Now it is the turn of the politicians to dither, haggling with one another on what sort of deal they might patch together to reach a majority in Parliament. But they have to watch their backs, keeping one wary eye on their restive parties, which may well decide that any deal involves a concession too far.

The Conservatives have the most right to feel aggrieved. They won the most seats, 306 out of 650, and 36.1 percent of the vote, against 29 percent for Labor and 23 percent for the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, but for their natural allies in the U.K. Independence Party, the Conservatives would have won.

UKIP won no seats but garnered 918,000 votes. In 21 separate seats, they secured enough votes to keep the Conservatives or the Lib Dems from winning. The most dismaying result for the Conservatives was in Morley, the seat held by Brown's tough and devoted henchman Ed Balls, who is the education secretary. Balls was the top target of the Conservatives, who poured volunteers and resources to unseat him and claim a major scalp. They failed. Balls clung on, with a shrunken majority of 1,101 votes -- 18,635 for Balls, 17,264 for Conservative Antony Calvert. The UKIP candidate won 1,506 votes and and, as a result, Balls slinks back into Parliament.

Had the UKIP candidates, who mainly want Britain to leave the European Union, stood down in favor of the Conservatives, Cameron would be prime minister today. But Cameron rejected an electoral deal in which UKIP candidates would have stood aside in return for a referendum on Britain leaving Europe. And Europe is the issue on which any agreement between Cameron and Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems, who commands 57 seats, is likely to founder.

The Lib Dems love Europe and hope one day to see Britain drop the pound and join the euro. This seems to have been the main reason why the high support Clegg won in the opinion polls, after impressive performances in the televised debates, shriveled away in the voting booths as news spread of the depth of the Greek debt and European crisis. Ten days ago, Clegg had been at level pegging with Cameron with more than 30 percent in the polls and had pushed Brown into third place.

Clegg has said that the price of his support is a firm commitment to reform the election system and move toward a system of proportion representation. It is indeed absurd that the 6.8 million Lib Dem votes won only 57 seats when Labor with 8.6 million votes won 258 seats. But any system of PR could mean that the Lib Dems would be in power forever as the permanent kingmaker, able to bargain with each of the other two parties in future elections.

However much Cameron wants to do a deal to guarantee his way into 10 Downing Street, the home of Britain's prime ministers, the Conservative Party and many of its members of Parliament are looking ahead to future elections and say that PR is just too high a price to pay.

It is, however, a price that Gordon Brown is prepared to accept, despite his humiliation at the hands of the voters. He has offered immediate legislation on changing the voting system to PR, followed by a national referendum on the matter. And Labor and the Lib Dems, who have formed parliamentary pacts in the past, are closer on most of the key social issues like immigration and welfare. The problem is that, even if Clegg were prepared to brave the Conservative sneers and join "a coalition of losers," the Labor and Lib Dem seats combined are only 315, 11 short on the number needed for the most narrow of majorities.

Enter Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, who has proposed a "Progressive Alliance" of Labor, Lib Dems, his own six seats, the three seats from Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Nationalists) and the three seats from the Northern Ireland Social Democrats (who almost always vote with Labor) and the single Green MP for a majority of 328 seats.

But Salmond then let the cat out of the bag, noting that this would give him sufficient leverage to secure "hundreds of millions" of public spending for Scotland. No doubt the Welsh and Irish would have similar demands. But the most implacable fact of post-election Britain is that with a budget deficit now at 11 percent of gross domestic product there are no millions for anybody or anything. Indeed, the only certainty about the next government is that it will have to make some dramatic cuts in public spending.

So the most likely outcome is that Cameron will be prime minister, with very limited support from the Lib Dems, under a tradition known as "confidence and supply." The Lib Dems will back Cameron is vote of confidence and will also support the supply votes (the budget vote on public expenditure), which will give them something close to a veto over each item of the budget.

This isn't a deal that can last for long and it will be in constant hostage to whatever promise Cameron has to make to mollify the Lib Dem demand for PR. It will mean another election, perhaps in the fall or perhaps next year, which is likely to hinge on the course of the financial crisis. For even as Cameron starts moving his furniture into Downing Street, the bailiffs are about to begin hammering on the door and demanding when and how the country's debt might be repaid.

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News