Hacker, the Government is not the same as Parliament. So, parliament is now dissolved and there are no MPs until the election. But the government remains in place. David Camerom is still PM, but is temprorarily at least not an MP.

The opening of parliament is like the first session of the House. The Queen's speech is probably more analogous to the State of the Union, but as the government sets the main legislative programme so contains a list of the Bills that are proposed for the next session.

At the moment it looks like neither main party will get majority, as much as I would hope Labour make it. It is also quite likely that no 2-party majority is possible other than a Grand Coalition Con-Lab which would be strongly opposed by many in both parties and render any electoral promises totally redundant.

the Government is not the same as Parliament

Right; the website was clear on that point at least: if Mr. Hacker sent a communique to another minister or to the press or a letter to somebody in the public he could sign it merely "James Hacker, Sec. of State for Administrative Affairs", not "The Rt. Hon. James Hacker, M.P., Sec. of State for Administrative Affairs." or something like that: the House of Commons, as of 30 March, has ceased to exist, except in the sense that it's an empty institution with 650 vacant seats. The website also said the speaker must run for re-election if he wants to remain speaker...feel free not to explain that one if you don't want to. Our speaker is a member of the House of Rep's, Boehner representing the 57th congressional district of Ohio. Yours doesn't represent an actual constituency, does (s)he?

In contrast, the congressmen voted out of office on 4 November 2014 were still members of Congress, as of 11:59 and 59 seconds a.m., on 3 January 2015. Congress may adjourn by vote of both houses, but never vote or vote to request to be prorogued or dissolved.. The president may call Congress into session while they're getting drunk on spring break (as opposed to getting drunk on the job) but he may never prorogue, dissolve, or adjourn them himself. He does not have that authority, ever (unless they both want to adjourn but the 2 houses cannot agree on a common date; the president can then mediate to pick the date of adjournment himself). In that sense, the U.S. Congress is--by many means quite regrettably so--eternal. Oh well...

So what you are saying is that, when the new house opens, as long as there's a hung Parliament (or the incumbent government party won a majority) then the government remains the government and is not required to resign, I take it.

And that' it's also possible the government, still being the government, will hand the Queen a speech to read as the official Speech from the Throne, but then the Queen's Speech can fail a vote in the House, in which case the proverbial sh*t hits the fan and either a coalition has to be put together, or the government, remaining the government, can govern as a minority government? somehow? Am I understanding that right?

And if they cannot put together a coalition and must govern as a minority government, how do they get "permission" to do so? Does the House vote in favor/against confidence in the [whatever party] to be minority government? Who makes the motion? or does the Queen issue a statement/sign a piece of paper (on the advice of the PM) that the new PM is the Rt. Hon. [whoever]?

Tell me if I have understood (or read it) wrong. I just slept until 4pm and didn't get the stuff I have to take in the morning until about....4:30 so I'm a bit out of it.

Yes, the Speaker is an MP. What happens is that they are elected by the Commons (conventionally from one of the main parties). When they next stand as MP, it is for "Speaker" not their original party. Also, the main parties do not stand against them. Minor ones and independents do. The Current Speaker, John Bercow, was elected as. Conservative MP before becoming Speaker. He stood as "Speaker" in 2010 in the same constituency as before, Buckingham. Unusually, he had a high profile opponent - Nigel Farage of UKIP.

Understood

Interesting about the speaker.

And I assume that whatever rules of parliamentary procedure exist in the House of Commons (I'm assuming every legislature has its rules manual) relegates the speaker to a more neutral role than, say, ours (Boehner). It seems that the Commons speaker is very impartial, vs. in the US House where he's the *real* majority leader (even though there is another individual who carries that title).

P.S. the bookie I looked at was giving better odds to a Tory majority than a Labour one. You might wonder why I'm looking at bookies, but since people are not taking a "no risk" answer (as with a pre-election poll) but risking actual money, I happen to think they are more accurate.

Bookies set odds based on money that has been bet, or on expectations. This is of course down to self-selecting risk-takers, guessing what other people will do in the future. Odds are set to maximise the bookies' margins, not to reflect "real" chances.

