Election Still.

The UK is still going on. This delay though has given me some more time to digest the figures.

In the UK Parliament the magic number is 326. With this number of seats a party should be able to win any vote providing its own members vote according to the party line (the whip). With all but one seat declaring a result Parliament currently looks like this;

Conservatives: 306 seats. Labour: 258 Seats. Liberal Democrats (LibDems): 57 Seats.

To this you have to add the figures for Northern Ireland where the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) (8 seats) and the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) (3 seats) fight the election separately but take the whip of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party respectively. There is also Sinn Fein (5 seats) but regardless of election result they are banned from sitting in Parliament. This gives the new total of;

Conservative: 314 seats. Labour 261 seats. Liberal Democrats: 57 seats.

Obviously that means if any party wants to reach the magic 326 seats they will have to do a deal with one of the other parties. If the Labour party were to do a deal with the LibDems it would give them a total of 318. More seats then the Conservatives but still short of the 326 seat total. This would create something called a minority, coalition government where the two parties join together but still cannot pass their legislation. There is no rule against this but that's mainly because when they drew up the rules no-one thought anyone would be stupid enough to try it. So technically Labour are still in the race.

What is much more likely though is that the Conservatives will do a deal with the LibDems that stops short of a formal coalition. Under the terms of the deal around 4 LibDem MP's will be given cabinet jobs in a Conservative government and in return the other LibDem's will either accept the Conservative whip or agree to abstain in key votes. There is a rumour that this deal has already been done it's just the announcement is going to be delayed until Tuesday in order to stress test the financial markets. That is though just a rumour and if to widely circulated could break the deal.

There have also been results in certain individual seats that have proved quite interesting. The first of these is Morley and Outwood where Labour MP, Ed Balls was fighting to retain his seat. Mr Balls was the Children's Secretary when the Baby P scandal broke. He dared to ask questions. This caused the forces of hell to be unleashed in an attempt to force him out of Parliament. He survived. The second interesting seat is Dagenham and Rainham which was the stronghold of the British National Party (BNP). Here their leader, Nick Griffin was fighting for the parties first seat in Parliament. With one notable exception everyone mobilised to stop him. The BNP came third in the poll and lost all 12 of their local councillors. In short it was a massacre.