This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 28, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

British Elections delivered a surprise boost for conservatives,

but what does that victory and other

storylines of the election mean for liberty. Mark Littlewood is director general

of the Institute for Economic Affairs he spoke last week with Cato Policy Analyst Matthew Feeney.

We were expecting to see a so-called hung parliament, that was to say that no single party could form a majority government.

And as you see typically in most Western European countries, there would be all sorts of

horse trading and haggling and eventually somebody would cobble together the necessary

number of seats to form a government.

That was what was anticipated and the opinion polls suggested it was going to be incredibly

close-run thing as to whether

that government was going to be a coalition government led by the Conservative

Party, the centre-right party, or a coalition government headed up by the Labour Party, the left of centre party.

To almost everyone's complete astonishment, at one minute past 10 on Thursday, May the 7th, it being polling day, the exit poll was released

showing the Conservatives within a whisker of actually winning an overall majority themselves.

You need to technically get to 325 seats out of our 650 to win a majority and the exit

poll suggested 316 seats for the Conservatives which would have meant that David Cameron

the Prime Minister would have been the only person who could have formed a

credible government but as the results trickled in it got better and better for

the Conservatives and in fact the final tally

at 331 means the Conservatives can govern in their own right.

...