How does the UK's government work?

Factual Questions
41

Judicial review is expensive, rare, and doesn’t often succeed, not least because the courts don’t see it as their role to overturn the will of parliament, expressed in Bills passed. Nothing parliament does is illegal because parliament is the supreme arbiter of its own actions. Hanging over this, however, is the spectre of Factortame, which is the closest the courts have so far come to directing the parliament to change its legislation.

Impeachment theoretically still could happen here, but hasn’t for centuries and is seen as obsolete.

Although the timing of the election is a matter for the Prime Minister, in practice various milestones on the political calendar usually limit his room for manoeuvre, to the point that most commentators successfully predicted the date of last year’s election twelve months in advance.

42

Thanks to Revenant Threshold, Mr. Kobayashi and UDS for your answers.

830?!? Holy shit! We Americans have enough trouble keeping track of 535!

43

a <nitpick> and a question

<nitpick> Boehner is Speaker
Question-Who was monarch when the evolution to figurehead happened, or at least began?

44

The most decisive point was probably the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Parliament essentially told James II he was no longer King and gave the job to his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. Two points were established; that Parliament could remove a sitting monarch and that it could raise a new monarch to the throne. (The Stuarts, which some people have mentioned in this thread, are the successors of the deposed James.)

45

This is also American history, since they were your monarch at the time (I see you live in Massachusetts). Having said that I didn’t get taught much about it at school here in Britain.

46

The convention that the PM has to be an MP has been around for most of the last century, but you don’t have to be an MP to be in the cabinet.

Members of the House of Lords can be in the cabinet, and sometimes people from outside parliament are parachuted into the Lords so that they can join the cabinet. This happened with David / Lord Young when he joined the cabinet in the 1980s, and Peter Mandelson when Brown brought him back to the cabinet in 2008.

47

Sorry if I’ve overlooked someone saying this already but this isn’t entirely a silly question, if I’ve understood it correctly.

I think the OP was distinguishing between elected officials and elected representatives. MPs, members of the Welsh Assembly, councillors etc are elected representatives. But in the UK we don’t have elected officials - in the USA you have elections for things like railway commissioner, sanitation inspector (there’s a Simpsons episode about that), police commissioner etc. We don’t have this in the UK, such officials are appointed by the relevant branch of local or central government.

We don’t even have many directly elected mayors, and the few there are have only been around for about 12 years.

48

Of course, if Cameron gets his way, there will be directly elected police commissioners.

49

That’s true. Although I do think it would be pushing things to have a member of the Lords in any of the four “great offices of state” (PM, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer). Last one I recall is Lord Carrington, Thatcher’s first Foreign Secretary.

On the subject of foreigner’s ignorance, I don’t see why they should be expected to know anything beyond understanding that Britain has an elected parliament, and hopefully some vague realisation that no, the Queen is not actually in charge. I don’t remember ever being taught anything about foreign governments when I was at school, and how many Brits could tell you much about the structure of US or German government, say?

50

A majority may also be lost by a process of attrition as over the course of time MPs die or resign for non political reasons (eg illness*). When an MP dies or resigns a new election (Byelection) will be called in their constituency, very often this goes against the incumbent government and they lose the seat.

  • In the situation where a government is struggling with an increasingly small majority it has been known for MPs who are actually dying to stay in office and continue to vote so that the government can continue in power, even when this means they are literally being wheeled into the House of Commons and into the voting lobbies. This was the case with the Callaghan government in the late seventies (the Labour governent preceding Thatcher). It doesn’t create a good impression.
51

Yes, but as you rightly acknowledge, in theory the courts have traditionally had no power to question Parliament on the substance of policy. The role of the courts in the UK is not to uphold a constitution but to uphold Parliament’s will. They have no role comparable to the US Supreme Court, which can strike down completely legitimately-created laws on the grounds that they’re unconstitutional. (The HRA might be changing this a bit in the UK but that’s a complicated issue).

[QUOTE=Quartz]
As explained upthread we have two. The House of Lords is essentially a revising body, but Parliamentary time is limited so if the Lords objects, it is taken very seriously.
[/QUOTE]

I know. But the reality is that if a majority in the Commons is determined to pass a bill, the House of Lords can’t stop them. The maximum the Lords can do is delay it. That’s what happened with the ban on fox-hunting - the Lords were fiercely opposed to the ban throughout the entire debate, and they still are, but it passed anyway. That’s a sharp contrast to the US where not only can the Senate kill a bill dead, but in practice they don’t even need a majority to kill it - just 40 senators out of 100 can do the trick.

It’s not a perfect comparison but I maintain a good way of thinking about the UK’s system is that it would be comparable to the US House of Representatives alone creating and repealing laws, with no President, Senate or Supreme Court review.

