British Politics: The Basics

Bill Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415835718, 9780415835695
• eBook ISBN: 9781317309666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the last two decades British politics has undergone a remarkable transformation. While some components of the system have been eroded, such as voter turnout and membership of the big parties, other parts have flourished, such as nationalist parties, the insurgent UKIP, as well as the new media.

British Politics: The Basics analyses these changes and places them within the context of the evolution of British society from absolute monarchy to representative democracy. It considers each of the major components of British politics, such as the Monarchy and the House of Lords, the Commons, voting behaviour, parties and pressure groups, the Prime Minister and Cabinet, devolution, local government, and foreign policy. Its contents include coverage of recent events such as the Scottish Referendum and the 2015 General Election.

This readable and comprehensive introduction will be of key interest to A-level students, undergraduates and those new to the study of British politics.

I

INTRODUCTION

1

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BRITISH POLITICAL SYSTEM

The British political system is the product of an extraordinary evolution, from Anglo-Saxon times to the twentieth century, when our present structure essentially emerged. From absolute monarchy to representative democracy in a millennium and a half would not be too bad an approximation of the transition involved. The history and ancient nature of this process tell us the British are a conservative people, slow to change and keen to hang on, even with a degree of nostalgia, to outdated symbols of our monarchical past, like the annual opening of Parliament and the ceremony attending the Queen’s Speech.

THE WITAN

The story begins with the Anglo-Saxon Witangemot – or Witan – itself probably related to the German assemblies or folkmoots from whence our islands’ then immigrant inhabitants originated. This King’s Council, comprising the most powerful people in the kingdom, including senior clergy, was very much the creature of the monarch. He decided on its composition; it was summoned at his command, he presided over its proceedings and it was dismissed by him as well. It also has to be realised that in a disunited land, there was more than one Witan.

But the Witans did accrete to themselves certain important functions. While the Witan usually had little influence on royal succession, it did issue a formal approval of a new monarch. In 1013 Aethelread was called back from exile by the Witan and re-established as monarch after the death of the Danish King, Sweyn Forkbeard. The Witan also proffered advice to the King and the King was expected to listen respectfully to its views on taxation and what laws should be passed. But this tradition of seeking the Witan’s advice on revenue and the law, as well as legitimation of the succession, was the crucible of what later matured into democratic parliamentary government.

CURIA REGIS

The Normans’ eleventh-century invasion destroyed much of the Anglo-Saxon heritage but their own ‘King’s Council’, the Curia Regis, effectively continued the tradition of the Witan and, indeed, strengthened it, coming to deal with all the functions of government, whether law-making (legislative), policy implementation (executive) or interpretation and enforcement of the law (judicial). Crucially it took on two incarnations: a large assembly of all the King’s landholders plus his officers, which met when summoned; and a smaller version in permanent session, which included his chief officers of the state, or, if we prefer, his ministers. This smaller curia, was in effect the King’s court, which was not static but moved around the kingdom with him. So here we see the embryo of the King’s government or executive and, in its wider form, of parliament.

LORDS AND COMMONS MEET SEPARATELY

At the time of Magna Carta, when the nobles forced King John to moderate his rule, he agreed to expand his council to include more ordinary people or commoners, though in practice they were drawn from the landed gentry, business people and lawyers. Representatives were drawn from the shires and the centres of population, and eventually this entailed some form of election. During the fourteenth century this speaking assembly, or ‘parliament’, began to meet separately: the nobility in what became known as the House Lords and the commoners in the House of Commons. King John had also been obliged to submit his proposals for taxation to this parliament and, over time, it became the lower house which acquired precedence in this respect. This ability to control the source and extent of the nation’s finances was the crucial lever used by parliament to extract recognised rights regarding its powers and functions.

