Election Betting.com

If you have listened to senior Conservative MPs over recent weeks, you’d have heard a common theme. Each and every one of them has painted the prospect of a hung parliament in the UK as some sort of ‘end of days’. No overall majority for David Cameron will result in birds falling from the sky and the end of civilisation as we know it.

Take this from Cameron last week: “A hung parliament would be a bunch of politicians haggling, not deciding. They would be fighting for their own interests, not fighting for your interests. They would not be making long-term decisions for the country’s future, they would be making short-term decisions for their own future. The way we are going to get things done is to have a decisive Conservative government.”
And from Ken Clarke: “”I simply fear an inconclusive election result, a situation where the three politicians who have such genuine disagreements are asked to lead parties into somehow cobbling together an approach to an economic crisis. If the British can’t form a proper government and people believe we can’t manage our debt then the IMF will have to do it for us.”

Politicians fighting each other and the IMF coming in to run our economy for us? It’s absolute nonsense.
Coalition government

Elsewhere in the world, countries don’t use the term ‘hung parliament’ – they call it ‘coalition government’. Rather than paralysing the political system in the way that David Cameron would have you believe, many flourishing, progressive countries have been in a ‘hung parliament’ situation for years. The Nordic countries, Israel, Austria, New Zealand, Italy and India all regularly operate with a coalition government.

Take Germany, for example. Coalition government is the norm, as it is rare for either of the two main parties to win an unqualified majority in a national election. They frequently side with smaller parties although, on occasion, there is a ‘grand’ coalition when the two largest parties rule the country in partnership.

In Ireland, coalition governments are quite common with a single party not having ruled for over two decades. Coalitions are typically formed of two or more parties always consisting of one of the two biggest parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and one or more smaller parties or independent members of parliament.

The current government consists of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, supported by independents.

Indeed, the UK has a minority government of its own at present. The Scottish Nationalist Party won just 47 of 129 seats in the most recent Scottish elections, meaning that the support of other parties is essential for legislation to be passed.

Hung parliament

The notion that the British economy and government will suddenly grind to a halt if there’s no overall majority on 6th May is utterly preposterous. Many advanced Western democracies operate under coalition government, and such a result in the UK would also precipitate a change to our electoral system that would almost certainly make majority government a thing of the past.

Hung Parliament Betting