Well, it’s official. We have a hung parliament. The Conservatives won the most seats but fell short of the 326 or more to secure victory. Final results shown here
This means that no party has majority control in the House of Commons and therefore cannot win parliamentary votes without the support of the other parties.
In my constituency of Lewisham Deptford, Labour won as expected. The Greens did worse than the last election but the good news is that the Lib Dems gained a 3.6% swing from Labour.
In Lewisham we also had mayoral and local council elections. In Ladywell the Greens were outed comprehensively by a sea of red, which is a shame because they did a lot of good work here :-(. Let’s be positive and hope that the new majority Labour controlled council perform well.
What happens next? Well, the existing government needs to form a coalition. There are no rules as far as I know whether the second placed party get first dibs. Ideologically Labour should choose the Lib Dems but morally speaking the Tories got more votes therefore should be asked first. In reality I expect it will be a robust dialogue between the top three parties and the party that eventually wins will be the one that commands most support in the new parliament.