PARLIAMENT’S AUTHORITY INCREASES

The Hundred Year War was substantially funded by grants from parliament and its authority grew in consequence. Its power increased still more when Henry VIII used it to legitimise his break from Rome, his establishment of a separate church and his looting of the monasteries. Henry was still, however, in the sixteenth century, the very image of the absolute monarch, able to oversee and command every aspect of his 1000-strong court, served by brilliant commoners like Thomas Wolsey (father a butcher) and Thomas Cromwell (father a blacksmith); and he was able to pick and choose wives from his court (even when they were already married) as well as frame them and others who had lost his favour (like the afore-mentioned Cromwell) in order to execute them. However, after the reign of Elizabeth I the power of the monarch began to wane. Charles I, denied much-needed funds by parliament, tried to rule without it, resulting in the so-called Long Parliament, when he refused to convene it after 1640 (it finally came to an end long after the Civil War – in 1660).

CIVIL WAR, 1640–49

It now seems remarkable that it happened, but a parliament with a powerful sense of grievance, and led by the extraordinary Oliver Cromwell, rose up against Charles, raised and trained its own army and defeated the serried ranks of royal cavaliers and their professional troops. Some aristocrats sided with parliament, though most stayed true to their class and supported the King against what has been described as a kind of middle-class revolution. Having been defeated in the first Civil War (1642–45), the King escaped to lead another charge at parliament’s forces (1648–49); after a second defeat he was tried for treason and beheaded January 1649.

IDEAS AND CIVIL WAR, 1642–49

Political ideas about government seemed to polarise during the Civil War. Charles sought to adduce the merits of ‘absolute monarchy’ on the grounds that the King was appointed by God and therefore was beyond criticism or any judgement by mere parliamentary mortals. For their part, the multifaceted forces arrayed against him allowed their thoughts to embrace a wide range of alternative forms of government and society at the 1647 Putney Debates. The Levellers movement, for instance, sought: popular sovereignty, one man one vote, equality before the law and tolerance of differing religious beliefs. Cromwell and his army supporters balked at such radicalism and suppressed these flights of fancy, yet it is possible to discern the first emergence at this time of the ideas which later created the representative democracy which has governed Britain since the early twentieth century.

GLORIOUS REVOLUTION, 1688–89

The restored monarchy discovered it was very much not business as usual. The monarchy had been bested by a body with some claim to represent the country and from now on monarchs ignored public sentiment at their peril. Consequently, the attempts of James II to introduce Catholicism to what was now, largely, a Protestant nation repelled the political class in his own country. William of Orange was approached by seven leading politicians – Whig and Tory – and invited to overthrow his father-in-law. This was an astonishing act of treason from one point of view, but it is always the victors who write the history and, in 1689, William proceeded to become such a person, and with the minimum of bloodshed. On 11 April 1689, William and his wife, Mary, were crowned King and Queen, but they had accepted the Declaration of Rights, subsequently embodied in the Bill of Rights, which effectively gave parliament the final say in making the law of the land. The historic importance of this ‘Glorious’ revolution is that it opened the door to genuine democratic government through a generally – though imperfect – representative parliamentary assembly.

THE HANOVERIAN DYNASTY

As Queen Anne had no heir, a great-grandson of William I was invited – a second imported monarch – to rule Britain, in addition to his native Hanover. While he preferred his homeland to these damp shores and never really learnt the language, his dynasty dominated the century, with his son and grandson becoming George II and George III, respectively. George I was happy to leave governing to his ministers, all of whom were Members of Parliament.

THE FIRST PRIME MINISTER

George I communicated with his committee of ministers, or cabinet, as it had come to be called, via the most senior finance minister. For a long time this key intermediary was the First Lord of the Treasury, Robert Walpole: initially called the first ‘prime minister’, with an irony destined soon to disappear as Walpole came to dominate the mid-eighteenth-century government of the country. He was followed by a number of exceptional talents, especially Pitt the Elder and his son, Pitt the Younger, who became prime minister in 1783 at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four.

POLITICAL PARTIES

Inevitably, if a large number of people in an assembly hold substantial power, they will seek to group together the better to win votes. In the eighteenth century, the two main groupings were the Whigs and the Tories.

