As the nation votes for the next Government, with most opinion polls still suggesting a hung parliament, Robert Hill, considers the implications.
By the time you read this, you will have probably cast your vote, and you may even know which candidate has been elected for your constituency.
But whether you will know who will form the next government is far less certain since, unless the pollsters are to have even more egg on their face than usual, the election may well result in a hung parliament – although the option of the Tories sneaking an overall majority should not be ruled out.
To listen to and read much of the media, you would think the UK has no experience of hung government.
For several years in the 1970s there was effectively a Lib-Lab Government. The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland parliaments/assemblies have hungness built into them, by virtue of the proportional electoral systems they use. And, of course, scores of local authority chief executives and senior officers have been through the experience of making a hung council work.
If no single party has an overall majority, then the immediate question is, who is going to form the government. One would normally expect the party with the largest number of seats to end up providing the prime minister and running the government.
However, if that happened to be the Labour Party, then that would be far from guaranteed. When, as in 1974, a party loses its overall majority, its mandate to continue governing could well be perceived to have been lost. The parties will also have to resolve whether both – or all – parties involved in the coalition will be allocated some key ministerial positions. Or will the coalition agreement only relate to policy rather than appointments?
The first big test of any coalition will be the content of the Queen's Speech. The haggling over what will be included and what will be left out of the first legislative programme will be intense. Part of the resulting compromise will probably lead to an impossibly-crowded parliamentary timetable – which will cause problems down the line. The second big test will be the Budget linked to the spending review, which will follow on shortly afterwards. A spending review tests a government and creates tensions even in the good times when funding is relatively plentiful. But with markets demanding drastic and explicit spending reductions, it could lead to savage and bitter rows between the coalition partners, within parties and between departments and the Treasury. Deciding how well a coalition will survive and manage a hung parliament will depend on seven factors...
