Why the hell are Labour going on about "The Largest Party" as if it matters?

[andrewducker]

Over here, Ed Miliband is complaining that SNP wins make it more likely that the Conservatives will be the largest party.

My question is - why on earth do I care who the largest party is?

The government is formed by whoever has the backing of a majority of MPs*. If the current Election Forecast predictions are correct, and the Conservatives have 286 to the 280 of Labour, that _doesn't matter at all_, because neither of them command a majority (326).

To command a majority is going to require coalitions. And doesn't require _any_ of the parties involved in the coalition to be the one that got the most MPs. It just requires the overall coalition to have more than half the House of Commons.

If Labour wants to be in power then they'd better stop scare-mongering and whining, and get on with actually selling themselves on their platform, and forming alliances for inevitable discussions on May 8th.



*Well, voting MPs, so subtract a few for Sinn Féin, who don't take their seats.

Comments

[matgb]

On a technicality, it does matter, as the precedent is that the Queen will invite the leader of the largest party to attempt to form a coalition first, if they're unable or unwilling to do so then the next largest gets a chance, etc.

However, the biggest precedent is that the sitting PM gets to stay on and attempt to form a coalition or get enough support to win a Confidence vote first, even if they're no longer the largest party (Heath, 1974, negotiations with Thorpe).

So the largest party thing only matters if both the Tories have more seats and Cameron has either lost his seat or is otherwise unavailable to stay on as PM (by, for example, falling under a bus)—in other words, really unlikely.

Labour have immense form for this sort of thing though, tribal loyalty and party colour is a lot more important to a significant number of Labour activists than policy or practicality. This isn't true of all of them, but it's true of enough of them to let them get carried away with campaign slogans that only make sense to people that think the way they do and don't work at all with most undecided/non-tribal voters.

They've convinced themselves that it matters, so it must be true, it's hardly the first time they've bought into their own rhetoric so hard they forget the reality check.