Having a Punt, Having a Go at Explaining the British Elections!

Polls are showing a tight race as voters prepare to cast their ballots Thursday.

By Elias Groll

May 6, 2015, 7:34 PM

After the votes are all cast and counted in Thursday’s elections in the United Kingdom, we may very well have no idea who will lead the next government. This year’s polling is the tightest in recent memory, and a proliferation of smaller parties have thrown expected voting patterns into disarray and has pollsters scratching their heads at possible outcomes.

So what to make of all this? Here, then, is a newcomers’ guide to an election that will determine the fate of Prime Minister David Cameron’s continued participation in British politics and may see a band of Scottish upstarts make historic gains.

The basics

The United Kingdom is a parliamentary system, meaning that the head of government is determined by the party that commands control of the House of Commons, the lower legislature. The individuals who hold these seats are selected in districts — or “constituencies,” to use their formal terms. To win a district election, one merely has to secure a plurality of votes — the most, and it doesn’t have to be a majority, of those running.

This electoral arrangement has resulted in a political system that in recent years has been dominated by the Labour party and the Conservatives, or Tories. The effect of this arrangement is that smaller parties are severely underrepresented in Parliament, while the big parties have a greater share of seats than share of the popular votes.

To secure the prime minister’s seat, a party has to control the Commons, and it can do so in a variety of ways but most importantly by either winning an outright majority of seats or by forging a coalition agreement with one or more smaller parties. The current government, for example, is led by David Cameron’s Tories in alliance with the Liberal Democrats.

This doesn’t sound so complicated. Why am I reading this explainer?

Well, in the last few years Labour and the Tories have lost their iron-grip on British politics. The U.K., as you’ll perhaps recall, is made up of the four nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. That union is now beset with separatist movements, most prominently among them the Scots. Last year, Scotland very nearly broke away from the United Kingdom, and this year’s election finds the Scottish National Party resurgent. For decades, Scotland has been a bastion of Labour support, but this year, the SNP is expected to win as many as 50 of Scotland’s 59 seats. In the last election, in 2010, they won six seats.

The rise of the SNP is but one aspect of the United Kingdom’s political fragmentation that has made the outcome of this year’s election highly unpredictable. The U.K. Independence Party, led by the chain-smoking, hard-drinking populist Nigel Farage, has undermined Tory support among what might be called the old, angry, white guy crowd. Populist rabblerousers, UKIP firmly maintains that the government is staffed by a bunch of idiots selling Britain’s patrimony away to Europe and opening the floodgates to immigrants who are ruining the country. It’s a familiar line of thinking in Europe; UKIP is merely the British variety.

Add to the mix renewed support for the Green party and the Welsh separatist party, and you can see why the Tories and Labour are highly unlikely to win an outright majority of 326 seats in the 650-seat Parliament. The SNP has stripped Labour of their Scottish support, and UKIP has peeled away Tory voters to leave the two major parties short of controlling the Commons. The latest projections give the Tories 280 seats and Labor 260 seats.

Sounds bad. What happens if no one controls the Commons?

While England has no constitution, it does have a delightfully named document, The Cabinet Manual, spelling out what can happen in a scenario in which no party wins a majority in the Commons, a situation known as a “hung Parliament.”

Unlike some other parliamentary democracies, the party that secures the most seats — recall that what matters in the British system is not vote totals but seat totals — is not guaranteed the first chance to form a government. Cameron has the advantage in retaining the prime minister’s office, but any party leader can try to form a coalition government. Regardless, if no one wins a majority, the aftermath of the race is likely to be followed by intense jockeying as to who has secured a mandate to govern.

The process of coalition building is complicated by the fact that that most major parties have pledged not to work with one another. The Liberal Democrats have been damaged by their coalition agreement with the Conservatives that saw the junior partner renege on a series of pre-election promises. The Tories have exploited the electorate’s wariness toward election agreements by arguing that a vote for the Labour party is a vote for the left-leaning SNP. This has forced Labour to pledge that it absolutely won’t enter a coalition with SNP.

The SNP, meanwhile, has said it absolutely won’t enter a coalition with the Tories. UKIP and the Greens say they won’t enter a coalition whatsoever. And Cameron and his Tories say they are holding out for a conservative majority — despite the fact that no polls indicate that will happen. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, are open to coalition-building and say they will “add a heart to a Conservative government and a brain to a Labour one.”

What, pray tell, does the Cabinet Manual tell us could come of this royal mess?

In the case of a hung parliament, David Cameron will stay on as a caretaker prime minister. If, however, it is clear that he will be unable to form a government, the manual says that he is required to resign, pack up his many suits, and vacate 10 Downing Street.

Setting aside Cameron’s political fortunes, there are three basic outcomes to a hung parliament, according to Alan Travis, the Guardian’s domestic editor: A single-party minority government, an inter-party agreement between two or more parties, or a coalition government in which politicians from more than one party gain ministerial posts.

In the case of a single-party minority government, the Tories or Labour would govern on their own and seek support from smaller parties for their proposals. The first key test for the government will be the so-called “Queen’s Speech,” in which the monarch delivers an address outlining the government’s policy agenda. That speech then has to be approved by a vote in Parliament. If it fails, the government will likely fall. The speech is already scheduled for May 27, and the vote usually follows a few days afterwards.

An inter-party agreement would see two or more parties hammer out a formal agreement on a set of policy proposals and concessions that would allow the smaller party to support the larger.

A coalition government would look akin to what we have now, with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats ruling together.

If this all sounds vague, that’s because it is. The possible shape of the government depends entirely on how the vote totals shake out and who wins the perception battle on election day and the days immediately following it. The party perceived as having secured a victory — even if no one really agrees on what constitutes a victory — will arguably have greater leverage in forming a government. The days following the election and the coalition negotiations may ultimately prove more important the the election outcome itself.

I heard something about a “bacon sandwich.” What was that all about?

Yeah, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is somewhat inept at eating food without making a fool of himself. The right-wing British print media has been portraying him as something of a sandwich-eating monster unfit to rule: