one I can remember.

I thought Gordon Brown was a bloody awful Chancellor after Labour's first term, and a barely credible Prime Minister, but I've always regarded him as a basically honest guy, who actually believed in what he was doing. If he attempts to cling onto power now, after the public have effectively told him to FOAD with around 28% of the vote, he will lose that one piece of respect I had for him. The voters never have elected him, and apparently they never will elect him. The Lib Dems have a point on electoral reform, when it's even possible that Gordon can attempt to call himself PM after this.

Comments

[arafel.livejournal.com]

We were watching the election results this morning on the BBC. I didn't realize that hung Parliaments happened so infrequently. The one Briton I asked about the results felt that it meant nothing was ever going to get done, which is pretty much politics as usual, right?

[tiggymalvern.livejournal.com]

Hung parliaments might be about to get a lot more common. There have been a number of electoral boundary changes since Labour took power in 1997, and there's a feeling it would be tough for the Tories to get a large majority now. (They actually got the same percentage of the vote last night as Labour got in 2005, which gave Labour a majority of 60, but has left the Tories 20 seats short.) And of course, if Nick Clegg gets his way on PR as a condition of coalition, hung parliaments will become the norm XD

Nothing getting done is definitely a large part of business as usual for politicians! But sadly, right now, nothing is really not an option. Somebody's going to have to take some serious action to fix the economy, after dear Gordon left the British debt increasing by almost half a billion pounds a day :-( The pound dropped 5c against the dollar last night just through the uncertainty.