You will have probably noticed that this week brings the excitment of a general election to the UK. Since parliament was dissolved (the last one stopped on April 12) we have been lucky enough to see and hear virtually nothing else apart from the politicians from the main parties doing their best to persuade us to vote for them. Actually most of it, as normal, is not each party saying what they will be particularly good at but each party saying how bad all the others are. This time the biggest change has been the introduction of the televised debates between the leaders of the 3 main parties which had the unexpected effect of pushing the leader of the 3rd biggest party (the Liberal Democrats) into the lead becasue he performed so much better on TV than the other 2. Nothing really to do with their policies but how good looking they were and how confidently they spoke. As we have gone through the last few weeks of interviews, comments, statements and analysis we have become none the wiser about the real policies of the parties but we do certainly know what all the newspapers think about the leaders’ wives and families.

At the close of the last parliament there were 643 MPS and 3 vacant seats. The UK is divided into areas called constituencies and in each of these the winner of the election is the person who has the most votes. Each person who is able to vote, gets one vote only – not choices for example 1st 2nd 3rd and votes for the person they like best. That will give us 650 winners who then all become MPs (Members of parliament). Each of them belongs to a political party and the party that has the most MPs is then invited by the Queen to form a government. So you can easily see that the government could be formed by a party which doesn’t have the most votes. As long as there are 326 MPs from one party that party will form the government and will have an overall majority in parliament, so in theory could win every vote on policy in the parliament. What seems more likely to happen this time is that there will be a ‘hung’ parliament where no one party will have a majority so there will have to be deals and alliances between different parties.

Who are these people? Who wants a job where you actually don’t have to go if you don’t want to and can earn £65738 a year? Out of the last lot of MPs the youngest was 27, the oldest 84, 20% of the MPs were women, 75% of them had a university degree, 2.3% were non-white and about 35% had been to private schools. Also, about 55% were from a professional (law etc) or business background. So actually not a very typical cross section of the population as a whole!

For international students it is not clear what the effect of a different party becoming the government will be. The last government – the Labour Party – passed some laws which we at UIC thought were pretty crazy and really worked against the interests of both students and language schools. The alternatives to the Labour Party - one of whom might well be the government in a weeks time – also have plans for dealing with migrants (and sadly they count students as migrants) in a very unsatisfactory way. It seems to us that with English Language Teaching being  a very successful export business for the country and with students wanting to come here in ever increasing numbers, the very least the government could do is to try to find a way of working with us to benefit the country instead of pulling down the barriers.

If you want to have a bit of fun then you can have a bet on the result – the odds at the moment favour the Conservatives getting the most seats but Labour might be worth a small bet at 10-1!