Politics course work - Essay Example

The Prime Minster basically looks upon the policies that have been formulated by various members, such as the minister of transportation or minister of defense, and he decides what should be sent to the House of Commons to be presented as a bill, or if a draft should be passed or not. Election took place in the UK in May 2010 and it was between the Conservatives, headed by David Cameron, Labour headed by Gordon Brown, and Liberal democrats headed by Nick Clegg. This was the first time that all three candidates, none of the leaders had led a general election campaign.

In 2010 after the election in which the conservative party emerged victorious, there arrived a situation in which conservatives were not of an overall majority. It needed twenty seats to form an overall majority (General Election 2010: the top 20 Conservative target seats, 2010), thus it resulted in hung parliament and so there were talks of a coalition government. (Election 2010: First hung parliament in UK for decades, 2010) After Gordon Brown’s resignation following the humiliating defeat in the elections (Gordon Brown resigns, 2010), Queen Elizabeth invited David Cameron to form a government.

since he was already short of twenty-two seats he decided to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. the reason behind David Cameron opting to form a coalition government with Conservatives was the manifesto of the conservatives, which was extremely anti­-labour. Here the role of liberal democrats was extremely important since it did not agree with both the parties on a majority of issues; it was in a catch-22 situation as to with whom they shall form the government. After the invitation by Queen to David Cameron to form the government, there were coalition talks between Liberal democrats and conservatives as to what shall be the strategy to form the government or if they should just go ahead forming a hung parliament.

The problems of forming a coalition government with the conservatives were regarding their manifesto. If they formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats they will not be able to fulfill their party manifesto. But at this point in time they had no choice because if they became part of a hung parliament, every other resolution would be vetoed by a joint action of labour and liberal democrats. And if they formed a coalition government with liberal democrats, they would have to follow a policy of give some and take some.

The coalition dialogue took a total of five days and in the end David Cameron came out and successfully announced that the coalition talks have been “overwhelmingly approved”. Both the coalition parties agreed on the basic 11 principles on which they would act in one voice and there shall be no compromise on the following issues (Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition deal, 2010): - 1. Deficit Reduction The deficit would be reduced and a total of 6 billion pounds worth of cuts would be made to decrease the budget deficit. 2. Spending Review - NHS, Schools and a Fairer Society National Health Service would be looked into to increase the benefits it gives to the people who need them the most, as well as a review of the replacement of the trident system for the British defense (Trident replacement decision 'after 2015 elections', 2010). This