There was no winner in last week's election in Britain. The Conservative Party took the most seats overall, but no party emerged with a clear majority, leaving the country facing the prospect of its first hung parliament since the 1970s. That underscores the depths of the divisions in Britain and the difficulties any government will face as it tries to deal with the myriad problems that ended Labour's 13 years in power. Ominously, those problems are only set to intensify.
A party must lay claim to 326 seats in Britain's 650 House of Commons to claim the right to form a government. In last week's ballot, the Conservatives won 306 seats, for a gain of 113 seats, while Labour took 258 seats (loss of 87 seats) and the Liberal Democrats claimed 57 seats (loss of six seats). Smaller, mostly regional, parties won the remainder.
Those results are disappointing across the board. The Conservatives were supposed to capitalize on the fatigue created by 13 years of Labour's rule to claim an outright majority. They failed. Labour suffered its worst electoral defeat in 80 years and Prime Minister Gordon Brown will go down in history as the man who ended his party's remarkable electoral run, whether it was his fault or not. Finally, the much-anticipated groundswell of support for the Liberal Democrats — prodded by the winning performance of party head Mr. Nicholas Clegg in televised debates — never materialized. Not only did the party fail to catapult itself into the ranks of the other two mainstays, but it actually lost seats.