For a good precedent, look no further than the last hung parliament in 1974, when Ted Heath’s Tories won over 200,000 votes more than Labour under Harold Wilson, but Labour won 4 seats more than the Tories. It’s sometimes pointed out that (with almost Brownite self-delusion) Heath refused to immediately resign, and didn’t move out of Downing Street on the day after the election, 1 March 1974.

But in fact the Prime Minister still resigned on 4 March – three days later. The rationale after the election was “We don’t yet know who’s won this election, but we know who’s lost it.” Even if Labour were still the largest party, if Gordon Brown were to squander a majority of over 60, then it may take a few days for the post-election dust to settle, but he would still have lost the confidence which he previously had some tenuous claim to, and he would have no choice but to resign.

If you want to go back further, you could cite the two previous hung parliaments of 1923 and 1929. In both cases, an incumbent Conservative government had lost its majority, but remained the largest party, and clung on for a month until its King’s Speech was defeated on the first reading. Labour, as the second largest party, then took office as a minority government. Both of these cases underlined the total futility of such attempts to hold on to power by your fingernails. And Brown is very familiar with both precedents – he wrote a PhD thesis and biography of 1920s Labour MP James Maxton. The idea that he might try to cling on without the support of his own party by citing a 1920s Conservative precedent which ended in failure seems laughable.

As for the scare stories on the effect of uncertainty on financial markets, this is largely irrelevant given the timetable as it stands. The full results won’t be known until Friday afternoon, and the markets will be closed over the weekend. By the time they re-open on Monday 10 May, four days after the election, the new environment should be plain for all to see.

If anything, this spells out the urgent need for fixed term parliaments with fixed transition periods, and the folly of expecting new ministers to all be at their desks when they’re still exhausted from the campaign trail – but for the immediate purpose of bringing down the Brown government, the weekend is more than enough time.

So don’t let this lie go unchallenged on the doorstep. Liberals haven’t endured the taunts of the other parties for so long, simply to prop up either Labour or the Tories at the first opportunity.

It seems many Liberal Democrats are welcoming the right outcome for the wrong reason.

There are two main possible justifications for this:

(1) Counting the votes as soon as possible, to minimise the risk of someone tampering with ballot boxes.

(2) Feeding the frenzy of wanting instant results broadcast as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, the campaign has been geared towards the latter, and most Lib Dem MPs who’ve supported the campaign have emphasised this reason. Ed Davey argues “It’s important for democracy that you retain the excitement of election night and brings the process of voting to a climax” while Don Foster says “The excitement of watching the results unfold through the night is one of the things that stimulates interest…dragging the results out across two days like this will only dilute interest.”

Even more unfortunately, this rationale doesn’t stand up for Liberal Democrats. Anybody who supports STV – as our party does – also supports counting in such large constituencies that voting results would not be completed for several days.

There is a trade-off between speed and accuracy, and I’d rather live in a country that makes all votes count, and carefully counts all the votes – however long it takes – than one which subverts democracy to the hype of TV election coverage. Therein lies the road to Florida 2000; with elections being ‘called’ by forecast, and candidates conceding defeat when only a fraction of votes have been counted. As such, this is an issue which separates those who are primarily democrats from those who are primarily political anoraks.

So by all means, let’s push for counting to BEGIN straight after polls close, as a safeguard against fraud. But let’s not get drawn in to an ill-thought-out campaign that creates false expectations which are hostile to electoral reform.

Seth Thévoz is doing a PhD in nineteenth-century parliamentary history with Warwick University and the History of Parliament Trust. He writes here in a personal capacity.

But for those of us who study history, the latest furore over the NHS is positively nauseating, with people apparently split into the camps of those who decry its very right to exist, and those who suddenly pretend they haven’t spent the last few years grumbling about how it’s in dire need of reform.

Part of this division is built upon a myth – a boil that needs to be lanced. We’re so used to Labour politicians churning out the line that Labour gave us the NHS, that we’ve begun to unthinkingly accept it. When Ian McCartney MP celebrated Labour’s centenary in 2006, he actually shed a tear for the NHS as Labour’s greatest triumph. Anyone familiar with 1940s history will tell you that this version of events is a cruel lie.

The NHS owes its existence to the climate of wartime British politics, not least the vastly expanded access to basic healthcare which came with conscription, and the subsequent rise in expectations. As Paul Addison outlined over 30 years ago in his landmark The Road to 1945, the wartime coalition of 1940-5 fostered a remarkable degree of consensus. In social policy, this resulted in the seminal 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services, chaired by the Liberal economist William Beveridge – better known as the Beveridge Report. In this, Beveridge set out a comprehensive state plan of social care. Section 19 of the report is the first public mention of a “National Health Service.”

The report was enormously influential, and what cannot be stressed enough is that in the subsequent 1945 general election, all three parties endorsed the Beveridge Report.

Revealingly, all three parties had NHS proposals in their 1945 manifestoes. The Conservatives actually had the longest section in their manifesto, pledging:

The health services of the country will be made available to all citizens. Everyone will contribute to the cost, and no one will be denied the attention, the treatment or the appliances he requires because he cannot afford them. We propose to create a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist, and from the hospital to convalescence and rehabilitation

although they went on to envision it as encompassing voluntary hospitals and university medical research, as well as focussing on maternity care.

