➜ geographical distribution of power unitary state, with devolved powers to regional parliaments ➜ relationship between legislature and executive parliamentary ➜ executive prime minister, leader of the majority party in the house of commons; elected every 5 years ➜ executive election system chosen by mps in the house of commons ➜ legislature bicameral: house of commons (lower house) and house of lords (upper house), though only commons wields power ➜ legislative election system smd first-past-the-post in national elections; pr in regional and supranational elections ➜ party system two-party system (conservative and labour), other parties also win some representation ➜ judiciary supreme court of the united kingdom
Each of the countries selected for the AP Comparative Government and Politics course was carefully chosen to give students a glimpse into issues affecting a wide array of countries and political systems around the world. Britain serves as a case study for many important concepts. First, it is an excellent example of a modern liberal democracy, dealing with the challenges of the modern developed world, including how to cope with climate change and the environment, an aging population, and immigration into the country of those from diverse backgrounds. Second, it illustrates a political system that emerged not because of revolution and reaction to crisis, but rather through gradual reform and political pressure from its own citizens, transitioning incrementally from authoritarianism to democracy. Finally, Britain illustrates the complex relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, as the little island that once ruled over a quarter of the world’s territory and people has had to cope with the decline of the Empire and the rise of many of its former subject nations. Part of this story is Britain’s gradual integration into the European community, the European Union in particular, which gives an insightful glimpse into the complexities of supranational politics and institutions.
There is often a great deal of confusion regarding the difference between “England,” “Britain,” “Great Britain,” and “The United Kingdom,” and the terms are often used interchangeably, albeit inappropriately. What exactly each of these terms refers to is a helpful first step to understanding much of Britain’s history and political culture. First of all, the United Kingdom is sometimes called a “country of countries,” in which four separate nations of people are united under one constitutional monarchy. These are the English, the Scottish, the Welsh, and the Northern Irish. These are the peoples who are “united” in the United Kingdom. This map details where each of these nations is located.
The United Kingdom is a “country of countries,” comprising the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
These nations are all located in a geographic space known as the British Isles, which include Great Britain (the largest island, on which England, Scotland, and Wales are located), and others, including Ireland (where Northern Ireland is located). When the Republic of Ireland gained independence in 1922, Northern Ireland, whose people were mostly “unionists” and did not want to secede, remained a part of the United Kingdom. Thus, the full proper name of the country is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. For simplicity and space, this text (and the Comparative Government test) will usually simplify this as “Great Britain” or “Britain.”
Britain is a unitary state, with political power firmly concentrated in London in a single political institution, the House of Commons, which is elected by British voters every five years (or less often in certain circumstances). This concentration into the House of Commons is the result of a long historical process and transition gradually moving power out of the hands of unelected nobility (the monarch and the House of Lords), and increasingly into the country’s main democratic body (the House of Commons), while at the same time expanding the democratic nature of the institutions. Modern Britain is increasingly a devolved unitary state, with certain political powers granted by “acts of Parliament” to lower-level regional assemblies. Britain is not a federal state, though, since the national government in London theoretically retains the power and sovereignty to revoke the existence of these assemblies and their related powers by an act of Parliament. The autonomy of the state to do this, however, is highly limited, as the public in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland would likely react very negatively to a change in this arrangement. Recent independence movements in Scotland and historical disputes in Northern Ireland would seem to require maintaining the decentralized nature of power if the nations of Britain are to remain united.
Geography has a substantial impact on the historical development of the political culture of a nation of people. This is more evident in Britain than in most countries. While most of greater Europe endured continental warfare in periodic outbreaks throughout the last millennium, Britain’s island geography protected it from foreign conquest, preserving the sovereign self-rule of the British people to develop and maintain their own distinct political traditions. This geographic separation from Europe has borne out culturally, as well as defensively. As the European Union emerged and integrated the people of the continent, the British have been generally willing to participate where they see the benefits, while never fully embracing the idea of being “European” people. As one example, Britain chose to keep the pound as its national currency, opting out of the European Monetary Union and the Euro, then in 2016, voted in a referendum to leave the European Union altogether.
Britain is in a cold and wet part of the temperate zone, with a short growing season that makes providing enough food for the island’s people a struggle. In addition, natural resources such as wood for energy were in short supply in the early eighteenth century. These factors motivated both the Agricultural Revolution, and later the Industrial Revolution, which both had their beginnings in Britain. The need for natural resources further pushed the British to create a world-class navy and colonize distant parts of the planet, in essence exporting British culture all over the British Empire, which once spanned a quarter of the world’s territory and population.
British political history has displayed two distinct trends over the course of its development. The first of these trends is traditionalism and gradualism, in which the British political structure has adhered to longstanding political traditions, while at the same time modernizing these traditions through gradual reforms and generally not through rapid revolutionary upheavals. The other dominant trend in British politics is one of constitutionalism, or adherence to a set of understood limitations on the power of the state. This may seem counterintuitive when you learn an interesting fact about the British constitution. It actually does not exist in any singular written form, as most countries’ constitutions do. The British constitution is essentially a collection of all of the political traditions, acts of Parliament, and established common law that have developed over hundreds and hundreds of years. While they are without a single document to quote from, it would be preposterous to suggest the British have no constitution. In fact, constitutional traditions and adherence to the rule of law are stronger in Britain than in any of the other five countries of study.
Britain’s island geography allowed the British to develop political traditions gradually through reform, including constitutional limitations on the power of the state.
