To the polls for the general election!

In the podcast from last Monday, you can listen to Carrie and me talking about the different voting systems in Britain and the US. With a general election looming in Britain, voting is a really important issue at the moment.

The other day, Carrie asked me a question that we didn't talk about in the podcast. "Why does nobody know yet when the British election will take place?" she said. "Surely people need time to prepare to vote." Well, when you think about it, it does seem a little strange.

In fact there are a few strange things about the British voting system. We talked about some of them in our podcast, but since Carrie told us more about the voting system in the US in her blog post, I thought I'd write a little bit more about the peculiarities of the British system.

• A general election has to be held at least once every five years. But not all governments run for five years. A government can call a new general election at any time during that period.
  
• There is usually just a month before calling an election and people going to the polls. That's why people don't know the exact date of the election until about a month beforehand.
• When the government calls an election quickly and unexpectedly, before the five years are up, it is called a snap election.
• The five years will be up by 3 June 2010, so the election must happen by then. But people think the most likely date for the next general election is 6 May.
  
• The Prime Minister can't just wake up in the morning and call a general election! He or she has to ask the Queen's permission. Only the Queen can dissolve parliament to allow a general election to take place.
  
• People expect Prime Minister Gordon Brown to go to the Queen on 6 April to call the election. The Prime Minister is driven in an official car from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace. This short drive is often filmed by helicopters and broadcast live on television!
  
• The election always takes place on a Thursday. This may go back to the time when payday was always on a Friday. That made Fridays a popular time to go to the pub and get drunk, so Thursday made sure people were not too drunk to vote!
  
• There are three main parties  - Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. But there are strange parties too. One famous one is called the Monster Raving Looney Party. They have funny policies, like allowing people taking their driving test to "phone a friend" for help or to take a "50:50" choice of driving route.