Friday 4 May 2007

Actually, if anything this could be more entertaining

Following on from Wednesday's post about the local elections, the results have now come in. Most of it's pretty depressing - OK, everyone, you can make a statement about how you don't like Labour, but did you really have to give the Conservatives that much power when you did so? - but it's the results from the Scottish Parliament that I find rather interesting. The seats won break down like this:

  • SNP - 47
  • Labour - 46
  • Conservative - 17
  • Liberal Democrats - 16
  • Others - 3
Given that this gives us a total of 129 seats, 65 are needed for a majority. This means that, in order for any party to hold any meaningful power, there will have to be a coalition. The fun part comes when you realise that, apart from Labour-SNP (and that's likely to happen shortly after pigs not only fly, but also learn to ice-skate over Hell), no two-party coalition can reach this figure. No majority for you. And this puts us in the situation where, even if Scotland doesn't get the chance to break away from the rest of Awesomeland the UK, there should be enough petty power-squabbling and infighting to ensure that politics up there should easily be interesting enough anyway. Good times, good times.

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