You may be aware that a general election took place in Britain on the 8th of June and that it didn’t turn out how anyone expected. If you don’t know anything else about British politics or even if you were totally unaware that there was just an election in Britain, then you are in the right place.

What the Fuck is Parliament?

The modern British Parliament was founded at the beginning of the 19th century when the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland were joined into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (Spoiler alert: not everybody was entirely pleased by this development). Like United States Congress, parliament has two houses through which all legislation must pass: the House of Commons and the House of Lords. As the names imply, members of the House of Commons are elected by the people while members of the House of Lords acquire their seats through inheritance or appointment.

The House of Lords was originally superior in power but it turned out that most people didn’t want Nigel Foxstrangler or Alistair Habsburgjaw making laws just because their grandpapa bayoneted a French drummer boy during the Battle of Waterloo. Successive generations of liberal and socialist reformers have reduced the power of the House of Lords and have done away with most of the inherited seats.

In the early 20th century the Liberal Party pushed through a bill that took away from the House of Lords the ability to veto legislation: the aristocracy could only delay legislation, and for no more than a year. Around the same time control of government ministries became the sole responsibility of the House of Commons. And so, with minimal guillotine use, the British bourgeoisie slowly wrenched legislative power away from an increasingly pointless aristocracy.

(Pictured: some non-British bourgeoisie seizing politic power from their aristocracy.)

What the Fuck is a Prime Minister?

Since presidential elections are among the most expensive and pointless national ordeals imaginable, the British did the smart thing and opted to keep their monarchy. This might seem bizarre to Americans for whom the concept of a monarch is synonymous with tyranny and incompatible with democracy. But the British have solved this problem by stripping their monarch of all but ceremonial power. The Queen is instead kept busy opening Tescos and occasionally giving speeches that the ruling party writes for her.

(Pictured: one of the boxes the Queen is stored in when she is not in use.)

So then who wields executive power if not an inbred monarch or a super wealthy president? Whichever party wins a majority of the seats in the House of Commons forms a government on behalf of the Queen with the party leader as Prime Minister (or PM). The PM is charged with appointing and leading a cabinet of senior ministers who will lead the various government departments of the UK. It is the cabinet collectively, not the PM, which wields executive power on behalf of the Queen.

Is a Hung Parliament as Sexy as it Sounds?

You may know that GE 2017 resulted in a ‘hung parliament’ and may be wondering what that means. Unfortunately the term refers neither to parliamentarians with large members nor the practice of collectively hanging all MPs. What it means is simply that no party achieved an outright majority within the House of Commons. Since the House of Commons has 650 seats and the largest party, the Conservatives (or Tories), won only 318, the UK currently has a hung parliament.

But Britain still needs a PM to appoint a cabinet and so there are three ways that one can emerge from a hung parliament. The first two possibilities both involve two or more parties with a collective majority of seats joining into a coalition together. This can either be a formal coalition which leads to a cabinet filled with members from all coalition members or an informal “confidence and supply” agreement where one or more smaller parties only agree to back a larger party on the budget and other key issues.

Finally, if neither arrangement can be reached, then another election is simply held. If you have just uncontrollably spat your drink onto your keyboard, then I apologize. But you read that correctly: the British do not exclusively hold their elections on a cyclical basis. In fact, a general election can be held either as a result of the ruling government losing a no confidence vote or if a two-thirds majority of parliament votes for an election to be held. If an election isn’t called for five years, then one happens anyway.

So What The Fuck Happened?

The short version is that Theresa May, the leader of the Tories, had a small majority in parliament and called an election because she thought she could expand that majority. Labour, a leftwing party and the second largest party in the UK, was polling very badly. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was near universally regarded by the media to be too leftwing to do well in a general election, and the polls appeared to back this up.

But what happened instead was a Labour surge: they gained 31 seats when only months before they were predicted to lose 50 or more. The Conservatives lost their majority in parliament and are now scrambling to make a confidence and supply deal with the far right Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from Northern Ireland. Such a deal risks alienating moderate Tories who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal.

(Pictured: Theresa May and Vladimir Putin trying to incinerate one another with their minds.)

There is another far more troubling repercussion of a deal with the DUP: it threatens the Good Friday Agreement, the bedrock of the peace in Northern Ireland. There is already an ongoing political crisis in Northern Ireland. In Part 2 we will take a shallow dive into the history of Ireland, by the end of which we all hopefully know enough to understand this paragraph.

The first two photos are from Wikipedia Commons, and the third is from the Kremlin’s website. All were found using free use filtered Google image search. I don’t actually know how to do photo credits: please don’t sue me.