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THE BRITISH SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT
THE BRITISH SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT
Britain is a constitutional monarchy. That means it is a country governed by a king or a queen who
accepts the advice of a parliament. It is also a parliamentary democracy. That is, it is a country whose
government is controlled by a parliament which has been elected by the people.
The highest positions in the government are filled by the members of the directly elected parliament. In
Britain, as in many European countries, the official head of state, whether a monarch (as in Belgium,
the Netherlands or Denmark) or a president (as in Germany, Greece or Italy) has little power.
The Parliament
The Parliament
The British Parliament is divided into two  houses , and its members belong to one or other of them,
although only members of the Commons are normally known as MPs (Member of Parliament). The
Commons is by far the more important of the two houses.
The House of Lords consists of over 1000 non-elected members. Members can be divided into the
Lords Spiritual, higher bishops of the Church of England, and the Lords Temporal. The latter can be
divided into Lords who have inherited their titles, Lords who have been given their titles for their
lifetime and Law lords. Only a relatively small number of the members of the House of Lords take an
active interest in politics and regularly attend meetings of the House, which usually sits about 145 days
each year. The sole power of the House of Lords is to delay bills becoming a law. The speaker of the
House of Lords, the Lord Chancellor, is a member of the Cabinet. The Law Lords sit as the highest
court of appeal in England.
The House of Commons carries out the bulk of parliamentary work. The 650 Members Of Parliament
(MPs), who sit in the Commons, are elected representatives of the people in the United Kingdom (523
for England, 38 for Wales, 72 for Scotland and 17 for Northern Ireland). Each MP represents one of
the 650 constituencies into which the UK is divided. Commons has a maximum term of 5 years, at the
end of which a general election must be held. However, a general election can be called in the
Government at any time.
The constitution
The constitution
However, Britain is almost alone among modern states in that it does not have  a written constitution .
There are rules, regulations, principles and procedures for the running of the country  but there is no
formal document that could be called the Constitution of the United Kingdom or which can be
appealed to as the highest law of the land. However, there are three distinctive features that have
influenced Britain s social and political institutions and that may be called the basis of the political
system: statue law, common law and conventions.
Statue law are Acts of the Parliament. They are written laws and include rules of major importance for
the history of the country, e.g. the Bill of Rights or the European Community Act. They also deal with
the electoral system (the Representation of the People Acts) and with the composition of the
Parliament. Other acts relate to the monarchy, or are concerned with civil liberties (the Habeas Corpus
Act).
Common law is the body of traditional, unwritten laws of England, based on judges decisions and
custom. They have proved particularly important in relation to civil liberties, such as the advancing of
the Habeas Corpus Act, which orders that a person should be told by a judge why he or she is being
held in custody.
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Conventions are basically rules that have developed during the centuries or may have come into
existence only recently. Some conventions are far more important than most of the statues or common
laws. So it is a convention, that says that there must be a prime minister or a cabinet.
The Government
The Government
The term  the government can be used to refer to all politicians who have been appointed by the
monarch to help run government departments or to take on various other special responsibilities, such
as managing the activities of the parliament.
The other meaning of the term  the government refers only to the most powerful of these politicians,
namely the Prime Minister and other members of the cabinet.
Partly as a result of the electoral system, Britain, unlike much of western Europe, normally has a
 single-party government . In other words, all members of the government belong to the same political
party. The habit of single-party government has helped to established the tradition known as collective
responsibility. (That is, every member of the government, however junior, shares the responsibility for
every policy made by the government.)
All important decisions are made by the Government. It consists of about 100 members who usually
belong to one of the Houses of Parliament. The highest members of the Government (about 20) are
known as the Cabinet.
The cabinet
The cabinet started in the eighteenth century as an informal grouping of important ministers and
officials of the royal household. The Government was run by the Privy Council, a body of hundred and
more people  including those belonging to  the cabinet  directly responsible to the monarch. In the
twentieth century, the cabinet has itself become more and more  official and publicly recognised and
much of the real decision-making takes place in the cabinet.
The cabinet meets once a week and takes decisions about new policies, the implementation of
existing policies and the running of the various government departments. The members of the Cabinet
are chosen by the Prime Minister and may or may not have a government department under them.
The Prime Minister
The position of a British Prime Minister (PM) is in direct contrast to that of the monarch. Although the
Queen appears to have a great deal of power, in reality she has very little. The Prime Minister, on the
other hand, appears not to have much power but in reality has a very great deal indeed.
Today the Governments power is concentrated in the hand of the Prime Minister, who at the same
time is the leader of his party. He is the head of the government and has a seat in the Commons.
Among other responsibilities, he recommends a number of appointments to the sovereign, including
senior clergy of the Church of England.
