Posts, pips and polls

Wise Words: pip, post, poll and horses

I love tongue-twisters. I think they can be useful for learning vocabulary. Here's one about Britain's general election. Can you say it really fast without mispronouncing the words?

Unpopular party to be pipped at the post on polling day, press predict.

What does it mean?

The media believe that Gordon Brown's Labour Party will lose the general election on 6 May by a small number of votes. But why do they refer to a post?

The UK is divided into 650 constituencies. Each constituency elects one Member of Parliament (MP). The person who wins the highest number of votes within each constituency wins the election and automatically becomes the MP for that constituency. The winner only needs one vote more than the loser(s). The losers get nothing. This kind of system is known as FPTP.

Pipped at the post! Photo: IFHA

At the moment, the polls (not the ones on polling day, but the ones that measure voters’ opinions) show that Brown is trailing David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives. But neither may win enough votes to form a government. That's where Nick Clegg, leader of the left-of-centre Liberal Democrats, comes in. He's gaining ground in the polls.

It’s unlikely that Clegg will win enough seats to form a government. But he may get to decide who governs. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Clegg didn’t want to say whether he would consider a political pact with the Labour Party or with the Conservatives. Clegg used another idiom that refers to horses when asked what he planned to do: “I’m not daft enough to put the cart before the horse,” he told the newspaper.

He won’t say yet which party he wants to work with in case he bets on the wrong horse. 

Can you remember the tongue-twister? Try saying it without looking at the text.