British Politics: The Basics

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Sadly, the most recent edition was published in 2000 and is unlikely to meet the needs of students starting their degree today, while the previous edition was published in 1991, and was a set text on my own undergraduate degree. In practice, several government departments and ministers have responsibilities that cover England alone, with devolved bodies having responsibility for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, (for example – the Department of Health), or responsibilities that mainly focus on England (such as the Department for Education). The Scottish National Party (SNP) have 56 seats in the House of Commons and the Scottish Government is responsible for running day-to-day matters in Scotland such as education, transport, and health. Rather like a Haynescar manual they often adeptly explain how the machine operates without considering the impact of whoever is driving it.

Key political parties are The Ulster Unionist Party, Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Féin, and Social Democratic and Labour Party. It had a solitude structure covering all major themes, tables and graphs to suggest fact-based analysis. The powers are delegated from the monarch personally, in the name of the Crown, and can be handed to various ministers, or other officers of the Crown, and can purposely bypass the consent of Parliament.

Only a genuine expert could explain successfully its significance within a broader understanding of the Basics of that politics. Short on facts, more opinion than one expects from such books, and a lot of it unsubstantiated, that even I could disprove. The advantage of books with multiple authors is that individual chapters are usually contributed by experts on each subject. The republican southern part of Ireland became Republic of Ireland (also known as Éire), leaving Northern Ireland part of the union.

In practice, this means that the leader of the political party with an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons is chosen to be the Prime Minister. If no party has an absolute majority, the leader of the largest party is given the first opportunity to form a coalition. She also startled the UK’s commentators by appointing the three leading Leave campaigners to senior cabinet posts in charge of the Brexit process: Boris Johnson as foreign secretary, David Davis as secretary for the ‘Department for Exiting the European Union’ (DxEU) and Liam Fox to International Trade (DIT). He shared with an ecstatic 2015 party conference the following thoughts: “I really believe we’re on the brink of something special … We can make this era – these 2010s – a defining decade for our country … one which people will look back on and say: ‘That’s the time when the tide turned.These are very welcome additions and reflect a broader focus on British society and to some extent the inequalities which underpin it, rather than simply focusing on the political process. While most will provide an introduction to the principal actors and institutions of the British political system they can, at times, read like guidebooks or manuals, which explain how the system works but not why it operates in a particular way. Before the Labour Party rose in British politics, the Liberal Party was the other major political party, along with the Conservatives. Moreover, while nobody sits down and reads a textbook in one sitting, books by a single author can sometimes display a coherence and consistency of purpose which can make them more readable than those written by multiple authors.