In the UK

For those of us who are political junkies, we've been following UK politics for the last several weeks or so, and now that polls have closed for the last hour or so it's time to talk about the situation.

In Britain they do elections a little differently than in the US. The election that just took place today will elect Britain's House of Commons which is kinda like the US HOR, and kinda like the US Senate, in that this legislative body is the only directly elected body and that it has significant powers to legislate. From the election results, whichever party has a majority of the seats in the HOC has had received the nod from the Queen of England to "form a government" which essentially means that that party gains the Prime Ministership and from there gains significant powers in controlling what legislation comes before the body. For the last several decades one party has successfully won the majority of seats.

Generally speaking, the Labour Party has represented the left-wing politics in Britain for the last several decades, and the Conservative Party has represented the right-wing side of the aisle. For the last 13 years, beginning with an Obama-like sweep in 1997 and PM Tony Blair (you know him as "that douche" who helped Bush invade Iraq, but in reality he's quite progressive on other issues)Labour has decisively controlled the government. But hampered by uninteresting leadership and multiple scandals, Labour has been expected to be overtaken by the Conservatives in this last election.

But in this election, perpetual third party Liberal Democrats who have always underperformed the other major parties, now led by Nick Clegg, are expected (depending on who you ask) to make large gains in the HOC. The Lib Dems are hard to classify politically; they're populist, generally anti-foreign-state-building, centrist or left leaning economically, and socially very progressive- probably some kind of left-libertarian philosophy. But mostly they are running on a platform of election reform which would allow the British people to have more power in their electoral process and possibly to allow more proportional representation in parliament based on vote. As it stands, no party is expected to receive more than 40% of the vote, (a fact that has been true for decades) and yet because of the British electoral process that favors the incumbent, Labour, and now Conservatives have been able to gain a disproportionate number of seats. Thus far, despite having 20-25% of the national vote, the Lib Dems have been shut out of the system almost entirely.

But maybe not this time. I'll keep things updated as poll results come out.


6:30pm update--

I can't believe to hear it, but UK law states that no ballot can be given out after 10pm (British Summer time) no matter what, according to the BBC, or perhaps (also according to the BBC) that the polling station doors must be locked after 10pm. The turnout looks to have been very large and significant (maybe in the thousands) numbers of people have waited for hours to vote only to be turned away. Police have even been called out to disperse crowds clamoring to vote in some areas. This will open up some areas to legal challenge; giving people like me even more to blather on about for weeks to come.