British Politics: The Basics

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British Politics: The Basics

British Politics: The Basics

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There’s a famous misquote from the Duke of Wellington that the Battle of Waterloo was “won of the playing fields of Eton”; that the generation who fought at Waterloo learned the values that enabled their victory at their public school, and specifically on the sports grounds, not in the classroom. The idealised tradition of the British public school education is that more than educating pupils to be great intellectuals or academics (which was not a priority; even now, Eton’s exam results are good but not outstanding), it raised young men who held values of courage, determination, and a readiness to take not only power but responsibility – or to put it another way, producing Gryffindors, not Ravenclaws. There are currently 11 political parties with seats in the House of Commons. Below is a brief overview of each one. Conservative Party The prime minister and cabinet 15 Ministers and civil servants 16 Policy-making in British government Yes, Minister is fantastic for understanding British politics in two ways. First of all, it shines a light on all the obstacles and delays that prevent ministers from putting promised legislation into place, demonstrating how even a government with a strong majority might falter in seeing its manifesto promises through.

To stand as a candidate in a UK general election, you must be at least 18 years old and a citizen of either the UK, Ireland, or a Commonwealth country that has a right to reside in the UK. Certain groups are disqualified from standing, including members of the police or armed forces, civil servants, and people with bankruptcy restrictions. Sinn Féin (meaning “We Ourselves” in Irish) is an Irish political party founded in 1905 when the whole of Ireland was under British rule. It is active in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, with the current form of the party in operation since 1970. The UK has three separate legal systems: one for England and Wales, one for Scotland, and one for Northern Ireland. However, judges in some of the highest level courts such as the Supreme Court have UK-wide jurisdiction. The party’s ideology is a mix of traditional liberalism and social democracy. It favors a market-based economy, supported by a strong welfare state. It also supports civil liberties, LGBT rights, European integration, and a shift to proportional representation voting. Members of the UK Parliament are elected in General Elections, which typically take place every five years. To vote in a General Election you must be:This chapter seeks to set the scene of the British political system by explaining briefly how its major elements – voting, parties, the media and so forth – interact with each other. This provides an over-arching introduction to the more detailed explanations which follow in subsequent chapters. Although the UK voted to leave the EU, both Scotland and Northern Ireland had majority votes for remain. Some political parties, such as the SNP, have pledged to rejoin the EU if their country wins independence from the UK. The state of the economy in the UK The leader of the Conservative party, Rishi Sunak, is Prime Minister of the UK. Sunak has held this position since October 2022 when he won the party leadership contest after the previous Prime Minister, Liz Truss, resigned. Another challenge to this classic view comes from the ‘ideational turn’ in studies of politics. Scholars have shown how politics is as much about contestation over ways of framing or narrating policy problems, as it is about struggles over distribution. Of course, the two may not be easily distinguishable: different ways of framing problems may have profound consequences for distribution. But the point is that politics is a battle of ideas, in which participants attempt to control the narrative through tapping deep-rooted values and beliefs, rather than invoking objective self-interest. This recognition of the importance of narratives chimes with debates on ‘fake news’ and the potential for significant divergence in the way rival political groups frame policy issues.

Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, held every five years, where voters choose MPs using the Additional Member System ( AMS) form of proportional representation. Sort of. The United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy. This means that while a monarch – in this case, Queen Elizabeth II – is the head of state, she is not the head of government. She does not get to make most of the decisions about how the government is run; that job belongs to the Prime Minister, or PM. DEVOLUTION These major decentralising reforms were made in response to the growth of nationalist movements in Wales and Scotland. IRELAND Extinction Rebellion UK, part of the wider global environmental movement, has been the most well-known activist group in the past few years. The group has staged non-violent protests to draw attention to the climate emergency. This led to MPs declaring a climate emergency in parliament in 2019.

Although the UK was predicted to vote to remain in the EU, and the Conservatives campaigned on a remain platform, the country voted to leave the union by 52% to 48% on 23 June 2016. The UK finally left the EU on 31 December 2020 after a short transition period. The Brexit issue has stoked up tensions among the British public and has also inflamed anti-immigrant sentiments in the UK. Just one week before the referendum vote, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered on the streets of Yorkshire by a far-right terrorist shouting “keep Britain independent”. Lifting the lid on how things work from the newsrooms to Number 10 Downing Street, Dunt utilises interviews from those inside to show exactly how things work, and how we can go about starting to fix them.



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