I'm a student in Brighton, UK. Here are some photos, and other delicious nuggets of interest.
And if no party does win the next election outright, what is likely to happen? No-one is talking about coalition, and the Lib Dems shy away from revealing their hand.
The nearest they have got is leader Nick Clegg’s ambiguous statement that “the party with the clearest mandate would have the first right to seek to govern”… though he studiously avoids saying if that means most MPs or most votes.
The former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell says it is hard to see his party offering support to a Labour government that had just lost, or to a Tory party that refused the constitutional reform the Lib Dems are so keen on.
But, intriguingly, on Gordon Brown’s 11th hour conversion to limited electoral reform with the alternative vote, Sir Ming said: “If the alternative vote were on offer, and by that I don’t mean a referendum or a Speaker’s Commission but if legislation was agreed, that is certainly something to which we should give the most serious consideration.”
And Sir Ming is not alone in criticising the expectation of an instant handover of power on the Friday after an election, when the outcome may be an uncertain one.
Conservative Andrew Mackay, agrees: “All of them will be dog-tired and exhausted and then, immediately, without sleep, to decide what to do isn’t in the national interest. This country can run without a government for a week or so.”
Mr Mackay was until recently David Cameron’s political and parliamentary adviser.
He thinks that, in a hung parliament where the Tories were the largest party, his leader’s strategy would be to form a minority government, set out a programme to tackle the economic crisis, and challenge the other parties to back him or vote him down with the prospect of asking the Queen to dissolve parliament for another election if he were defeated on a crucial vote.
The Conservatives vehemently oppose the alternative vote, arguing that the current first past the post voting system “delivers clear, clean results” even if it does currently seem to work against them.
But what if a minority Tory government called an early second election which produced another hung parliament? Then all bets might be off.
