"What Just Happened?!" (The UK Election)

So, as many of these articles do, this begins with Lovely Wife asking me a question. In this case, "why is everyone so upset after the election in the UK?"

Now that's a complicated one, but to give off a good TL: DR; for everybody, it comes down to surprise, and sore losers.

The British government works differently than does the government of the United States. Superficially, they're similar, in that Parliament has two houses, like Congress, and an executive, but the similarities stop there.

Parliament has two houses, the house of Lords, and the house of Commons.

Those names are mightily descriptive.

The Commons are the "Members of Parliament" that make up the bulk of the government. They are elected.

The House of Lords has two types of members: the senior bishops of the Church of England, known as the Lords Spiritual, and members of the peerage appointed by the ruling monarch, known as the Lords Temporal.

All government ministers must come from Parliament; they can't simply be brought in from the outside.

Like the United States, ministerial positions are generally taken by the members of the coalition currently in power in the UK.

Now, in the U.S., that doesn't mean a whole lot, as there are only two significant political parties, which means that whoever won the last election controls all the cabinet positions. But in the UK, where there are four parties big enough that their results mattered in this election, ministerial positions are typically put together from a coalition between two or more of the existing parties.

But this election was a weird one.

See, the UK has weathered some financial crises, as well as diplomatic ones, over the last few years. (Their biggest ally, the U.S., spying on them being high among that number.) Accordingly, the coalition government made up of Conservative and Liberal Democrat members that has been serving, has become steadily more unpopular, and the left wing of British politics has been getting louder and louder in their determination to take over.

Don't get bent out of shape. The British "conservatives" are center-rightish in American terms, while the Liberal Democrats are centrists. They're not nearly as far apart in the UK as the groups living under the same labels do here.

At any rate, the Labour party, specifically, has been agitating heavily, and was openly predicting a huge victory in the elections.

Since the BBC and most of the British media outlets available to the U.S. are also pretty solidly left-wing, they were too.

And that's not what happened.

To understand the true depth of the upset, there are a couple of other factors that need to be brought in.

Scotland is one.

Labour has traditionally counted on Scotland as a bastion of votes. Scotland, however, has experienced a strong upswing in nationalism just recently, going so far as to have a losing, but hotly contested, plebiscite in September; a vote that would have split Scotland off into an independent nation.

The Scotland National Party or SNP, which had previously held 6 seats in Parliament, took the Scots' Parliamentary seats by storm, leaving Scotland represented by one Conservative, one Liberal Democrat, one Labour, and 56 SNP members. Scotland sent a powerful message that while they may not be ready to exit the UK yet, they're very unhappy with Labour and its representation of their constituencies.

That right there was a disaster for Labour; previously, they would have been able to count on another 46 members in Parliament, seated and voting for their agenda, but the loss of Scotland's seats was crushing.

The end results of the election were that the Conservatives won, not only over Labour, but enough of a majority to form a government all by themselves, which is very rare.

To put in perspective how rare, only one other Prime Minister in history has been re-elected after a full term with even more seats under their control than in the previous term; that was Margaret Thatcher, who was also a Conservative.

The problem for the media in the UK, and the Labour Party, is that the majority held by the Conservative Party is a definite mandate from the people. They put their hopes and dreams behind the idea of removing Prime Minister Cameron, and failed miserably, as well as potentially losing Scotland for Labour permanently.

But in fact it is worse than it at first appears, because it wasn't so much the fact that the UK government is now 330 Conservatives, 232 Labour, 59 SNP, 8 Democratic Unionists, and 8 Liberal Democrats; it was the fact that of the 46 seats Labour lost, and the 48 seats the Liberal Democrats lost, they lost several of their parties' major leaders.

Labour lost the party leader from Scotland, Jim Murphy; the party campaign manager (who seems to have been the wrong man for that specific job,) Douglas Alexander, and Ed Balls, former Chancellor for the Exchequer. (Treasury, in the U.S.)

The Liberal Democrats lost Danny Alexander, their Treasury Secretary; Vince Cable, the Business Secretary; Charles Kennedy, a former party leader; and Simon Hughes, their deputy party leader.

Apparently - and who knew this from their tv shows, media, fiction, and every other cultural touchpoint - British citizens prefer to keep their views private except at the actual election booth; the polls showed a much more even split between Labour and Conservative right up until Election Day.

And this whole thing has made many, many people who are really invested in the success of the political left very upset.

Predictably, they're screaming that there must have been some kind of fraud.

Not so much, guys. You had 66% voter turnout, and of the voters, the Conservatives got slightly over 11 million votes, versus the Labour Party's 9 million.

So...

I understand that it stings.

I know losing a cherished belief hurts.

But unfortunately, a wiser course, instead of bewailing your fate, is to adjust to the new circumstances and move forward.

The new circumstances are that the Conservatives have an all-Conservative government for the first time in 18 years.

They will be responsible for the formation and operation of policy for the UK until the next election at least.

They will, however, be responsible; if you want success going forward, hold them to it.