Apologies to all if I get a little off-subject, but I may have to break your heart on this one, Lav. We may all get a vote in the UK but that ain't how it works.
Our current system for electing MPs to the House of Commons is First-Past-The-Post. There are 646 separate constituencies across the UK each electing one single Member of Parliament. In order to vote you simply put an 'X' next to the name of the candidate you support. The candidate who gets the most votes wins, regardless of the actual percentage of support. Once members have been individually elected, the party with the most seats in Parliament, regardless of whether or not it has a majority across the country, normally becomes the next government.
To put some numbers around this and give a clearer idea of how this actually works these are some of the numbers for the General Election in 2005:
The average number of votes per MP elected was 26,906 for Labour, 44,373 for Conservative and 96,539 for Liberal Democrats
Labour won 35.2% of the total vote cast, but got 55.1% of the seats in Parliament, giving them power to form a government.
The reality of this is that they did get the highest number of votes for any individual party, but 35.2% of voters hardly counts as popular government, even less so by taking into account the low turnout (61%) of eligible voters who actually voted for them, thus giving a rather pathetic 21.5% popularity. At best that means 33% didn't want them and the other 39% either felt that their vote wouldn't make any difference (hey, wake up out there, you should have an Apathy party and then you'd have the majority) or apparently don't care enough to vote.
And this doesn't account for strategic voting e.g. those who may have voted Labour to prevent yet another Conservative government, and vice versa, further distorting the poularity stakes.
So, if we base this on popularity i.e. number of votes cast per party gets % of seats in government we would have the following:
| Actual Seats | Seats by popular % |
| Labour | 356 | 228 |
| Conservative | 198 | 209 |
| Lib Dem | 62 | 142 |
| Other | 30 | 67 |
So, the Labour party would still have the most seats, but not enough to form a Government, this could only have been done by an alliance of parties.