Most would place the beginning of the story of England in 1066 when William the Conqueror defeated Harold II at the Battle of Hastings, winning support from most of the nobility by promising that he would consult them before ever choosing to raise or levy new taxes, thus establishing the House of Lords as a check on the power of the king. The Lords forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in response to what they felt were excessive taxes for his military expeditions, and it marked the beginning of a long tradition of constitutionalism and rule of law for the monarch. The House of Commons was created in the fourteenth century in response to the emergence of a growing commercial class as towns in England developed. Many of these themes of tradition, gradual reform, and constitutionalism were solidified thanks to two major events in the seventeenth century. The first of these was the English Civil War (1642–1651), in which King Charles I attempted to govern and raise revenue without Parliament until he could no longer do so. Supporters of the Parliament’s traditional role eventually won victory over the supporters of the King, solidifying the constitutional limitations of the monarch’s authority. Later in the century, Protestants in Parliament were increasingly concerned that the rule of James II was Catholicizing a Protestant country, and in 1688, the Parliament called upon William of Orange, who had a claim to the throne through marriage to James II’s daughter Mary, to come to London with his army and reign as a Protestant head of state. James II fled the country, and the bloodless coup organized by Parliament came to be known as the Glorious Revolution. In return, William promised to adhere to limitations known as the English Bill of Rights, which ensured the role that Parliament would be guaranteed to play in the British state, and further identified rights that could not be violated against British citizens by the monarch.
Society changed radically over the course of the Industrial Revolution, and the British political system continued to reform and modernize to reflect those changes. While much of the European continent endured violent conflict between labor and business interests, and were transformed by workers’ revolutions, major acts of Britain’s Parliament—the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Reform Act of 1867, the Representation of the People Act of 1884, and finally the granting of suffrage rights to women—each extended voting rights to larger and larger shares of the public, and prevented the British system from succumbing to the same violence. The extension of voting rights to the middle class, then to workers, and finally to all adult citizens, meant that the government was also increasingly sympathetic to the interests of common people; this gradual change had profound effects on the structure of Britain’s political institutions. The monarch was reduced from a strong chief executive to a symbolic constitutional figurehead. The House of Lords, by 1911, only retained the power to delay legislation passed by the House of Commons. Political power was fully vested into the House of Commons as the supreme legislature, and the prime minister and the cabinet chosen by the majority party acted as the functional executive.
Britain’s traditional political party structure consisted of the Conservative (Tory) Party, and the Liberal (Whig) Party, and it was similarly transformed by reform. The Labour Party was formed in 1906 to represent the interests of the newly enfranchised working classes, and emerged as the chief challenger to the Tories by the end of World War I. Labour sought to level Britain’s deep class divisions between middle-class merchants and business interests (who largely supported the Conservatives), and the working classes. They pushed for legislation to provide public education, public housing, better pay for workers, and medical care. Labour’s ideology combined militant trade unionism with democratic principles that would seek to provide, in their view, a more fair, just, and equitable society. The Liberal Party sank to third place in the polls, and has remained in that position ever since.
The political divisions were further altered in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II with a period known as the collectivist consensus. After having pooled the resources of the country to win the war, Labour candidates under their leader Clement Atlee pledged to pool the resources of the country to “win the peace” through a system of progressive policies that resulted in the modern welfare state. Both Conservative and Labour parties had embraced the findings of the Beveridge Report, which recommended sweeping changes to guarantee at least a subsistence income to all British citizens no matter what. Voters swept Labour into power in 1945, and Atlee’s government led Britain through a program of nationalization of many formerly private heavy industries, such as railroads, steel, coal mines, oil, electricity, and other utilities. The state would take ownership of these assets and use their profits to fund welfare-state programs such as the National Health Service (NHS), which provided all British citizens with the guarantee of medical care free of charge. The British people were also given free compulsory secondary education in the National Education Act, and old-age pensions and unemployment insurance in the National Insurance Act. These programs all created the foundation of a mixed economy that attempted to balance a role for the public and private sectors to the benefit of the British people at large, and even when Conservatives won victories in subsequent elections, they did not attempt to remove the institutions of the welfare state.
During the collectivist consensus, the size of the British welfare state grew dramatically in response to the troubles of the Great Depression and World War II years.
The collectivist consensus was challenged in the 1970s as nationalized industries became increasingly inefficient, and required large sums of taxpayer money to subsidize their losses and high wages for militantly unionized workers, which seemed to some British to be on strike more often than they were working. These problems were exacerbated by the formation of OPEC, an international oil cartel of countries that cooperated to keep oil prices high for importers like Britain. As oil prices skyrocketed, Britain experienced inflation, high unemployment, declining GDP, and a general loss of faith in the trade unions and their unwillingness to reform.
The backlash against the growing welfare state and stagflation led to the rise of a new British right wing led by Margaret Thatcher, who shrank the role of government in economic policy.
The country responded in 1979 by electing the Conservative Party, led by Margaret Thatcher, to take the country in a definitively rightward direction. Thatcher blamed socialist policies such as the strong welfare state and the nationalization of industry for her country’s problems, and set out on a large-scale program of reform. The core tenets of Thatcher’s reforms, known as Thatcherism, included:
Some criticized her as harsh and strident, while others believed she was exactly the hero Britain needed. The moniker “The Iron Lady” came to define her legacy. While many workers and ordinary British citizens experienced great difficulty making ends meet as a result of Thatcher’s policies, the Conservatives did revitalize the British economy in the 1980s and restored a new sense of optimism to the future of Britain.
