Hung Parliament Then

So after weeks of posturing, live TV debates and canvassing the UK has ended up with a hung Parliament. In all honesty this is nothing strange for a democratic country so all the ho-ha is slightly over dramatic (as is the picture I chose). However it seems that everyone knew this would be the outcome before we did.

The markets had speculated and prepared for it and the polls up to and including the exit poll were pointing to it as well. What will be interesting to see now is who will form a coalition with whom. You’d imagine that Labour and Lib Dem would form a coalition as the Lib Dems came about as a fork away from Labour. However some believe the Conservatives will be able to woo the Lib Dems into backing them. Personally I’m not sure, if anything the Lib Dems will be disappointed with their performance considering all the positive press Nick Clegg got after the first TV debate. If anything I predict that while we’ll get a coalition for a while it will likely lead to another General Election sooner rather than later.

It sounds strange to say this but I’m actually quite excited to see where this goes. What will be the major concern for the coalition if we get one. Will it be electoral reform in preparation for another election or will they continue to concentrate on the economy and sort that before moving forward with anything else? I’m hoping the latter as we need to make sure we come out of this recession before making plans and I’m hopeful that is the way this will go. It’ll also be interesting to see who does form a coalition and, if rumour is to be believed, will it be Labour and Lib Dem but only if Brown resigns? I doubt we’ll hear much if anything till after the weekend so for now we’ll just have to put up with the press making all sorts of claims especially the Murdoch lead press. In the end though I think any coalition will be fragile and we’ll end up going to the polls again.