I’m not able to vote in the British general election, but that didn’t stop me from staying up late (and waking up early) to see this morning’s results. A handful of constituencies have yet to report, but it’s pretty clear that no party has gained enough seats to form a government. The United Kingdom is headed for a hung parliament, in which either the ruling Labour party or the right-leaning Conservatives will try to form a coalition with other, smaller parties in order to establish a government.

The hung parliament outcome had been predicted by many of the polls in advance of yesterday’s vote, but the real surprise was the poor performance of the Liberal Democrats, the left-leaning third party in the race. Partially as a result of party leader Nick Clegg’s strong performance in the first-ever televised debates, it was widely expected the Lib Dems would become a force in parliament.

That would have been good news for science in the UK. Evan Harris, the Lib Dem MP for Oxfordshire and West Abingdon, had been considered a strong advocate for science in the last parliament. Many science watchers privately speculated that if a hung parliament resulted in a Lib Dem coalition with another major party, Harris could end up with the job of science minister.

Instead Harris, and several other science-minded Lib Dem candidates, lost their seats (at the moment, the party is actually five seats down from the last parliament). Harris lost in a squeaker to Nicola Blackwood, the Conservative candidate and a trained singer (you can hear her victory crowing on BBC Oxford).

Mark Henderson over at the Times didn’t pull any punches, calling the election a “terrible night” for science in the UK. In addition to loosing Harris, the Times predicts that there will be only 71 members of the new parliament with a science background, a drop of roughly 15 (Parliament has a total of 650 seats, so that’s still over 10%, pretty good in comparison to America).

Others were more sanguine about the election results. Research Fortnight’s Ehsan Masood points out that Caroline Lucas, the first ever Green Party member of parliament was elected in Brighton, though given the Green’s hard-line stance on nuclear and genetically modified foods, it’s an open question whether that’s good for science. And the Campaign for Science Education in the UK says that six of the pro-science candidates that blogged for them have been elected (that’s out of 14 total).

So what does this mean for the future of science in the UK? Well if by the future of science you mean the future of science funding then the answer is that it’s far too early to tell. According to the rules, the incumbent Labour party will have the first crack at forming a government. At the moment, it looks as though even a Labour-Lib Dem alliance won’t have enough seats to command a majority. If Labour fails, it will be the Conservative party’s turn, and again, it looks like their margin over Labour won’t make it easy to form a government.

The bottom line is that it could be days or weeks before a new government is announced and longer still before they can work out a budget for science (and everything else).

For now, the only thing that is clear is that science has lost some strong parliamentary allies in the election, and in a time of economic uncertainty, that’s probably bad news.

Cross posted from Nature’s The Great Beyond blog.

I’m not able to vote in the British general election, but that didn’t stop me from staying up late (and waking up early) to see this morning’s results. A handful of constituencies have yet to report, but it’s pretty clear that no party has gained enough seats to form a government. The United Kingdom is headed for a hung parliament, in which either the ruling Labour party or the right-leaning Conservatives will try to form a coalition with other, smaller parties in order to establish a government.

The hung parliament outcome had been predicted by many of the polls in advance of yesterday’s vote, but the real surprise was the poor performance of the Liberal Democrats, the left-leaning third party in the race. Partially as a result of party leader Nick Clegg’s strong performance in the first-ever televised debates, it was widely expected the Lib Dems would become a force in parliament.

Read the rest of the post on The Great Beyond.