In 1992, Labour chose a new party leadership, headed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Tony Blair recast the Labour Party as a center-left party that embraced the positive effects of Thatcher’s market reforms on Britain, while remaining left of center on issues of the welfare state, public investment, and taxation. One of the most significant symbols of this change in Labour’s approach was the party’s decision to remove Clause IV of the party manifesto, which expressed support for the nationalization of industry. This indicated a recognition from Labour and its new leadership that public ownership did not always equate to benefiting the public interest and that free-market policies could also be to the public’s benefit. Labour was elected to power in 1997. Tony Blair became the new prime minister, and Gordon Brown became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Labour quickly enacted a series of significant constitutional reforms. These included:
In total, these reforms represented the most significant changes to Britain’s constitution in generations, and the ramifications of these reforms are still unfolding today, but they were not the only meaningful events of the Blair Decade. Blair’s government also had to respond to the crisis level of violence between unionists and separatists in Northern Ireland. Violence and terrorism had plagued Northern Ireland since the period that began in the 1970s, known as “the Troubles,” when Northern Irish separatists, most notably the Irish Republican Army (IRA), used violence to agitate for secession from Britain, in the hopes of uniting Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. In 1998, Blair’s government negotiated the Good Friday Agreement between the conflicting factions, creating a peace that has generally held since. Constitutional reform for devolution and a Northern Irish regional parliament was a critical piece of the settlement.
At the peak of his popularity, Blair called for early elections (as prime ministers had the power to do before 2011), and Labour expanded its parliamentary majority. But their work wasn’t finished. In addition to “the Troubles” of Northern Ireland, Blair’s government also needed to formulate a response to a new terrorist threat: Islamic extremists. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack against the United States of America, Britain joined American-led coalition forces fighting against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan; both groups were suspected of playing lead roles in the attack. Britain also joined the American-led invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, with the goal of changing the despotic regime and removing the regime’s suspected stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. In the midst of these conflicts Britain was the victim of a major terrorist attack on July 7, 2005, when four Islamic-extremist suicide bombers detonated explosives on public trains and buses, killing fifty-two civilians and injuring hundreds more. From 2001 to 2008, the Labour government passed a series of antiterrorism acts that expanded the definitions of punishable offenses related to terrorism and gave police broad powers to detain and question terrorist suspects without charge for limited periods of time.
In 2005, sensing the declining popularity of the Iraq War, Blair called for early elections. He calculated that Labour might lose its majority if he waited until the end of the five-year period (coming in 2006) but that he could win Labour five more years in power if they could maintain their majority in 2005. His calculation was correct, and Labour won a majority again, albeit by a smaller margin than previously. As Blair’s popularity continued to decline and the Iraq War became increasingly unpopular, he stepped down from the prime ministership, and Gordon Brown was selected as Blair’s successor.
Unfortunately for the new prime minister, the global financial market meltdown in 2007/2008 caused the most severe recession across the world since the Great Depression. Hoping to stimulate demand, Brown’s government attempted to counter the effects of the crisis by passing an $850 billion rescue package for the banks and reducing Britain’s sales tax rates. The recession proved too severe for these measures to fix, and Brown’s popularity declined steadily until the general elections of 2010.
In the 2010 elections, Conservatives gained ninety-six seats, more than any other party in Parliament, though not an outright majority. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, negotiated the formation of a coalition government with the Liberal Democratic Party, making Cameron the new prime minister. In exchange for participation in the coalition, the Conservatives (also known as the Tories) gave the Liberal Democrats several positions in the new cabinet; in particular, the Liberal Democratic leader, Nick Clegg, was named deputy prime minister. They also promised to stage a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV), a proposed reform to Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. The AV would allow British voters to rank candidates for Parliament in order of preference rather than choose only one to vote for. The Liberal Democratic Party expected that a reform to the election system would improve their chances of winning more seats in Parliament. The referendum was held in 2011, but voters rejected the AV reform. Cameron’s coalition government also passed the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act of 2011, setting a fixed five-year election cycle for Parliament and significantly restricting the prime minister’s power to decide election dates at politically advantageous times.
In response to Britain’s significant budget deficits in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Cameron’s government imposed a series of austerity measures to reduce government spending and balance the budget. These included spending cuts to food banks, health care and the NHS, housing assistance for the poor, public-sector pay and pensions, and unemployment benefits.
The 2015 election gave Conservatives a clear majority in the Parliament. During the campaign, David Cameron had promised a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union, referred to colloquially as Brexit, to appease the Euroskeptical elements of the Conservative Party. Cameron personally opposed leaving the European Union and believed British voters would also choose to remain, but in the 2016 referendum, a majority of voters chose “leave.” Cameron announced that he could not continue as leader of Britain for the next stage and resigned as prime minister.
Theresa May was chosen as the Conservative Party’s new leader and thus prime minister as well. Her government became responsible for navigating Britain’s exit from the European Union and negotiating the complex trade relationships and rights of British citizens living and traveling in Europe. As the earliest conflicts over these issues emerged, May called for early elections in 2017, believing Conservatives could extend their majority with more members who backed her position in the Brexit negotiations. The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act allowed her to do so with consent of two-thirds of the Parliament, and many Labour MPs voted to support early elections as well. The elections were a disaster for the Conservatives, who lost their outright majority as Labour gained thirty seats. In the aftermath, the Conservatives formed another coalition government, this time with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland. In the end, the difficulty of getting a final solution for Britain’s exit from the European Union proved too daunting for May’s government, and she resigned after her final negotiated deal with Europe failed to pass in Parliament. The Conservatives chose Boris Johnson as their new leader, and therefore Prime Minister as well, and his government is now responsible for crafting the next steps for Brexit.
British society is noteworthy for the consensual nature of its political culture and its unifying commitment to democratic values, but Britain is not without cleavages that divide the population. These are a few of the most significantly divisive cleavages in British society.