THE WHIGS

This group was formed in the late seventeenth century, when it resisted the Catholicism of James II, but became associated thereupon with Nonconformity, the industrial interest and reform. They dominated during the century via the so-called Whig ‘junto’, which lasted until the Tories took the lead under Pitt the Younger. The Whigs went on to form the basis of the Liberal Party in the nineteenth century.

THE TORIES

This group supported James II after 1680. Although they accepted the Glorious Revolution, they then supported the ‘Jacobite’ ‘Pretenders’ to the throne; as a result, they stayed out of power until the reign of George III.

PATRONAGE

This was a crucial means of controlling power in the eighteenth century; it was used by the aristocracy and the monarch to control personnel in the Commons and to reward supporters from all walks of life. The monarch owned over 100 offices, as well as many sinecures, pensions and contracts – monarchs could therefore deploy their largesse in such a way as to advance their own policies. The large landowners used their power of appointment to help determine who sat in the Commons via the ‘rotten boroughs’ and ‘pocket boroughs’ that were in their gift.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The twentieth-century philosopher and historian Bertrand Russell argued that Descartes initiated this intellectual movement in Europe in the seventeenth century with his individualistic assertion that ‘I think, therefore I am’: a tacit rebuttal of the religious and feudal ideas of his age. The ferment of ideas called the Enlightenment which swept through Europe in the eighteenth century arguably began in the late seventeenth century in Britain with the advance of science: Isaac Newton and thinkers like Thomas Hobbes. Essentially, Enlightenment thinkers applied the tests of reason and humanity to existing social, economic and political conditions and came up with answers fundamentally challenging traditional assumptions about religion, the role of the individual and relationships between state and citizen.

In France, Voltaire flayed the ancien régime with his wit and rational critiques; his works and those of similar writers affected the intellectual atmosphere in which all political activity took place. Freedom of speech and movement, tolerance of differing views and beliefs, the sanctity of the individual and the reality of people’s basic rights plus the obligations of the state to the citizen were all ideas picked up and applied in Britain by the likes of John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume and Tom Paine. Baron Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment thinker, contributed the idea of the ‘separation of powers’: the idea that the three functions of government – legislative, judicial and executive (making laws, interpreting laws and implementing them, respectively) – should be embodied in separate institutions, thus balancing each other’s power and preventing tyranny by any single centre.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic the framers of the US constitution produced their classic Enlightenment document – the American constitution – built around the same notion of the separation of powers. All this ferment of ideas and activity created a sense in which the British form of government, already praised for its emphasis on liberty, was ripe for further reform.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1789

Events in France had a huge impact on encouraging reform and a movement for democracy throughout Europe.

Bliss it was . . . to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven.

So wrote the young poet William Wordsworth (The Prelude, 1805) of the French Revolution, which began in 1789. While the course of the Revolution took much of the passion out of the reform movement, ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ were ideas which, thanks to the likes of Tom Paine, crossed the Channel. Such thinkers helped to advance the idea that individual citizens had the right to help determine how they were governed, rather than by a hereditary monarchy or by religious ideas. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, dissatisfaction grew at the need for constitutional reform in Britain. Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt was just one of the radical voices causing a stir among the working classes in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In August 1819 he headed up to Manchester to give a speech now immortalised in history.

THE PETERLOO MASSACRE

This famous event occurred when Hunt addressed 60,000 people assembled to support the idea that the new industrial towns should be granted representation by MPs. As Martin Wainwright wrote in The Guardian on the 188th anniversary of the event (13 August 2007):

Less than 2% of the population had the vote at the time, and resentment was sharpened by ‘rotten boroughs’ such as the moribund Wiltshire village of Old Sarum which had 11 vo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• British Politics: The Basics
• The Basics
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The Political Context
• Part III The Mediating Agencies
• Part IV The Legislature
• Part V The Executive
• Part VI Sub-National Government
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index