Americans sometimes don’t pay a lot of close attention to politics in Britain. But this week, British voters denied the Labour Party a majority in the House of Commons for the first time since 2007. The Conservative Party won 306 seats in the 650-member House of Commons — not a majority. Labour took 258 seats and Liberal Democrats won 57.
So in Britain’s parliamentary system, there will be maneuvering as the Conservatives try to make some arrangements to have a coalition majority, to enable them to pick a new prime minister to replace Labour’s Gordon Brown.
We think our American political system is often messy, but most of us surely would not like to adopt the often complex British system instead.