Broken British System

The election in Britain is over. The results are in, and the people have spoken… but the problem is, no-one still knows what the results are. We have no parliament, and Gordon Brown is still Prime Minister… without being voted in for the second time! Furthermore, thousands of voters were turned away at the polling station. There was a 65% rise in voter turnout and there was not enough polling stations and staff to handle the pressure. Is this really democracy when people were told that they would not vote because there simply wasn’t the space? This could have made the difference in the votes today, but instead, we have something that is known as a “hung parliament”. This situation has opened our eyes to just how broken the British electoral system is and the British people are furious.

In order to secure a Prime Minister, a party will need to secure a majority of 326 seats. These seats depend on the voters voting for which party a certain borough wants to be presented by. The problem with this is that the UK is dominated by two parties: Labour and the Conservatives…which means that they will always have more members in the party, and always have a higher number seats than candidates from independent parties, fringe parties or even parties like the Liberal Democrats. Confusing? Carry on reading!

Currently, the Conservative party have secured approximately 302 seats, Labour with 232, and Liberal Democrats with 55 – which was incredibly disappointing. The balance of power now depends on the Liberal Democrats. If they pass over their seats to the Conservatives, they will gain the majority votes and David Cameron will become Prime Minister.

In the next few days, Gordon Brown and David Cameron will have to negotiate with Nick Clegg and other independent parties to negotiate on passing their seats onto either Labour or Conservative, but this means a lot of game playing and political ‘bribery’… “Give me your seats and I will work with you on the child tax”.

You can keep reading about what the outcome of this election is but we are confused too! We have no government, many prominent MPs have lost the vote, and Gordon Brown is still our Prime Minister. I shake my head at this poor system. This is not democracy and it is indeed a very poor, unsatisfying and disappointing result.