Basically, polls weight to try to get a sample as close to representative as they can. Bookies only weight based on money. So a small number of heavy bettors can skew the odds.

There is also a "meme" that suggests incumbent governments gain support closer to an election. In the UK, historically, that is true up to the start of the campaign, but the opposition tends to pick up in that campaign. Main exception is 1992, but we now know that polling methodology was wrong.

This week is when the main manifestos are launched. labour today and Tories tomorrow. After a few more days we'll see if their reception affects opinion.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... oll-labour

This was an interesting poll....

Massive outlier to the overall trend of course and I don't really buy it at all (UKIP on only 7% strikes me as very low), but if true then it would probably be enough for an outright Tory majority.

Do you reckon we're going top see that late swing back to the Tories from UKIP ? It's pretty much the only thing that can save Cameron at this point. Up till now the Kipper vote has seemed impervious to reason, this is the first real evidence I've seen of their vote suffering serious erosion. The assumption has always been that they'd tail off in the end though.

UKIP, UK Independence Party, a poll you gave me a link to, the one in the Independent, gave UKIP a prediction of 4 seats. What do they stand for anyway; withdrawal from the European Union? When did they crop up and start winning seat(s) in the House of Commons? Wait I'll just look that up on Wikipedia.

[a few clicks of the mouse later....]

They sound a bit like the Tea Partiers in the US but more....well, less batsh*t. In some ways.

UKIP are essentially a right wing party but they don't exclusively take away votes from the Tories. Their main pitch is anti-EU and a very strong anti immigration line. The latter is the real reason they've grown in popularity though, and this is causing them to attract increasing numbers of traditional Labour voters who have found their living standards undermined by the effects of mass migration. Labour is widely (and justifiably) seen as having opened the floodgates to mass immigration back when they were in power and this hurts them among a demographic that were either their traditional lifelong supports (the working classes) or their main target demographic (the aspirational working and lower middle classes who swing between Labour and the Tories). The latter group were the early adopters of UKIP voting and so it's damaged the Tories more at this point, but they may also prove to be more likely to swing back into line come May. We'll have to wait and see.

And yes, they are completely nuts, or at least very eccentric. In a strange sort of way though this helps them with the sort of voters they're after, who feel patronised by the mainstream parties and are revelling in their underdog status.

I have often wondered something. In your system, how much power does the opposition have, and in what ways? If you're an MP in opposition, what can you really do for your constituents?

In terms of what you can do for your constituents, all MPs are more or less the same. Their position gives them influence with public authorities which they can exercise on their behalf through sticking their nose in and asking questions. MP correspondence is always given highest priority and where there's interest from an MP it usually serves to grease the wheels to make things happen (although not all the time of course). Beyond that, the opposition don't really have very much legislative power unless the Parliamentary arithmetic is very tight, as it may well end up being this year. That said though, Labour did manage to scupper us going to war in Syria during the current Parliament, which was a pretty significant achievement for an opposition. It relied on their being a lot of backbench opposition from within the Tories, but nevertheless it was in direct defiance of the wishes of the government.

In fact, that indirectly resulted in Obama calling off his own plans for war in Syria, so it was a pretty epic achievement really as it also interfered with American foreign policy. Quite how Ed Miliband has managed to come out of that with essentially no credit for it whatsoever is an enduring mystery of the age.

Anyway, shall we have a go at some predictions ? I honestly have no clue how the election is going to pan out this year. The polls are totally whacky. Today we had a poll in the Observer giving the Tories a 4 point lead on the same day as a poll in the Times giving a 3 point lead to Labour. It's pretty bizarre. Makes it extremely difficult to make any kind of informed prediction. For what it's worth though, right now I'm going to tentatively predict that the Tories will end up narrowly being the largest party, based on the presumption that we'll see a late swing back from UKIP. There's no real evidence of this happening yet, but I do think it probably will in the end. I'm calling a lead of about 2% in the popular vote but a virtual tie in seats, with the Tories having enough to be the largest party but not enough to form another coalition with the Lib Dems. We'll then see a constitutional crisis and an unholy mess will ensue...

