Does Cameron probably have to put some Liberal Democrats into the cabinet, or is there something he can offer that keeps more power for his party but still keeps him shy of a no confidence vote? Why would the LDs give in short of cabinet posts?
I’m not positive I have the firmest grasp on the British system, so please don’t assume a lot of background on my part, or use some Ian Hislop obscure political slang/references I probably won’t understand. Thanks.
A committment to electoral reform in the form of proportional representation would probably be enough. The Tories and Lib Dems certainly won’t agree on Europe or defence. I’d bet on a compromise towards electoral reform, a pile of minor agreements, and possibly one cabinet post (at most).
Proportional representation is making all the constituencies of the same population size? The BBC thinks I already know what this is.
No, it sounds like the seats in Parliament would be assigned by percentage of the vote the parties get. It would eventually have the effect of ending two-party rule in the UK, and causing many coalition governments.
Thereby effectively ending the constituencies. Which means you have no idea for whom you just voted. Just for one example Arizonans would have been very upset to find that they’d effectively elected a hard right-winger instead of John McCain. This greatly changes the philosophy and even point of the election.
Who chooses the people after that, the party? Why wouldn’t they then choose the most loyal people ahead of every other consideration?
The conventional wisdom is that the Conservatives (“Tories”) would be inhjured the worst by adopting STV (single transferrable vote) or other mode of Proportional Representation. The Liberal Democrats are almost pledged to their constituencies not to enter a coalition that will not seriously try for some form of electoral reform. They seem to be agreed on having an all-party conference on the issue. One thing I’ve seen broached, and I don’t know how seriously the proposal is being taken, is for a referendum on an electoral reform proposal; this is something that both the Tories and the LibDems can support, or at least live with.
Cameron will certainly try to put together a coalition to give himself a majority Government. (In British usage, a Government, generally capitalized, is the Cabinet officers and other ministers, their political underlings, and the P.M.'s party and any coalition partners in Parliament. It is not equal to the whole machinery of governance as in America.) If he and Clegg can agree on terms, or he can cobble together enough minor-party support (very unlikely), he will endeavor to do just this. Expect him and Clegg to do some serious horse-trading over the next few days.
If agreement on a coalition cannot be reached, he will form a minority government, or else decline to form a government and give Brown (or his successor as head of Labour) the opportunity to try to put a coalition together. The latter might be to his strategic advantage if he sees the likelihood of such a move showing up Labour in people’s minds as a “do nothing” party or one making unpopular decisions, or hoping for more embarrassing situations to further erode Labour or LibDem support.
In a minority government, he would attempt to govern without a guaranteed majority in Parliament, hoping that at least some measures will attract enough votes (or at leat abstentions in lieu of nay votes) from members of other parties to pass them. An energy bill, for example, might include provisions tailored to win Scottish Nationalist support and the votes of some LibDems. He will attempt to negotiate with Clegg to get a commitment not to oppose him for a specified period on supply (the budget bill[s]) and vote of confidence – which can be either the opposition moving a resolution of no confidence or the Government placing its own future on the line to emphasize the importance of a measure. (“If this bill does not pass, I shall submit the Government’s resignation to Her Majesty.”) While this sounds perilous, the effect on the Opposition also needs to be taken into account – if they vote it down and the Government resigns, the public will hold them responsible for the ensuing election, which might engender negative feelings if, say, they did it five months ifrom the last election. In the ill-fated three-party compromise after Canada’s last election, this arrangement is what the Parti Quebecois offered – they agreed to support the proposed Liberal/NDP coalition on supply and confidence votes for 18 months, retaining the freedom to vote against anything else proposed.
Note that Brown has to resign or be voted out on a confidence vote first, though. Merely because his party’s support was significantly eroded does not automatically throw him out of office – he could remain in while Cameron and Clegg spar, fail to come to terms, and Clegg makes a compromise offer Brown can accept, then carry on, with a cabinet shuffle bringing in LibDems, as if nothing had happened.
The court of last resort (pun only sort of intended) is the Queen. Her job is to give the country a Government that Commons and the voters will support. Nearly always she does this by remaining above the fray and waiting until the politicians have hashed out a solution they can live with. But in the event that no agreement satisfactory to parties commanding a majority is possible, and neither Cameron nor Brown feel they can govern with a minority government, given the intransigence of their opponents, she will enter into behind-the-scenes discussions with political leaders aimed at hammering out a Government that is able to lurch along, however difficultly, for some months until a new election is reasonable. This sort of thing happens extraordinarily rarely, though. I’m unsure if she intervened in 1974; if not, the last occasion would be one of the incidents during her grandfather’s reign. (Note that she will not tell anyone what to do in such a case; she will act as an impartial deal-broker to try to help work out a compromise, using her prestige to help ‘grease the skids’ for such an arrangement.)
