Introduction: Single party government in a fragmented system

The 2015 General Election was, electors were told throughout the campaign, too close to call. The opinion polls all pointed to a contest that had the Conservatives and Labour almost inseparable. The BBC's eve of election poll of polls captured the uncertainty with the Conservatives on 34%, Labour on 33%, United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) on 12%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%and the Scottish National Party (SNP) expected to do very well in Scotland, winning almost all the Scottish seats. One thing was apparently clear: no party would get the 326 seats needed for a majority in the House of Commons. A hung Parliament would, as in 2010, be the outcome with party leaders and their emissaries then meeting in secret to work out the terms of a coalition deal or some other way of sustaining a government. The wider point was that Britain's socially and geographically fragmented political system seemed no longer capable of producing single party majority government. A telling image that captured this fragmentation had been provided in the supposed showpiece event of the campaign, the televised leaders' debate that saw seven party leaders from England, Scotland and Wales go head-to-head as a powerful representation of this new era of multi-party politics.