The Liberals had the shortest manifesto of the election, making just 20 points, but still placed health as a priority:

People cannot be happy unless they are healthy. The Liberal aim is a social policy which will help to conquer disease by prevention as well as cure, through good housing, improved nutrition, the lifting of strains and worries caused by fear of unemployment, and through intensified medical research. The Liberal Party’s detailed proposals for improved health services would leave patients free to choose their doctor, for the general practitioner is an invaluable asset in our social life.

and in typical Liberal style, they accordingly released a supplementary pamphlet giving detailed proposals for the practical implementation of such a scheme, which nobody read, but was then largely worked into law a year later.

The Labour party, on the other hand, was by far the most ambivalent of the three. It gave a fairly evasive pledge, envisioning the NHS as little more than an advisory body for healthier nutrition and medical research:

By good food and good homes, much avoidable ill-health can be prevented. In addition the best health services should be available free for all. Money must no longer be the passport to the best treatment.

In the new National Health Service there should be health centres where
the people may get the best that modern science can offer, more and better hospitals, and proper conditions for our doctors and nurses. More research is required into the causes of disease and the ways to prevent and cure it.

The point is that a Conservative post-war government under Churchill was fully signed up to introducing the NHS. A Liberal post-war government under Sinclair was fully signed up to introducing the NHS. The NHS was not Labour’s great achievement, it was an inescapable conclusion. And it was only the colossal Labour majority of 1945 which made it possible for Clement Attlee’s government to confidently embark on an NHS scheme that was deeply controversial among its own members.

The Labour party, despite its self-written mythology, was not even a dogged believer in socialism up until this point. Until the 1920s, most of its own MPs saw themselves primarily as workers’ and trade unions’ representatives, and the majority did not consider themselves to be socialists (indeed, with the Fabian Society originally within the Liberal tradition, far more Liberal MPs of the 1900s and 1910s considered themselves socialists than Labour or Lib-Lab MPs did). Furthermore, the Labour party was never particularly interested in social reform before the Beveridge report. Many Labour MPs actually opposed the first state pensions in the 1909 Peoples’ Budget because they thought they would get in the way of demands for wage increases. The Labour governments of 1924 and 1929-31 dismissed talk of such comprehensive extensions of the state as unaffordable, focussing instead on appeasing further trade union claims for wage rises until the Great Depression made that impossible. It wasn’t until a report commissioned by a Conservative-led coalition, and chaired by a Liberal economist, that the Labour party showed any serious inclination towards social reform, and only after the other two parties had embraced it.

If anything, the National Health Service Act 1946 is emblematic of something else – the Labour party’s struggle for a justification to exist in the modern age. Even as early as the 1940s, with the levelling of society during WWII, the justification for a purely class-based party came under question. Labour was in search of themes, and continued to be through much of the twentieth century. Thus we see the natural consequence today, with the farcical sight of Labour MPs wrapping themselves in the flag of the NHS, in historical paroxysms.

These exaggerated claims that the NHS owes its whole creation to the Labour party are only possible through the most colossal ignorance and misrepresentation of the past, of what was a cross-party consensus. The NHS was Britain’s triumph, not Labour’s.

Seth Thévoz is currently completing an MA in Modern History at King’s College London. He writes here in a personal capacity.

Quite simply, it’s a piece of devolved, ‘opt-in’ legislation. Participation isn’t compulsory, but councils can choose to get involved – and on their terms. The Act enables local councils to submit proposals to the government on how they can promote ‘local sustainability’. This is extremely loosely defined. It’s anything which will contribute to ‘the improvement of the economic, social or environmental well-being of the authority’s area whereby “social well-being” includes participation in civic and local activity.’ By such a vague definition, almost anything which a council does, and does well, could count, so it really is a great chance to flag up distinctly liberal issues and instilling free choice, social justice, devolution of power, and encouraging diversity in our communities.

All councils’ ideas will then be collated and prioritised by the Local Government Association. As the LGA stage will very much be an all-party affair, it’s vitally important that we fight our corner, and that from the very outset we present and argue for a series of distinctively liberal solutions for stronger, more empowered communities.

It’s also worth flagging up that in taking these options through the LGA, we will be avoiding the Whitehall policy ‘threshing machine’, and will instead be going through councillors’ own representative body, adding more legitimacy to the final solutions.

The Act puts a duty on the government and its quangos to ‘reach agreement’ with the LGA on implementing the solutions, so everything hangs on using our strong local government base to overwhelmingly argue our case in the LGA.

Furthermore, because the Act includes a requirement for the government and quangos to publicly publish a local breakdown of all related local spending, councils will then be empowered to claw back locally-spent money which they think they could more effectively spend themselves. This could be a passport to localism, Lib Dem-style, not Labour or Conservative – if we grasp the nettle of opportunity here and now.

If I sound overly excited about all this, it’s because I am. Nobody is saying that the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 was a Lib Dem measure. It was a cross-party compromise, and one that leaves the field open for more cross-party compromises. But it has the scope to be a liberal measure, and to empower more liberal communities. At the moment, its final effects are a blank canvas. It is what we make of it. And it will only be a liberal measure if we get to work on it, before the other parties do!

Seth Thévoz is the project co-ordinator for The Local Parliament, a joint project between the LGA Liberal Democrats, and the Leadership Centre for Local Government.