I guess I really don’t understand the workings. How can Cameron form “minority government”? I thought he needed a majority vote to choose him as PM.
If he were to let Brown run on, would this be in anticipation of a number of the minority MPs becoming so upset that he can muster 326 votes of no confidence, forcing a new election?
Also, I thought that Labor plus LibDems did not make a majority vote. What am I missing here?
Yes, if the Lib-Dems can get whoever they partner with to pass proportianal representation, the UK will never ever again have another majority government.
There are many Proportional Representation systems in use around the world, and some of them address that problem. One approach is to have two categories of MP - some representing particular constituencies, just like in the British system, and some from lists drawn up by the parties. The list MPs are used to make up the numbers so that the number of MPs reflects the proportion of the national vote that the party got.
Not quite. He needs to command a majority in the House of Commons. That simply means that more MPs vote for him (or rather, initially his Queen’s Speech) than not. The Lib Dems could agree to abstain, so he would not then need 326.
Thanks for that last post. I had sort of assumed that the votes FOR were compared to the total MPs, not the votes AGAINST. I guess that means that abstaining is a passive vote for.
What are the political implications of doing that, since everyone knows what this strategic abstaining is about?
It means, in essence, “The subject matter of this particular bill is not of sufficient importance to me and my party to risk bringing down the Government and likely triggering an election, even if I am opposed to it in principle.” Or something to that general effect.
Perhaps the adage of advice “Choose your battles wisely” might help clear it up.
To draw an American parallel, suppose I am a liberal Democrat in the state legislature. Some right-wing Republican has introduced a bill that prohibits a person who openly admits to having homosexual tendenciies from teaching in the public schools of the state unless he or she signs an affadavit stating that he/she is now celibate and will remain so for the duration of his/;her employment as a teacher in state-funded institutions. The bill stands a good chance of passage.
Now I think the bill is odious and would gladly vote against it. But if I do so, I risk pissing off the moderate Republicans who have agreed to back my bill giving additional assistance to elderly on fixed-incomes and low-income households where needed to cope with rental or heating cost increases, which is something I have been pushing strongly.
So instead of voting my principles, I hold my nose and abstain, and explain why privately to the gay leaders who understandably feel I let them down.
Minority governments:
You can also look at Canada for examples. Canada has a parliamentary system modeled on the UK, and has had minority governments since 2004.
In Canada, the Liberals in Opposition have abstained from some major votes in the recent minority governments, because the other two Opposition parties (Bloc québécois and New Democrats) had announced that they would vote against the government on those measures. If the Liberals have also voted against, that would have brought down the government.
That approach led to criticisms that the Liberals were weak, and too concerned about their electoral position to do the job that they were elected for, namely to hold the government to account and to vote against measures that they disapproved of. It was one of the factors which lead to the Liberal leader, Stéphane Dion ultimately losing his position as Liberal leader - he was seen as too weak to lead them.
On the other hand, the people have a right to expect that their elected representatives will try to make the minority government work, rather than just defeat the government and trigger a general election at the first opportunity. If the people have given a divided verdict on who should govern, the MPs have to accept that and try to make it work. That imposes some responsibility on the Opposition parties, not just the party which forms the government.
So, a minority Parliament can be tricky not just for the party that forms the government, but for the main opposition party as well.
It’s incredibly complicated, and a virtually unprecedented situation (there hasn’t even been a hung parliament, of any sort, for nearly 40 years). No one over here seems to understand how it all works, even the media. I try and follow politics but I’m baffled, even after reading this thread. It seems to me like the Conservatives’ options are briefly as follows:
Form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Gordon Brown and the Labour party technically get the first chance to form a coalition government, but they seem to have let the Conservatives go first given they won the most votes and seats in the election. This would involve the parties coming to an agreement on policies to implement, and/or the Lib Dems getting prominent positions in the Cabinet. I’m not entirely sure how it works though. When would another election have to be held in this scenario? 5 years, as usual?
Form a coalition with some other parties. Another possibility floated was for the Conservatives to form a coalition with the Democratic Unionists in Northern Ireland, exempting Northern Ireland from spending cuts in return. I can’t see them trying this simply because the public would be outraged, and I don’t think it works psephologically either.