Class divisions are deeply pronounced in Britain, despite the declining role of nobility in British politics. Many of Britain’s wealthiest citizens come from a long history of inherited wealth from generations back, and those in the upper classes typically dress distinctively from the lower classes, participate in different leisure activities, speak in a different English dialect, and generally don’t interact much with lower classes. While this may seem to be true of people in the United States as well, it is not to the same degree. American millionaires, for instance, would likely dress in clothing that looks a lot like other typical middle-class professionals (though perhaps in more expensive brands), and watch the same sports (though perhaps with better seats at the games). Class distinction has played a role in British public life for hundreds of years, and continues to run deep in its culture. There has been some evolution in the divisions, however. For one example, World Wars I and II brought many from Britain’s upper and lower classes together serving in the same military units as equals, and produced a great deal of upper-class sympathy and understanding for the lower class as they bonded in the fighting, resulting in a gradual leveling to some extent of class divisions. Another example is the concept of noblesse oblige, which centuries ago, referred to a nobleman’s responsibility to care for the serfs and common people under his care. The concept was reimagined during the Collectivist Consensus to mean that the wealthy had a certain social responsibility to accept higher taxes in order to fund the welfare state for the middle and lower classes. While social class is declining in its significance as a cleavage in Britain over the last century, it remains a source of division.
Although the social class division between the rich and the working class has diminished in political importance, it remains one of the most important social cleavages in British politics.
While there is a certain identity associated with being “British,” people in Great Britain are much more likely to consider themselves a member of their nationality, which is either English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish. England has long been the dominant player of the United Kingdom, in which over 80 percent of the population resides, and where most of the country’s wealth and political power are concentrated, not to mention the fact that it is the English royal family’s monarch who reigns as head of state over all of the nations. This has engendered resentment of the English by other nationalities at times, exemplified most notably in recent years with Scotland’s failed (but nearly successful) referendum in 2014 for independence from the United Kingdom.
The response from Westminster to these pressures has been to grant increasing local autonomy to these minority nations, beginning with Prime Minister Blair’s reforms of devolution in 1997 and 1998 to create national assemblies in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland with limited policymaking power granted from the central government, thus devolving some powers down to a more local level.
More than 80 percent of the British are white; however, there are a growing number of ethnic minority populations in Britain that are increasingly Muslim. Most common among these are Pakistanis, but there are many others from the rest of Europe, Asia, and Africa as well. Fears of changes to British culture resulting from their arrival led to significant immigration restrictions under the Thatcher government that were continued by the Blair and Brown Labour governments. Britain has had to reconcile some of these restrictions with membership in the EU (which allows freedom of movement and immigration among its member states), but Britain has also negotiated exceptions to many of the immigration principles of the EU. In the aftermath of Brexit, these issues will be part of new negotiations with Europe. Minority groups in Britain are generally poorly integrated into the society, and minorities in Britain often report profiling and mistreatment by police.
Civil society is alive and well in Britain, almost completely unrestricted in its formation. One estimate places the number of civil society organizations in Britain at over 900,000. There are business groups, labor groups and unions, charitable organizations, religious institutions, and government advocacy groups for nearly every matter of public interest.
Elections in Britain are generally regarded as completely free and fair, consistent with expectations of a liberal democracy, and British history has consistently progressed to expand access and participation for the average citizen. British citizens today participate in elections of officials at three different levels.
The most important of these elections is at the national level to choose the Members of Parliament (MPs) who will act as the national government in Westminster and choose the prime minister and the cabinet. Historically, the prime minister had the power to call for elections whenever he would choose, though he had to do so within five years of the last election. Prime ministers used this power strategically, calling for elections at opportune moments when they believed they could build a larger majority, or buy their party five more years in power as the majority. Tony Blair, for example, called for elections in 2001 believing Labour would win even bigger than they had in 1997, and then called for them again in 2005 as his party was declining in popularity and was likely to lose seats. He did so then because waiting until 2006 might have resulted in the loss of Labour’s majority, and this allowed Labour to hold on through 2010. This changed in 2011 with passage of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act of 2011, which now sets a fixed term of five years for every parliament starting with 2015, excepting only for the cases of a vote of no confidence (which will be explained later), and when two-thirds of the Parliament consents to early elections.
Britain’s single-member-district national election system results in dominance of two large political parties, currently Conservative and Labour.
The United Kingdom is divided into 650 constituencies that each elect one single MP to represent them in Parliament. This is called a single-member-district system (SMD), as was explained in Chapter 5, “Democratic Regimes.” The single winning candidate in each district is the one who wins the most votes—a plurality. A plurality is not necessarily a majority, since a majority is more than 50 percent. In fact, many constituencies will have votes divided among candidates so much that the winning candidate has well below 40 percent of the vote. It is often called a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system since there is no runoff held to make sure the winning candidate gets a majority. In this system, parties capable of winning the most votes are rewarded, usually the major Conservative and Labour parties, while parties that receive large shares of votes without winning districts (such as the U.K. Independence Party and the Liberal Democrats) are “punished” by the system. This is illustrated in the data from the 2015 general election below.
| Party | Share of the National Vote | # of Seats Won (out of 650 possible) | % of Seats Won |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | 36.9% | 330 | 50.8% |
| Labour | 30.4% | 232 | 35.7% |
| U.K. Independence | 12.6% | 1 | 0.2% |
| Liberal Democrats | 7.9% | 8 | 1.2% |
| Scottish National | 4.7% | 56 | 8.6% |
| Green | 3.8% | 1 | 0.2% |
Whichever party wins a majority of the seats in Parliament will select its leader as the new prime minister and form a government. In the event that no party wins a full majority of 326 seats, parties may join together and build a coalition government to make up a majority, as the Conservative and Democratic Unionist parties did in 2017.
As part of membership in the European Union, every five years, a direct election was held to send members to the European Parliament. The EU parliamentary election rules vary from nation to nation, but in Britain they were all conducted in a proportional representation (PR) format rather than through an SMD. Parties win shares of the vote based on how they perform in each constituency, which reduces the discrepancy between votes received and seats won compared to the elections for British Parliament. The results from 2014’s election are displayed below.
| Party | % of the Vote | # of Seats Won (out of 73 possible) | % of Seats Won |
|---|---|---|---|
| U.K. Independence | 26.6% | 24 | 32.9% |
| Labour | 24.4% | 20 | 27.4% |
| Conservative | 23.1% | 19 | 26.0% |
| Green | 6.9% | 3 | 4.1% |
| Liberal Democrats | 6.6% | 1 | 1.4% |
| Scottish National | 2.4% | 2 | 2.7% |
Once Brexit is made official, there will no longer be elections to the EU Parliament in Britain.
