UK: Three losers

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The ballots in the UK general election have been closed for slightly less than an hour now. All the BBC can talk about, all they have in their hands, is their exit poll. An exit poll is, after all, a poll, not an election result. So it fits in well with our blog's stated purpose. Here it is:

• Conservatives: 307
• Labour: 255
• Lib Dems: 59
• Others: 29

At the risk of falling into cliché, if we take a minute to presume that the exit polls are close enough to take as an 'approximate' view of reality, the fact is that this remains an election with no winners but with plenty of losers.

There's no getting round the fact that Labour have lost: even if they can cobble together a coalition with the Lib Dems, they have certianly lost their mandate: they've lost any real claim to 'represent' the British people in any real way. There's no surprise there. Given that David Cameron looked like cakewalking to a majority just a month ago, it's tough to see a hung parliament as anything but a loss for the Conservatives as well - polls all long have shown very little enthusiasm for the Tories this time round: merely less antipathy than exists towards Labour. The biggest loss, though, has to be the Lib Dems, really: this exit poll shows them, amazingly, losing seats since 2005. While the Lib Dems can spin that scenario into a plea for electoral change, and while a hung parliament is very obviously exactly what they've been salivating for, 2010 was meant to be the real electoral breakthrough for the Lib Dems. Losing seats is a queer way to have a breakthrough...

No winners at all. No breakthroughs for nationalists, for Green, for UKIP either... one hopes, then, that the way forward here is humility. One hopes that all three parties will come forth and talk about their inability to have engaged the public's imagination or hopes this time round. Obviously co-operation is essential between the parties: not just for the for-the-love-of-God-stop-talking-about-them 'markets', but most importantly to stop the British public as a whole from falling either into a profound apathy or into the trap they appear to have avoided this time out of voting for far-right fringe parties.

Will that happen? Well, the optimist in me hopes so. The pessimist in me? He sees dark times ahead...

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UK: Divide by three

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Probably my last post before the UK general election. Looks like the Tories will come out on top after all. The race is for the basement, really: will the LibDems keep their lead above Labour, or will they drop back down at the last minute?

Well, when I say 'drop back down', I certainly don't mean to pre-campaign levels. It's too soon to say for sure ow permanent it is, but it's starting to look like we're seeing the entry of the LibDems as a real major player - something they've veen threatening to do but failing to do ever since they were the Liberal-SDP coalition. Whatever your opinion on the LibDems, there are two things I'm willing to say: (1) they are the true story of this election campaign, and will be remembered as such, and (2) bipartisan politics no longer exist in the UK - in fact, they never really did, but it was always convenient to act as if they did.

YouGov at the moment has:

• Conservatives: 35%
• Labour: 28%
• Liberal Democrats: 28%
• Other: 9%

I think it's ridiculous to look at this stat and say anything other than 'the Tories have a significant lead over their rivals', but I bet you'd find that that lead is not that far outside the margin of error, and that theoretically all three parties could be polling exactly equal numbers: disregarding that not-small 9%, the other 91% might be evenly split between three parties. It's a given that it will be, at the very least, almost evenly split.

While I see this as a sign of a healthy democracy (to say nothing of frustration at the 'politics of old'), it does create a problem, hopefully a short-term one, for the politics of Westminster business-as-usual. There's much hand-wringing about the political insecurity of a hung parliament, but I think that the first thing the UK will need to do as of 7 May is get over their fears of a hung parliament: there's a decent chance that they'll never have another majority government.

I don't see this as anything to fear, but hopefully the UK will find its political maturity more quickly than Canada, where people continue to believe that coalition governments are less democratic than a party that fully two voters in three voted against claiming any kind of mandate to act alone. Whoever wins on 6 May (and it will be David Cameron) will have no mandate: he will start in office with the knowledge that far more people voted against him than voted for him. And this is patently ridiculous: the moral authority to govern a people descend from the notion that the people consent to being governed by you. In its absence, all you have is totalitarianism.

Unless, of course, you can increase your mandate by finding a way to be inclusive in parliament: to work together with at least one of the other 'big three' parties (and a few of the others would help too) in order to develop the sense that you are leading the country not as the leader of a party with support in the thirties but as the leader (spokesman) for a group of parties that, in combination, represent the majority of British voters. It's only logical.

Will it happen? Well, Cameron's not the right person to launch the next stage in British parliamentary procedure, but it does fall to him. What will happen? Let's wait and see.

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