Dan, care to make a prediction ?

sass

We'll then see a constitutional crisis and an unholy mess will ensue..

.

There is an old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".

What you are predicting is that the popular vote will be reasonably closely reflected in the portion of seats earned in parliament. Does that usually happen? I thought there was usually some over performance by the lead party in popular vote due to opposition splitting of the vote.

The main reason why it's turning out to be different this year is the surge in support for the SNP. Most polls are putting them on about 45% in Scotland, with several showing them even higher than that. 45% seems about right though since it's consistent with the proportion of Yes voters in the referendum. Given the way that FPTP works this will likely be enough to see them win almost all of the seats in Scotland. A vast swathe of seats in Glasgow and the rundown central belt of Scotland which have been Labour bastions for their entire history look set to fall to the SNP this year. If it goes according to forecast then Labour could lose up to 40 seats. If this hadn't have happened then we'd almost certainly be looking at a Labour majority.

The reason for this is that the constituency boundaries are skewed in their favour. The number of voters per seat in the Labour heartlands (urban areas basically) is significantly lower than in the traditionally Tory areas. This means that in theory it's possible for Labour to form a majority even if they end up with a fractionally smaller share of the popular vote. By contrast, in order for the Tories to get a majority they'd need to be at least 5 points ahead, but probably more (they were almost 7 points ahead of Labour in 2010 and still didn't get a majority). Miliband has been pursuing the so-called '35% strategy' for a long time now, which basically involved appealing to the core vote and hoping to pick up enough disaffected Lib Dems to sneak home with only 35% of the vote. It probably would have worked were it not for the expected loss of all those Scottish seats. As it is though, 35% is unlikely to be enough given the impending wipeout in Scotland. The bias in the constituency boundaries still helps them but not to that extent, and so we're likely to see both Tories and Labour with roughly equal numbers of MPs from a roughly equal share of the vote, which would never have happened otherwise.

Sass

The main reason why it's turning out to be different this year is the surge in support for the SNP

From my recent reading it looks from afar more like the personal popularity of its leader Ms. Sturgeon - and her performance in public debates - rather than full blooded support for the independence cause.

Striking similarities in the recent past in Canada and Quebec between the popularity of Parti Quebecois leaders but not popularity for the choice of separation. It did lead to a significant nationalist bloc in the federal Parliament fighting for regional issues. Ostensibly. But often taking reasonable left of centre positions that were popular across the nation.
I don't know all that many of the issues in the UK, but Ms Strurgeon might be an interesting influence in Parliament.
On the surface, and in the debates, she seems level headed and straight forward. Maybe thats the source of her surge in popularity?

Election 2015 live: SNP would not 'torture' a minority Labour government, says Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has greatly intensified the pressure on Ed Miliband to strike a deal with the SNP, endorsing Labour’s key tax policies and pledging “the hand of friendship” to English voters.

In an assured speech at the launch of the Scottish National party’s election manifesto, Sturgeon confirmed for the first time that her party would back Labour’s mansion tax and the banker’s bonus tax, as well as its promise to abolish zero-hours contracts.

Until now, the SNP had only endorsed reinstating the 50p upper income tax band, and pressed for a higher rate minimum wage of £8.70 an hou

r.

Nah, don't you believe it.

Sturgeon is well known in Scotland, she's been a major political figure up there for about 10 years or more. The only people to have been surprised by her performance were English people who hadn't already been paying attention. It's not accurate to describe the SNP surge as a personal vote. Rather what we're seeing is those who voted Yes in the referendum have almost all decamped en masse to the SNP while the No vote has been split three ways. It's not really all that much different to their share of the vote in the last elections to the Scottish parliament in 2011, it's just that a lot of people used to switch back to voting Labour when the general elections came around and this time they're not doing it. The SNP is benefitting from the energy generated by the referendum campaign, which was still only a few months ago.

And I really don't think they'll be a benign force at Westminster. It's not in their interests to make it work for the whole UK. They actively want to bring about a constitutional crisis and to antagonise English voters as much as they possibly can because this is the best way to advance their separatist agenda.