Since the creation of devolved national assemblies in the late 1990s, elections have been held for members of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Scottish and Welsh elect their members with a hybrid of SMD and PR party list systems, while the Northern Irish system uses a single transferrable vote, allowing voters to rank two preferred candidates. Elections are also held at the local city, county, and/or borough level, and the rules for these vary by locality.
Britain’s electoral system lends itself to the creation of a two-party system. Historically, the government has always been operated by one of two major parties in its time—originally Liberals versus Conservatives, now Labour versus Conservatives. Recently, the Liberal Democrats also held a significant number of seats in the House of Commons and formed part of the governing coalition with Conservatives from 2010 to 2015, and currently, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) holds thirty-five seats, and many other minor parties hold seats as well. Competition for control of government is still between Britain’s two major parties.
The Conservative Party (nicknamed the “Tories”) is the more right-leaning of the two parties. They are generally a pragmatic rather than an ideological party, but the internal debate within the party on the proper role of government in the economy often results in factional divisions. There is a “traditional wing” that embraces the principle of noblesse oblige, which is the idea that the upper classes have a responsibility for the care and welfare of those in lower classes. There is also a more right-leaning “Thatcherite wing,” which adheres to the economic philosophy of Margaret Thatcher, believing in the rolling back of the welfare state, reducing government controls and regulation, and expanding the role of markets. Thatcherites often tend to be more Euroskeptical than their traditional counterparts as well, seeing European integration as a threat to British sovereignty.
The Conservatives are the right-leaning party in Britain, and Labour is the left-leaning party. Both parties are generally centrist and support most of the principles of the modern welfare state. Other parties represent fringe ideologies or regional interests and typically do not get elected in large numbers.
Conservatives draw most of their electoral support from England, and generally receive very few votes in other nations. Conservative voters tend to have higher incomes and education levels, as well. The Conservatives have held power in Britain for about twice as many years as Labour since World War II, and act as the lead party in the current government, with Boris Johnson currently serving as prime minister since 2019.
The Labour Party began in 1906 as a means for members of the working class to advance workers’ rights in the political sphere. It soon surpassed the Liberals electorally and has since been one of Britain’s two dominant parties. The modern Labour Party portrays itself as the defender of the British middle class and working class against a Conservative Party that seeks to make the economic climate more favorable to business and investors, as opposed to “regular” British employees who have seen their wages stagnate despite economic recovery. Labour’s voters also tend to be English. They draw most of their support from densely populated manufacturing towns such as Birmingham and Manchester, though they have also historically won most seats in Scotland and Wales. Significantly in 2015, Labour won only one seat in Scotland, losing the other fifty-six to the Scottish National Party, and lost the general election to the Conservatives, prompting Ed Miliband to resign as party leader. The Party chose a new, more leftist leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and fared better in the 2017 election.
Liberals were once the opposing major party to Conservatives, but after the 1920s they never held control of government again, losing their position to the Labour Party. In the 1980s, Liberals and the Social Democratic Party saw an opening for a centrist party between the right-wing Thatcherite extremism and the left-wing Labour extremism. They made a formal union in 1989, renaming their parties the Liberal Democratic Party, commonly referred to as the Lib-Dems.
Lib-Dems are regularly the biggest victim electorally of the single-member-district system. While their total share of the vote is often impressive for a third party (frequently above 20 percent of all votes cast), their seats in the House of Commons have never exceeded 10 percent of the total. Lib-Dems are the most vocal advocates of election reform in the United Kingdom, pushing for integration of more proportional representation into the system that would make their power in government reflective of their votes won. After the 2010 elections in which no single party won a parliamentary majority, the Liberal Democrats forged a governing coalition with the Conservatives (who won the most seats), and as part of the arrangement, a referendum was staged on reforming Britain’s election system away from the SMD first-past-the-post model, and replacing it with what was called the “Alternative Vote” in which British voters could rank their preference of candidates on a list, as opposed to voting for only one choice. This referendum was defeated, and Britain’s election system remains as it was. Lib-Dem cooperation with Conservatives in many budget austerity measures frustrated and alienated many of the Lib-Dem’s left-leaning supporters, and the Liberal Democratic Party received only 7.9 percent of the vote in 2015, dropping from fifty-six seats down to only eight, prompting Nick Clegg to resign as the party leader.
One of Britain’s newest parties, the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), is fundamentally Euroskeptical, calling for a British exit from the European Union. They currently have the most representation among British parties in the European Parliament, controlling twenty-three of Britain’s seventy-three seats, and they won 12.6 percent of the vote in the 2015 general election, though this only translated into control of one seat in the House of Commons. After the results of the Brexit referendum, their leader, Nigel Farage, stepped down, saying his work was done. UKIP received very few votes in 2017.
Deep-rooted nationalism in Britain also leads to the presence of many regional nationalist parties competing for seats in the Parliament, and though they have never held enough seats to control the central government, they win considerable representation into Westminster and regularly compete for power at the regional devolved level. These parties include the Scottish National Party (SNP); Plaid Cymru, which is based in Wales; and Sinn Fein, which is based in Ireland, but opposes Northern Irish union with Britain and consistently refuses to take the seats at Westminster that they win. In the 2015 election, the SNP nearly swept seats in Scotland, winning fifty-six of fifty-eight seats, while the other regional parties combined took nineteen. Their vote and seat shares declined significantly in 2017.
