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British voters go to the polls on Thursday. But given the tight race, there’s a good chance they won’t know who’s running the government on Friday. And they may not even know for a few days after that. The World’s Laura Lynch reports from London.

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MARCO WERMAN:  British voters go to the polls on Thursday.  But given the tight race, there’s a good chance they won’t know who is running the government on Friday and they may not even know for a few days after that.  Polls suggest the nation is heading for a hung Parliament, when no party gets an outright majority.  If past minority Parliaments are any indication, whoever does win may have an uneasy time in power.  The World’s Laura Lynch reports from London.

LAURA LYNCH:  With just three days to go, the Conservative Party has decided to lay out precise post-election plans.  Still, leader David Cameron says he’s not certain he’ll actually win.

DAVID CAMERON: If I was overconfident I wouldn’t be going on a 24 hour non-stop campaign to win over the last undecided voters.  But I think people do want to know if you win on Thursday, what would change on Friday?

LYNCH: But the leader of the upstart third party Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, says Cameron is displaying breathtaking arrogance.

NICK CLEGG:  Well I think for David Cameron in the papers this morning, to start second guessing how people are going to vote, stop measuring the curtains for number ten before the election campaign has even been decided, I think is really wrong.

LYNCH: Cameron and the Conservatives are leading in the polls.  But it’s not a big enough margin to ensure a win, much less a win with a majority of seats in the House of Commons.  And so Prime Minister Gordon Brown is still speaking of building an alliance with the Liberal Democrats after Election Day.

GORDON BROWN:  Where there’s an agreement on ideas and of course the Liberals, I think, are closer to us on tax and public services, there’s obviously the possibility of people working in common harmony.

MALE VOICE 1:  Good evening, and welcome to BBC Television’s coverage of this razor’s edge election ’74.

LYNCH: It’s been more than three decades since a British national election ended up with a hung Parliament.  It lasted about eight months before another election gave the Labour government a tiny majority.  That majority vanished just a few years later in a string of by-election defeats.  Kenneth Clarke, then as now an opposition Conservative MP, says the House of Commons suddenly became a very exciting place.

KENNETH CLARKE:  Bliss to be alive if you were an MP then.  I was a front bench spokesman then.  It was really fun because you never knew who was going to win a vote.

LYNCH: Hung Parliaments don’t always evoke such happy memories.  Andrew McKie was in charge of dragging every government member in for every vote in another minority government.

ANDREW MCKIE:  There was the horrid sight of it all, of having to bring people who were seriously or critically ill.  And in one case, somebody who knew they were definitely dying and was very courageous indeed.  I just hope we don’t see those scenes again.

LYNCH: But Scotland’s current minority government provides a different perspective.  Deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon says it makes government more responsive and flexible.

NICOLA STURGEON:  And we build consensus on an issue by issue basis with different parties and small parties in the Scottish Parliament.  The Greens, for example, they’ve only got two members of the Scottish Parliament but they used their influence very wisely to win big concessions.  So we’ve got experience of how a balanced Parliament works.  In Scotland it works well.  I think it could work well across the U.K. and it certainly would be in Scotland’s interests.

LYNCH: But Scotland is not Britain.  Given the fragile economy, the tasks facing the next national government are huge.  Tim Bale of Sussex University says for that reason, even if the Conservatives do win and are able to build a coalition, it may not last long.

TIM BALE:  It’s not going to have a very big cushion of votes to see it through some very, very difficult times spending cuts obviously.  But also some of the legislation that it wants to put through is going to be quite controversial and you normally need a cushion, if you like, of MPs to help you through those difficult times.  And it’s hard to see some of the smaller parties actually staying on board for a lot of what the Conservative Party wants to do.

LYNCH: The last lesson for politicians looking to learn from past hung Parliaments may be the most painful for voters’ pocketbooks.  The pound is already taking a pounding on world currency markets.  If there is no clear winner the day after the election, history suggests it may fall even further.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

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