UK Election (Not Quite) Final Results

Running off the BBC reportage, with 16 seats left to declare, the totals are:

Conservatives: 299
Labour: 254
Liberal Democrats: 54
Others: 27 (Scots and Welsh nationalists, Sinn Fein and other NI parties, and the Greens' leader)

With a total of 642 seats in play (there are 650 total, but four are taken by the traditionally neutral Speaker and deputies, and another four are held by Sinn Fein, which doesn't take up its seats in the Westminster Parliament, leaving 642), the majority number is 322.

For those who don't know, the Westminster Parliamentary system provides that the party with the most seats is invited to form a government, ideally with more than half the voting seats. No party has done this, meaning a few possible outcomes:

1) The Conservatives could try to hold a minority government, as in fact is currently the case here in Canada. This would mean they'd be the government, but they'd be a government which had to cope with the fact that they'd need to put compromises in their legislation to win support from other parties.

2) Either the Conservatives or Labour could form a partnership with the Liberal Democrats. If the Lib Dems partner with the Conservatives, their coalition would be sufficient to hold a majority, but the Lib Dems would hopefully soften the right-wing agenda of the Tories. This might also include a shift toward a more proportional system of voting, something long favoured by the smaller parties, as the First Past the Post system tends to favour the bigger, established parties. For example, Labour and the Lib Dems had roughly similar proportions of the popular vote, but the distribution of that vote means that Labour have five times the number of seats, compared to the Lib Dems.

At the moment, and possibly for the coming several days, the government will be in some chaos, as the various parties jockey and negotiate to try and come to a conclusion about what kind of government will be formed.

Traditionally and constitutionally, the incumbent party is given the first chance to form a government which will hold the confidence of Parliament, which would mean Labour (under current PM Gordon Brown) would have the first go. If they can't, then other parties will be invited to try.

The Tories, unsurprisingly, have been making a lot of self-serving noise about the "moral right" to try and form a government, but given they only received 37% of the popular vote, it's hard to see this as a mandate of any sort - nearly two-thirds of Britons voted for someone else!

It's still very tight, very tense, and will be for some time.

(Note: I won't be around to monitor this thread much; I'm off to Buffalo this morning, as my partner is visiting for the weekend and I need to pick her up from the Flugplatz.)