Britain is a pluralist system in which interest groups and other civil society organizations group and act independently, competing for the attention of the state to influence policymaking. They represent all number of interests of concern to British citizens. Some of these relate to economic concerns of business leaders in particular industries or trade, or to the interests of laboring class workers employed by those businesses. Others relate to particular political causes such as improving the environment, protecting animal rights, alleviating poverty, changing the relationship between Britain and Europe, or revising civil laws regarding fathers’ and mothers’ rights in divorce and custody disputes.
Whereas Britain was a corporatist state under Labour governments in the early 20th century, modern British interest groups organize freely in a pluralist society.
The state’s relationship to interest groups is particularly complicated in the case of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos), which refers to publicly funded bodies that operate as integrated parts of the private sector. They are not part of the formal state structure, but they perform functions valued by the state, and receive funding from the state in return. Some examples in Britain would include The Forestry Commission and the Water Services Regulation Authority. Quangos often simultaneously act as advocates for the interests of their organization, while also advising the government on policy, which complicates the divide between the state and private actors.
Media in Britain are open and free in their ability to investigate and report on the activities of the government at every level. Much of British media, notably the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) were created by the state for the purpose of providing information to citizens. Despite being owned and operated by the state, the BBC functions much more as an independent media company than as any kind of voice for the state. British media are tightly regulated in political communications for the purpose of ensuring and enhancing fairness in competition among the political parties. For example, parties and candidates may not buy airtime to run advertisements. Rather, television networks in Britain must give equal coverage time to all parties in the weeks before a general election, and political communications are only allowed during the general election period, which is six weeks before the election. Almost everyone in Britain has access to a wide array of information sources in print, broadcast, and digital platforms with no restriction from the state.
The United Kingdom remains an official monarchy under the Queen of England. While the monarch still retains many ceremonial functions as the Head of State, she does not hold any policymaking authority. This stems from the history of gradual English reform, highlighted by a few key events such as the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and the Reform Act of 1832 (each of which are covered in the section on political change in the United Kingdom). While the functions of policymaking are still officially conducted by “Her Majesty’s Government,” the role of the monarch these days is limited to presiding over the State Opening of Parliament where she gives a speech outlining the government’s agenda in Commons (though the speech is actually written by the prime minister), and inviting a party leader to attempt to form a coalition government and become prime minister if elections result in a hung Parliament, in which no party has received an electoral majority.
The supreme political institution in Britain’s system is its legislature, the Parliament. The British Parliament is composed of two houses: the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The House of Commons today is by far the more significant of the two in modern British politics, so we will begin there.
The 650 members of the House of Commons (called MPs or Members of Parliament) are directly elected by the people in single-member-district plurality elections, with each member running in a specific constituency. Generally, these candidates don’t run from their district of residence; rather they are assigned which constituency to run in by their party leadership. Typically, either the Conservative or Labour Party emerges with a majority of seats in the Commons, at which point that party may “form a government” with the official blessing of the monarch. Many smaller parties will also typically win representation in a few constituencies, and in the most recent election, the Scottish National Party took nearly all of the seats in Scotland. In the event that no party receives a majority, parties must ally together to form a coalition government. The monarch has the power to appoint the leader who will have the first chance to “form a government” by negotiating with smaller parties to make a coalition, though she is expected to begin with the leader of the party that won the most seats. Nearly all major political powers in Britain are concentrated in the House of Commons, and specifically within the party that wins a majority of its seats. The current government is a Conservative and Democratic Unionist coalition led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The House of Commons is the dominant political institution in Britain. The majority party in the House of Commons chooses the prime minister and cabinet to run the government.
The House of Commons chooses the chief executive (the prime minister), and the rest of the government ministers (the Cabinet) who will be leading members of the majority party in the Commons. Many members will serve as junior ministers in the government, while most act as backbenchers—rank-and-file members of the party who do not hold any significant leadership position or responsibility beyond serving their constituency in the Commons. The opposing party will sit directly across from the majority party in the House as the “loyal opposition,” opposing the current government, but loyal to the state and the regime, with the leaders of the opposition in the front row, representing the shadow cabinet—the leaders who would form the government were they to win a majority after the next elections. There is also a speaker of the house who was elected as an MP, but has been chosen by the other MPs to serve in this role. The Speaker renounces his or her party affiliation upon being elected, and serves as a non-partisan moderator of debate in the Commons. One important part of British political culture is a weekly event called “Prime Minister’s Questions,” or PMQs, where the opposition party, backbenchers, and minor party MPs can submit questions to be answered by the prime minister on a live television broadcast. While there is no policymaking at PMQs, it is an important element providing transparency and accountability from the government to the people of Britain.
The House of Lords is known as the “upper house” of Parliament, but it certainly does not play the greater role in modern policymaking. Though it was once the entirety of Parliament, it has taken a backseat to the Commons due to gradual reforms of the British constitution over the last three centuries. There is not a fixed number of members, though presently, there are 788 members. Of these, twenty-six are “Lords Spiritual,” meaning they acquired their place due to their ecclesiastical role in the Church of England. The rest of the Lords are considered “Lords Temporal.” Of the Lords Temporal, ninety-two members are in the Lords as hereditary peers, meaning they inherited their title due to family lineage. The large majority of the House of Lords used to be composed of hereditary peers, but that number was reduced to ninety-two by the House of Lords Act 1999, one of Tony Blair and Labour’s constitutional reforms. The remaining members are called life peers, as they are appointed by the prime minister (with the official appointment performed by the monarch) to serve for life, without passing the title to their heirs, usually as recognition of lifetime achievement and contribution to the United Kingdom.
The monarch and the House of Lords both once exercised supreme political power. Today, they are largely ceremonial.
