Brown defiant as exit poll shows Conservative election gains

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave no indication early Friday that he would step down, despite exit-poll predictions that his Labour party had come second in elections for the House of Commons on Thursday.

The "outcome is not yet known but my duty .. is to play my part in Britain having a strong, stable and principled government," he said. "I will not let you down."                                                                                                        

Exit polls suggest that David Cameron's Conservatives are on pace to win 305 seats -- 21 short of a majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.

After being returned to parliament by his constituency, Cameron said it was "clear that the Labour government has lost its mandate to govern this country."
If the predictions are borne out by results the UK is heading for a "hung parliament" in which no single party controls an overall majority.


The leader of the largest party traditionally gets the first chance to form the government and become prime minister. But if no party has a majority, the sitting prime minister has the right to stay in office and try to win a confidence motion in parliament.


"The sitting prime minister and the incumbent government are given the first chance to create a majority that commands the confidence of the House of Commons, and if they fail to do that it passes to the leader of the opposition," top Labour politician Peter Mandelson told CNN.

Brown was expected to fly to London from his constituency of Kirkcaldy in Scotland.
Top figures in each party took to the airwaves late Thursday night to spin their results their way.
Labour's David Miliband said that if no party had won a clear majority, no party had "a moral right to a monopoly of power."
But George Osborne, a Conservative, called the results a "decisive rejection of the Labour party," urging them to "get real."

Few pre-election opinion polls, if any, suggested the Conservatives would win an outright majority.
The official results are not expected until Friday, after votes are counted by hand through the night across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Labour won the first three seats to be declared officially, all in Labour strongholds -- but the Conservatives did better in each district than they did in the last election, in 2005.
A key Cameron ally, Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson, lost his seat in East Belfast, Northern Ireland, potentially robbing the Conservatives of a supporter in the Commons.

There were some scenes of voter anger across the country over long lines to cast ballots or polling stations running out of ballot papers, but it was not immediately clear how widespread problems were.

The election campaign was marked by the first-ever televised debates between party leaders. Cameron hammered Brown for the country's economic woes, arguing for tax cuts to get the country moving again. He also took a hard line on immigration, which many voters listed as a high priority.

A YouGov poll for CNN the day before the election showed that more than 3 out of 4 British voters wanted to cut immigration levels or halt the inflow of foreigners entirely.

Brown has stood at the center of British government since 1997, when Labour ended 18 years of Conservative rule -- first as the powerful chancellor, or finance minister, under Tony Blair for a decade, and then as prime minister since 2007.
But he was personally unpopular with voters, many polls suggested.

Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats -- the smallest of the national parties -- appeared to be the favorite in early debates, and some opinion polls showed his party could overtaking a slipping Labour.

But if the exit polls are correct, the Liberal Democrats will finish with about the same number of seats they had in the outgoing parliament -- probably a crushing disappointment to a leader who had talked about overturning the dominance of the two big parties.

It's very unusual for no party to get an absolute majority of seats in the Commons. The last time it happened, in 1974, voters were back at the polls within months.
British political parties normally do not form coalition governments, as happens in many parliamentary democracies.
A parliament with no majority party is called a "hung parliament."

Many smaller parties also appeared ready to take some seats, including nationalist parties such as the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and unionist and republican parties in Northern Ireland.

The far-right British National Party is hoping to win its first seats in the House of Commons after having won races for European Parliament seats last year. However its leader, Nick Griffin, condeded defeat in the mainly white, working-class constituency of Barking in east London early Friday.

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) also fielded candidates, as did the venerable if satirical Monster Raving Loony Party, whose candidates have been known to say, "Vote for insanity! You know it makes sense!"

After the election there will be 650 seats in the Commons, four more than in the previous Parliament. Voters are choosing representatives for only 649 seats. Because of the death of a UKIP candidate in the Thirsk and Malton constituency in North Yorkshire, the election there has now been moved to May 27, local officials said.

The candidate who gets the most votes in a constituency wins; it's not necessary to win an absolute majority of votes in a district to win the seat.

Because of that "first-past-the-post" voting system, one party normally wins a majority of seats, even though there are three national parties.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com