At 5/7/10 08:35 AM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote:
wtf is a hung parliament, i thought you just obeyed the queen's every word
This is the race to elect the guy who'll be the queen's advisor (hence the term Prime Minister). In Disney's Aladdin, picture Jafar. We're electing him. Only in practice the monarch's even less powerful and I'm pretty sure the PM's not going to have a talking parrot..
As for hung parliaments... You know how the US Senate is totally incapable of doing anything thanks to the fact that the Democrats don't have a supermajority?
The Hung Parliament's sorta like that. Sorta.
The Conservative Party (our version of the Republicans, but less likely to hold thier convention in Hawai'i, led by yes-man David Cameron and backed by Rupert Murdoch's Global Empire) has won the most seats here, but lacks the outright 50% majority to be able to claim parliament. The other two parties, Labour (see the US Democratic Party, only less competant and led by an angry scottish cyclops NOT armed with a grenade launcher) and the Liberal Democrats (the 'other' group thanks to the fact we don't favour a two party system that looked like it was doing well until opinion polls worked out people lie quite well) together don't have enough to take control of the 50% either if they combined forces to become a Coalition Government.
So currently Gordon Brown is still in control, but there's immense pressure from the larger party for him to step down. And currently, we're not sure who's going to run things. The Lib Dems could coalition join with the Conservatives, in which they'll promise to help run the country with them in exchange for first pick of thier guys (yes, british politics works like playground football...), or the Conservatives could try running the country without the supermajority in a Minority Government, and get constantly shouted at by the Lib Dems and Labour, grinding most political processes to a halt.
My constituency in Derby kept Labour in, despite our MP changing, and the Conservatives kept thier seat in the Mid Bedfordshire seat my family lives under. Nationwide there are calls for parliamentary reform since despite the Liberal Democrats earning 23% of the nation's votes (contrast with 29% Labour and 36% Conservative, the numbers are pretty close!), they managed to LOSE seats.
I'm personally ignoring them all now and waiting for the foot to drop after this election when whatever person we're all living under has to break the bad news about budget cuts and tax hikes...