The powers of the House of Lords are now limited to merely taking up legislation from Commons for debate, which can result in delaying its implementation for up to a year, and amending legislation. Even when the Lords exercise this power to amend a bill, the amendment can be removed by a majority vote in the House of Commons, making this power effectively procedural, rather than substantive. One role the Lords held until 2009 was that of court of last resort, where a committee called the “Law Lords” would act as the highest court of appeals. This power has been transferred to a newly created Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, resulting from the passage of the Constitutional Reform Act of 2005. Although a peer from Lords will occasionally serve as a minister in the government, their power as a political institution is little more these days than as a traditional relic of the past.
Executive power in the United Kingdom is exercised by the prime minister and the cabinet, who are chosen as the leaders of the majority party in the House of Commons.
The prime minister is not the United Kingdom’s ceremonial head of state, but does act as the functional head of government. In governing, he is considered “first among equals” with the cabinet. The prime minister generally exercises quite a bit of control over the legislation coming out of Commons, given his position as majority party leader. That being said, he is subject to removal by a vote of confidence. In former times, this would happen when he presented a key controversial issue to the House and lost on that matter, at which point he and the rest of the government were expected to resign and call for new elections. In modern times, only the express vote on the question “that this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s government” would result in resignation and new elections.
The prime minister commands the loyalty of the majority party and can generally get any legislation he or she recommends passed into law.
While many executive powers are officially held by the monarch, the prime minister exercises them functionally. For example, the Queen is technically the commander in chief, but the prime minister carries the functional power to declare war, and oversees the Defense Council through his appointed Secretary of State for Defense. Much of the prime minister’s power stems from the party loyalty commanded in the House of Commons. There is particularly strong party loyalty in the British House of Commons due to the party’s power to decide which constituency a candidate will run for office from, and to remove MPs from the party. Those MPs are not required to leave the House of Commons, but it does make their next reelection much less likely. This party loyalty makes it highly unlikely that a prime minister will fail to get his initiatives passed through the House.
The British cabinet consists of the prime minister and twenty-two ministers, each of which oversees a major government bureaucracy. The ministers are typically party leaders, elected as MPs in the majority party of the House of Commons, though the occasional Lord is included as well. They are chosen to serve in their post by the prime minister. The cabinet does not vote on questions that come before the House of Commons, but all members publicly support all policies of the government under the principle of collective responsibility. In other words, all cabinet ministers together are collectively responsible for the government’s policies. Traditionally, if a cabinet minister cannot conscionably support a policy of the prime minister, they will resign their cabinet post or risk being “sacked” by the prime minister.
Cabinet ministers are generally subject to heavy influence from the bureaucrats they are supposed to oversee. Since the cabinet members are MPs and leading political figures, they do not generally possess technical expertise in the government ministry they are charged with leading. As a result, the career bureaucrats working under the ministers often shape policy by giving direction to the ministers themselves. Ministers are often reliant upon the top bureaucrats for advice.
Bureaucrats are a powerful political force in Britain. Most bureaucrats make a career of their work and remain in their departments for decades. The cabinet ministers who oversee them, meanwhile, come and go as their political careers advance and decline, and their party’s electoral fortunes unfold. As a result, career bureaucrats develop policy expertise that their “superiors” in the cabinet do not possess. Many bureaucrats are empowered with discretionary power to decide how a particular law or executive branch policy is to be implemented.
Quangos, which were addressed earlier relating to interest groups, also form a piece of the complex British bureaucracy. There are at present 766 quangos in operation in Britain. These bodies are held “at arm’s length” from the government and ministerial agencies, receiving financial support and bureaucratic authority from the government, while at the same time retaining political independence apart from the government in their decision making.
The judiciary of the United Kingdom does not exist in any unified fashion. It is decentralized into judicial systems over England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, each with their own separate legal authority. However, many appellate courts, most notably the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, do have unified jurisdiction to take appeals from the entire United Kingdom.
Common-law systems such as Britain’s place a tremendous importance on precedent and consistency in the interpretation of law, giving judges more interpretive power.
Code-law systems place more emphasis on the specific text of the legal code.
Judges in the United Kingdom have a reputation for independence and legal competence. Few ever serve as MPs or in other political offices, and they are not active in party politics. Most were educated at Oxford, Cambridge, and highly prestigious British public schools, which is the term for elite, independent academic institutions one must pay fees to attend. Judges are also traditionally expected to retire at the age of seventy-five.
The United Kingdom is a common-law legal system, as opposed to a code-law system. Common law is characterized by the adherence to precedent. In other words, the way that courts have applied the law in the past when making decisions should, as often as possible, be the way the law is applied in the future. Many practical laws for how property is transferred, rights of workers, who owns a patent, and so on, are not formally written down in an act of the legislature, but rather come from historical court decisions and case precedents that create the basis of the application of the legal system. This collection of case precedent from British history is referred to as the “common law.”
Code-law systems, by contrast, attempt to write the answers to all potential legal questions into a set of legislative codes to form the basis of the legal system. Code-law systems generally come from states where there is not a long history of precedent from which to draw common law. Britain, meanwhile, having centuries of legal history dating back to the middle ages, has already decided most legal questions in longstanding case precedent.
Courts in the United Kingdom perform the traditional judicial functions of carrying out trials for criminal and civil cases, and for settling legal disputes. They do not, however, traditionally exercise judicial review or constitutional interpretation in the manner that many courts do in other liberal democracies. This is because of a principle of British political culture called parliamentary sovereignty, the idea that final authority should rest with decisions in the democratically elected House of Commons, rather than unelected officials in the judiciary. The courts do have legal authority to rule on constitutionality, or whether acts of Parliament violate British common law, but when they make these rulings, they do so on a very limited, narrow basis, rather than through sweeping, activist declarations that change policy.
