drunken British man on Election Night: "The Queen's Government must live on!"

I’m putting my travel journal (of sorts) on hold because this is a very exciting time to be in London. Yesterday was Election Day! English elections don’t happen very often, so it’s particularly special. There hasn’t been an election here in 5 years, which I find mind-boggling. The same people are in Parliament who were there five years ago (until last night in many cases). Doesn’t that just get a bit stale? It’s also a bizarre and complex political machine. There’s tons of parties, but the main two are labor (liberal) and tories (conservative), with lib-dems forming a sort of independent, but more aligned with labor, third party. The day’s been full of scandal and drama. In some areas people weren’t allowed to vote. They send people voting ballots in the mail which they have to arrive with at the polls, and, of course, students have been turning up en masse without the documents they need. In some districts they ran out of ballot paper. In the home county of Nick Clegg, the lib-dem nominee, who was widely lauded for dominating the three televised debates and thought he could bring the lib-dem party into prominence, there was an overload of people and they just started turning people away once it got too late. This led to some Florida-style recounts. The only difference being that they only have to recount thousands, not millions, of votes so it all gets done in a couple hours. It is now the morning after and everything is still chaos. Some districts still don’t know who they’re MP (parliamentary representative, as opposed to PM, the prime minister) is. Also, since it seems like no party will have a majority, everything turns into a schoolyard scrum over who gets the seats necessary to decide on Prime Minister. Basically, the tories have more votes and seats in Parliament, but labor has enough to keep them from being decisively declared the majority and establishing a new Prime Minister. The Prime Minister election isn’t run like our Presidential campaign. The three PM candidates are all in Parliament, and whoever’s side wins, that side gets to put their leader as the nation’s leader. Like if whoever won the majority in Congress by default had their president elected. However, in this situation the current PM, Gordon Brown, who is the leader of the second place party, can make a deal with the lib-dems, who will throw their seats behind the labor party (the labor and lib-dem are more natural allies than lib-dems and conservatives, and there’s a sort of weird, unwritten right for the current PM to get the first crack at forming a coalition with the third party). So this is what they call a coalition government, and it will mean some deal will be hashed out to keep the tories from becoming PM. Of course Cameron, the conservative PM nominee, is wheeling and dealing behind the scenes as well. According to BBC he’s offered a deal to the lib-dems where he’ll be the new Prime Minister (with their seats he’d have a solid majority), and he’ll concede to them certain cabinet positions. So the fact that the lib-dems had a terribly disappointing election is sort of nullified by the fact that the seats they did earn become wildly valuable as the possible decider on the next PM. Lib-dems hate the labor party for shitting up Iraq so badly amongst a couple other issues, Labor is angry with the lib-dems for being liberal but not voting for them, the conservatives hate liberals but like the lib-dems for splitting up labor’s vote, everyone hates the conservatives and some lib-dems vote “strategically” (aka they vote labor because they know they wont win and anybody’s better than the Tories). It’s madness. And then you have to get Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales involved.
The election seems to bring out the stereotypical in everyone. England votes more conservative, so the Scottish go liberal. Also, when the English announce a vote it takes place in a town hall and everybody claps respectfully for their candidate. In Scotland it’s mayhem, with drunken hordes bellowing threats and insults from the crowd so much they can barely announce the winner. A woman I was watching with (a friend’s mother, and of Scottish origin) chuckled as a raucous Scottish man in the crowd tried throwing something at the conservative nominee and said, “Well…they’ve all had a few bevvies.” The Irish all vote for obscure parties then don’t send anyone to Parliament anyways because they don’t believe in the system. And who cares about Wales? When they announce the winner in Wales they do it in Welsh, which sounds like a dying hyena, so that’s kind of fun.