52

The biggest problem with a parliamentary system is that it can end up either of two ways-

If the ruling party has a majority, the prime minister is essentially a dictator for 5 years. The only thing that can stop him is if he/she gets carried away and does something sufficiently unpopular that their own MP’s rebel and turf him. (IIRC, isn’t this what happened to Thatcher?)

The other danger is that nobody gets a majority, and so nobody wants to make a tough decision. The ruling party has to make those tough decisions with the threat that at any moment there could be opposition parties who either vote against the government on principle or read the polls and vote opportunistically. A minority is often also a trap for the second or third party - if they are blamed for causing an election instead of getting along and passing reasonable legislation, they suffer in that election; so parliamentary maneuvering is often as much about optics and twisting the “political truth” as about actual government.

As mentioned earlier, the party whip keeps members in line. Basically, yes, you have to be into that sort of discipline to be in parliament. A finance bill, and any other bill the government defines as a confidence item, plus “motions of confidence”, a government MUST win. Otherwise, a defeated government must resign. If it’s been real early, technically the queen (or her representative, in Canada the governor general) might appoint the next biggest party to be government. In fact, it usually boils down to an election… Again half the election is spent arguing over whose fault it was that we are having a repeat in such a short time. But - because a wrong vote at the wrong time can trigger an election and possibly lose the MP his seat if his party is down in the polls, there is a strong incentive to toe the party line. Plus, in Canada at least, tax laws about political giving etc. are strongly biased in favour of the big political parties that designed those laws, rather than for individual politicians.

Finally, an MP is nominated by his riding organization (usually about 500 or less people have paid $10 to be party members, unless the seat is a hot commodity), rather than the public at large. IIRC it takes about 200 signatures and $1500 to register as a candidate. Anyone can run, and I have seen ballots that included up to 7 or 8 names, including independant and Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). The central party leadership has to sign off on a candidate’s aprty affiliation, so again it’s a balancing act between the top and the grass roots - if a candidate is objectionable, the party can refuse to allow them to run as their candidate, but can stop them then from running as an independent. This could result in the independent winning anyways, or at least, splitting the vote so the other party wins.

IIRC there are about 630 members of parliament in the UK, vs. say 308 in Canada. I think of this as an advantage. In Canada, a majority is say, about 160 to 170 members. 50 to 70 make up the cabinet ministers, their assistants, committee chairs, whip, etc - all jobs handed out by the PM’s office. That leaves less than 100 members who are just backbenchers. maybe 50 to 75 of those are up-and-comers trying to behave and look good so that they might get the higher jobs in the next shuffle. Only about 25 or so realize they are going nowhere and being ignored for whatever reason to speak out against the party line and try to reign in excesses of the prime misinster and his ilk. (most such objecting is done in private, in closed caucus sessions).

In the UK, the same math - 350 in a majority, 60 to 70 in special positions, and say, 100 who hope they are on the ladder up - leaves 150 to 200 backbenchers who realize they are going nowhere and able to raise objections and dissent about party policy, to keep the party from implementing too unpopular a policy. Caucus revolts and real feedback are more likely in the UK.

53

You’re forgetting something mentioned above: along the Atlantic coast, what is now the USA was under this system from the reign of James VI / I* until 1776 (or 1783, depending). To understand the US government, it is important to understand the system they came from and rejected. When I was in school, it was all about how bad a king George III was, but you’ll note our revolution was nearly 100 years after the Glorious Revolution, and yet we heard nothing about Parliament. The cry “taxation without representation!” was taught, but it didn’t make much sense. When I was a kid, I thought the colonists wanted the right to send the king ambassadors or something.

*I’m not counting explorations under Elizabeth I, only from Jamestown on.

54

I had a term in history class in high school in Canada which was basically about parliament - more like civics. The whole gamut was covered - bills, committees, 3 readings, majority and confidence votes, senate, governor general and queen, etc. and especially Roberts Rules of Order. Plus, we’ve had umpteen occasions like the constiitutional repatriation and various minority government shenanigans where the news has to explain the mechanics of what’s going on. Particularly, for example when the opposition parties tried to gang up and ask the governer general to depose the prime minister and make their coalition the new government of Canada without an election - there was much discussion of the technicalities of parliamentary procedures. However, you will still find many people who like the DMV example above do not know where the federal government stops and the provincial government takes over.

Similarly, I suspect unless you have had a really good civics class or love listening to real (boring) news like CSpan, many Americans do not know exactly how their government works. My impression is that a lot is ad-hoc or recently made up, like the fake-filibuster rules in the senate, the committees that hammer out compatible legislation between the house and senate versions, and now a super-committee.