This is not a hung (UK) Parliament. When Parliament meets a majority of those voting will vote for the Tory leader (although by that time PM May have stepped down).
With 649 of 650 seats declared at this juncture (10 AM BST, June 9, 2017), the Tories have 318 seats.
[. . .]
That leaves the Tory leader (Prime Minister May or her successor) with a 318 to 314 vote on a no confidence motion and a majority of 4.
QED: No hung parliament. And did I mention that DUP, on which the Tory Government is likely to depend, as a practical matter, is proBrexit. What a time to be alive!
>The Democratic Unionist Party are the anti-abortion pro Brexit party of climate change deniers who don’t believe in LGBT rights who Theresa May needs to prop up her failing governement.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/who-are-the-dup-10589910
I like ’em already. Maybe the mother country just got a feature instead of a bug.
They sound like what Dan Hannan wrote about last month. Churchill’s Tories, underrepresented and believed extinct by the urban intelligentsia.
It will be interesting to see what happens next. Did she lose her majority because of her weak response to Islamic terror ?
Or is BREXIT weakening?
She lost it by running a dreadfully bad campaign. She’s a dud.
It is very difficult as an American to make sense of UK politics, since we don’t have the class system legacy, or a multiparty parliament. It sounds like the election saw an anomalously small vote share for smaller parties, which drove many of the differences from what had been expected. And it also sounds like she is indeed a dud of a candidate.
Another theory that I have read is that UKIP, which resembles the Trump coalition, went back to Labour for domestic issues once Brexit was a done deal.
“since we don’t have the class system”: that’s odd, you had a reasonably conspicuous one some decades ago. Unlike many aspects of American life it was subtler than its British equivalent, I’ll grant you that.
Nah, we have nothing even remotely like the British class system. Sure we have income/wealth disparities, but that’s not what class is.
We do have a class system, but it’s … a very peculiar and complicated one. I refer you to this particular tome, although it was written some decades ago.
https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
The guide to the class system in America was published a long time ago and is called, The Yuppie Handbook.
A person of either sex who meets the following criteria: 1) resides in or near one of the major cities; 2) claims to be between the ages of 25 and 45; 3) lives on aspirations of glory, prestige, recognition, fame, social status, power, money or any and all combinations of the above; 4) anyone who brunches on the weekend or works out after work.
My favorite concerned sailing, of course,
The Transpac was too energetic and likely to ruin a good tan. The Bermuda Race was the defining event of the Yuppie world.
1. If you can change where you are in the social status system easily, it’s not a class system.
2. Snobbery and elitism among the wealthy do not a class system make.
3. I will concede that something like a class system is strengthening in the past few decades particularly, with the rise of “meritocracy” (which is actually nothing but a credentialocracy), which is even more pernicious than the European class system because the dominant class thinks it deserves its success.
I agree with Brian. But the Brit upper class do believe they deserve it as well, it just comes down to a larger part of deserve being blood heritage (polished up by finishing school such as Oxford, Cambridge, etc. including the tie).
If Chelsea makes it big beyond her coat-tailing of her parents, we’ll know we are becoming a more heritage and credentialed class based system, but still not holding a candle to the Brits. Perhaps the public’s fascination with British accents in news, opinion, weather, advertising and sports reporting and commentary is evidence that we are moving in that direction?
Death6
Not sure about “the public’s fascination with British accents” and class-system envy. I think there have always been some Americans who have that but also many others who don’t like it. I don’t think it will work for the Clintons.
I was listening to, I think, Hannity yesterday and he was making fun of the entertainer Madonna who moved to England and affected an English accent and English upper-class lifestyle trappings. This is funny in part because by pretending to be an upper-class Brit Madonna is following a quintessential American middle class or LMC goal-oriented achievement pattern. But maybe no one took it seriously and therefore Brian’s first point doesn’t apply.