"As leader of my party I must accept that that is a judgment on me," he said.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="336" caption="Photo Credit: Off2riorob"]
[/caption]Brown is asking his Labour party to start on preparations for a new leadership contest. He will not be taking place as a candidate. This shows that he is on his way out as prime minister.
As a result of this move, his party might be able to stay in power. Last week's elections left no party with a majority in parliament. This boost might be exactly what the Labour party needs.
After 13 years in opposition, the Conservative party won the most seats, however they did not win enough to form a government by themselves.
The elections went like this: the Conservative party won first, Brown's Labour party came in second and the Liberal Democrats came in third.
"The Liberal Democrats are in talks with the Conservatives, but Brown said they had now asked for talks with Labour as well," says CNN on the matter.
This might be true, however, the Liberal Democrats did not confirm that their leader Nick Clegg had made a request to Labour.
They Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have a few areas where they do agree on.
"The two parties have not yet agreed on 'education funding, fair taxes, and on issues in relation to voting reform,' Liberal Democrat lawmaker David Laws said after newly elected Lib Dem members of parliament huddled to discuss the negotiations," CNN stated.
The Liberal Democrats also "agreed to continue to listen to the representations that are coming from the leader of the Labour Party," Laws said.
Clegg said Monday "a prolonged period of uncertainty" about who would govern Britain is "not a good thing."
"We have been working around the clock, meetings, telephone calls constantly going on, to provide that clarity as soon as possible," he said.
It is very rare that the British House of Commons is left without a majority party. There last time the country had a so-called "hung parliament" was in 1974. This was not workable and voters were back at the polls within a year of the elections.
"The Liberal Democratss say the current electoral system is unfair and leaves them under-represented in Parliament.
They say the number of seats they have in the House of Commons fails to reflect the number of votes they won across the country, and they believe each party's allocation of seats should reflect the percentage of the national vote they get.
For example, the Conservatives got 36 percent of the vote, but a total of 306 of the 650 seats in Parliament.
Under proportional representation, they would have 234 seats.
Labour got 29 percent of the vote and a total of 258 seats, but the Liberal Democrats' 23 percent of the popular vote amounted to 57 seats -- little more than a third of the roughly 150 they would have won with proportional representation," CNN states.
There are a few parties smaller than the Liberal Democrats, however they hold too few seats in parliament for them to be realistic choices for the Conservatives.
0 التعليقات:
إرسال تعليق