While it was a member of the European Union, Britain was bound under the EU’s treaties and laws, and it was incumbent upon the courts to decide when acts of Parliament did not comport with the laws of the EU, though this did not extend to a full power of judicial review. This was part of the logic for the creation of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court, which was empowered to rule on the constitutionality of acts of Parliament in the context of the European Convention on Human Rights and other EU laws. The Supreme Court was created in 2005 to replace the Law Lords, who previously acted as the highest appellate court.
Many of Britain’s current public policy concerns are consistent with those that nearly all relatively wealthy liberal democracies are currently navigating, such as concerns about the aging population and funding the welfare state’s obligations. Others are unique to Britain’s history and political culture. These are a few of the most significant policy debates of recent decades.
After World War II, the Labour government under Clement Atlee established a series of policies meant to provide care to British citizens “from cradle to grave” through the welfare state. One of the most significant of these was the creation of the National Health Service, which centralized all health care provision into a single-payer system with the government providing access to all citizens free of charge. This was financed by progressive taxation and by the operation of state-owned enterprises nationalized during the collectivist consensus. Britain today faces the problems that many developed countries face. Life expectancy is getting ever higher, the “baby-boom” generation is reaching old age, and older people require much more medical attention at a higher cost than younger people. This is putting tremendous strains on the system, leading to budget problems for the state and long wait times for diagnosis and care. Many Conservatives have proposed reforms to add market-based elements into the system, or shifting some of the cost burden away from the state and onto those using medical services, but these reforms often face stiff political resistance.
Tuition is part of the welfare-state structure in Britain, and is heavily subsidized by the state. Until 1998, no university student was charged tuition to attend a school they were accepted into. Demands by the universities for access to more funding combined with a lack of available money except through new taxes led the Labour government to allow universities to charge up to £1000 in 1998, then £3290 in 2010, and now £9250 since 2016. These additional funds paid for by students are supposed to make expansion of the higher education system to more students possible, but many fear that the costs will push higher education out of reach for many middle-class British students.
EU integration has been a topic of intense debate in Britain since the European Community was first imagined. The British have long seen themselves as somehow distinct and different than continental Europe, and they have thus frequently been more resistant to integration from the people of other European countries. This tension is exemplified by two distinctions Britain negotiated in its EU membership. First, Britain joined the EU without joining the European Monetary Union (EMU), meaning they retained use of the Pound, and the Euro is not a valid legal currency in Britain. This is a continuing issue of conflict within Britain, and the Conservative Party is even divided against itself on the matter, with many business interests of the party supporting integration for trade benefits, while the populist right wing opposes any further integration with Europe and backed the Brexit referendum to leave the EU.
The European Union requires freedom of movement across state borders for European citizens to live, work, travel, and retire wherever they so please, but Britain was allowed to restrict immigration and travel into itself. Britain would not accept loss of border control when the Schengen Agreement was being negotiated, but was given a full opt-out in order to keep its membership in the European Union.
The emergence of the U.K. Independence Party as a major political force after 2013 was a sign of the degree to which many British citizens wanted to withdraw from the EU altogether, and David Cameron approved a referendum on the question of Britain’s continued membership in the EU in 2016. Fifty-two percent of the British voted “leave” in the Brexit referendum. Cameron resigned as prime minister.
Just less than two decades ago, the issue of terrorism in Britain was confined to discussion of activities of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other anti-Unionist forces in Northern Ireland. The conflict in Northern Ireland was resolved by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement negotiated by Tony Blair, which led to the cessation of hostilities and the creation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, in addition to other devolved regional parliaments. Today, Britain is much more concerned with the threat of Islamic extremism both abroad and inside of Britain. The most significant terrorist attack in Britain occurred in 2005 when four British suicide bombers attacked the London transit system, killing 56 civilians. In 2017, there were four more horrific attacks. In three of the incidents, Islamic extremists drove vehicles into crowds of pedestrians. In another incident, a suicide bomber killed 22 and injured 139 victims at Manchester Arena as people were leaving a concert. Other terrorist attacks were attempted but failed or were foiled in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2012, and 2013.
British policymakers have tried to deal with this problem with new security measures, including broader surveillance in public places, and an educational program designed to dissuade young Muslims, who are one of the fastest growing segments of the British population, against the use of violence. This prompted criticism of the manner in which Muslims were being “singled-out” as potential perpetrators by a society that aspires to treat everyone equally before the law. Balancing security against the desire to have an inclusive society remains a difficult issue for modern Britain.
The decision to devolve many powers to local parliaments and national assemblies had made it increasingly realistic for Scotland to assert its ability to govern itself, and Scottish nationalists have been pushing for independence with growing support. In 2014, the Scottish Parliament under a Scottish National Party government staged a referendum on the question “Should Scotland be an independent country?” In the end, approximately 55 percent of voters voted “No,” keeping Scotland firmly within the United Kingdom, but the general election in 2015 saw the Scottish National Party win fifty-six of fifty-eight seats in the House of Commons from Scotland.
Although the SNP did not perform as well in the 2017 elections, the Brexit referendum renewed questions of Scotland’s future in the United Kingdom. Whereas a majority of voters voted “leave” across Britain, 62 percent of Scottish voters voted “remain.” Depending on how Britain’s negotiations proceed, Scotland may again one day consider independence in order to continue its relationship with the EU.
*Note: Terms with an asterisk (*) are those that consistently appear on the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam as tested concepts.
Political power in Great Britain is most concentrated in
Which of the following features best characterizes British political culture?
Tony Blair and the New Labour movement most directly influenced Labour Party policy in which of the following ways?
The modernization of the concept of noblesse oblige is most evident in
Which of the following best characterizes the nations of the United Kingdom?
In Britain, the prime minister
Britain’s SMD plurality election system
Unlike Britain’s national election system, elections to regional parliaments in Britain
MPs are unlikely to vote against the position of their party leadership because
One of the purposes for the creation of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom was to