Prime Ministers since 1940:
Winston Churchill (1940-45) Edward Heath (1970-74)
Clement Attlee (1945-51) Harold Wilson (1974-76)
Winston Churchill (1951-55) James Callaghan (1976-79)
Anthony Eden (1955-57) Margaret Thatcher (1979-91)
Harold Macmillan (1957-63) John Major (1991-97)
Alec Douglas-Home (1963-64) Tony Blair (1997-)
Harold Wilson (1964-70)
Conservative - Labour
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Central and local government
In Britain local government authorities  generally known as  councils  only have power because the
central government has given them powers. Indeed they only exist because the central government
allows them to exist.
The system of local government is very similar to the system of national government. There are
elected representatives, called councillors  the equivalent of MPs. They meet in a council chamber in
the Town Hall or County Hall  the equivalent of Parliament, where they make policy which is
implemented by local government officers  the equivalent of civil servants.
The monarchy
The monarchy
For the evidence of written law only, the Queen has almost absolute power, and it all seems very
undemocratic. Every autumn, at the state opening of Parliament, Elizabeth II, who became Queen in
1952, makes a speech. In it, she says what  my government intends to do in the coming year. And
indeed, it is her government  not the people s. As far as the law it concerned, she can choose
anybody she likes to run the government for her. The same is true for her choices of people to fill
some hundred or so other ministerial positions. And if she gets fed up with her ministers, she can just
dismiss them. Officially speaking they are all  servants of the Crown . Furthermore nothing the
parliament has decided can become law until she has agreed to it. There is also a principle of English
law that the monarch can do nothing that is legally wrong.
But in reality it is of course very different. Of course she cannot choose anyone she like to be Prime
Minister, but she has to choose someone who has the support of the majority of MPs in the House of
Commons  because  her government can only collect taxes with the agreement of the Commons, so
if she did not choose such a person, the government would stop function. With the Parliament it is the
same story  the Prime Minister will talk about  requesting a dissolution of Parliament when he or she
wants to hold an election, but it would be normally impossible for the monarch to refuse this  request .
So in reality the Queen cannot actually stop the government going ahead with any of its politics.
There are often mentioned three roles of the monarch. First, the monarch is the personal embodiment
of the government of the country. This means that people can be as critical as they like about the real
government, and can argue that it should be thrown out, without being accused of being unpatriotic.
Second, it is argued that the monarch could act as a final check on a government that was becoming
dictatorial. Third, the monarch has to play a very practical role as being a figurehead and representing
the country.
The sovereign reigns but does not rule.
The royal family
The family name of the royal family is Windsor. Queen Elizabeth is only the fourth monarch with this
name. It is because George V, Elizabeth s grandfather, changed the family name. It was Saxe-
Coburg-Gotha, but during the First World War it was thought better for the king not to have a German
sounding name.
Queen Elizabeth II was born in 1926 and became Queen in 1952. She is one of the longest reigning
monarchs in British history.
The party system
The party system
Britain is normally described as having a  two party system . This is because, since 1945, one of the
two big parties has, by itself, controlled the government, and members of these two parties have
occupied more than 90% of all the seats in the House of Commons. The same situation existed
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already throughout the nineteenth century, except that the Liberals, rather than the Labour, were one
of the two big parties.
In Britain there exist a lot of different parties. The three biggest ones of the UK are the Conservative
Party, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. Furthermore, there also exist some Nationalist
parties  such as Both Plaid Cymru ( Party of Wales ) and the SNP (Scottish National Party), which
fight for devolution of governmental powers  some parties in Northern Ireland  which mostly
represent either the Protestant or the Catholic communities  and there are also numerous of very
small parties  such as the Green Party, the Communist Party and the British National Party, an
extreme right wing party, which is fairly openly racist.
The Conservative Party
The Conservative Party was developed from the group of Members of Parliament (MPs) known as the
Tories in the early nineteenth century. The Conservative Party is right of centre and stands for
hierarchical interference in the economy, they would like to reduce income tax and they give a high
priority to national defence and internal law and order. The leader, who has a relatively great degree of
freedom to direct policy, was the former Prime Minister John Major in 1996.
The present Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is supported by the Labour Party.
The Labour Party
The Labour Party was formed at the beginning of the twentieth century from an alliance of trade
unionists and intellectuals. In 1923 the Labour Party was in government for the first time. The Labour
Party is left of centre and stands for equality, for the socially weaker people in society and for more
government involvement in the economical issues.
The Liberal Democratic Party
The Liberal Democratic Party was formed in the late 1980s from a union of Liberals  who developed
from the Wigs of the early nineteenth century  and the Social democrats  a breakaway group of
Labour politicians. It is regarded as being in the centre or slightly left of centre and has always been
strongly in favour of the European Union. The leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1996 was
Paddy Ashdown.