Form a minority government. I don’t really have any idea how this works. All I know is it would involve the Conservatives forming a government without reaching the magic 326 seats needed for the normal majority government. But how does it affect legislation? When would the next election need to be called?
Another option is that, if the Conservatives fail to form a coalition with the Lib Dems, the Labour Party could then form a coalition with the Lib Dems instead. Unlike the Conservatives, Labour have come close to offering the Lib Dems their key demand (a referendum on electoral reform) and are ideologically closer to them, but the public might not stand for being ruled by a government that doesn’t include the party that won the most votes and the most seats in the election. Plus the idea of Gordon Brown remaining as Prime Minister is effectively untenable. But if anyone can explain to us British what the hell is going on, it would be much appreciated. 
The difficulty with forming a coalition in the Westminster system is that the principle of Cabinet solidarity means that every member of the Cabinet must support the policies of the government, even if they personally disagree with them. That principle works well when all members of the Cabinet are of the same party, but it poses problems when there are members of different parties - a Cabinet minister of the smaller party might find that the Cabinet adopts a policy that runs directly contrary to the policy of his/her party, and then has to choose between the party and the coalition.
The one time I can think of when Cabinet solidarity was relaxed was during the National Government, dealing with the economic crisis of the Great Depression. There was one key point of economic policy (can’t remember exactly what it was), where the Conservatives and the Labour ministers took one position, and the Liberal ministers could not accept it because the Liberal policy was the opposite. They reached a political agreement that on this point, the Liberal ministers could publicly state they disagreed with the policy. However, that was very much an exception to the general rule of Cabinet solidarity.
As a result, true coaltions are very rare in the Westminster system, at least in the U.K. and Canada (I won’t pretend to speak for what those wacky upside-down Antipodeans do 
). The Canadian experience is that the more common outcome is that the smaller party stays out of Cabinet, but agrees to support the government on certain issues.
However, if the parties form a coalition, it lasts only as long as the parties can work together. At any time, the smaller party in the Cabinet may decide that it’s no longer in its interest to support the coalition and can pull out of Cabinet to sit on the Opposition side. That may trigger a general election, well short of the normal five-year period.
Alternatively, the larger party may conclude that working with the smaller party is no longer in its best interests, because the smaller party is demanding too great an influence on government policy, and break up the coalition itself. (This may well happen if the larger party concludes that it has a chance at a majority government in a new general election.) Again, there could be a new election well short of the usual five-year cycle.
That’s how it’s been working in Canada for the past six years. We’ve had three minority governments since 2004: Prime Minister Martin and the Liberals, 2004-2006; Prime Minister Harper and the Conservatives, 2006-2008 and 2008 to the present.
The Parliament lasts only so long as the parties wish, normally tied to the election polls. If either the government party or the main opposition party thinks they have a reasonable chance of winning a majority in a new general election, they’ll trigger an election: the opposition parties by voting against the government on a confidence measure, or by the government advising the Governor-General to dissolve the Parliament and call an election.
How does the minority government work? A lot of inter-party politics, more than usually occurs during a majority government. The government introduces a budget and legislation, but always has to remember that if it tries too hard to push its own policies, the other parties might find themselves forced to vote against them, and there will be an election. If the issue that brings down the government raises considerable popular interest, they could find themselves defeated in that general election.
On the other side of the House, the Opposition parties can’t just blindly vote against every major government measure, as is the common practice during a majority government. They have to show responsibility in making the hung Parliament work, and pick their battles carefully. If they were to trigger an election on something that is not important to the public at large, they might find that the voters decide to give the party forming the government a majority.
For instance, in the fall of 2008, Prime Minister Harper introduced a measure calling for a reduction in public funding for political parties. This was something that none of the three Opposition parties could support, and they announced that they would form a coalition to form government. It triggered a major political crisis. Eventually, Prime Minister Harper stayed in power, by backing down from the funding proposal. The leader of the Liberals lost his position as party chief by the way he’d handled it. The entire episode showed how carefully all parties have to move in a minority situation.
Just a small point but whereas a Tories + Lib Dems coalition would have an absolute majority, a Labour + Lib Dem coalition would not.
When they talk about a Labour/Lib Dem coalition, what they’re really talking about is a “progressive alliance” of a whole bunch of parties. A combination of Labour, Lib Dem, Plaid Cymru, Green, Alliance and Scottish National Party would give them 326 for instance, although the inclusion of the SNP (or, alternatively, the DUP) in that scenario might be a little uncomfortable.