British Politics

British Politics provides an introduction to British politics with an emphasis on political science to analyse the fundamental features of British politics, and the key changes post-Brexit. Part A looks at constitutional and institutional foundations of the subject. Chapters in this part look at leadership and debating politics and law creation. The second part is about political behaviour and citizenship. Here chapters consider elections, the media, agenda setting, and political turbulence. The final part is about policy-making and delegation. The chapters in this part examine interest groups, advocacy, policy-making, governing through bureaucracy and from below, delegating upwards, and British democracy now.

1. The Starting Point

This chapter discusses what makes British politics distinctive and recognizable: its parliamentary democracy, uncodified constitution, and pattern of party government. It begins by outlining some recent events that have made British or UK politics so fascinating and controversial. The chapter then describes the political system, particularly the institutional rules that affect what happens and govern how politics takes place. Parliament, composed of the House of Commons, House of Lords, and the Crown, is the supreme legal authority in the UK. The chapter also provides a summary of the British constitution. It places the UK in a comparative context, to be studied alongside other nation states. Finally, the chapter sets out the information and concepts that help in understanding the nature of and limits to British democracy.

6. The Media and Agenda-Setting

This chapter addresses media in politics, including newspapers, television, the internet, and social media. It seeks to answer the question of how influential the media is over politics, in areas such as voting behaviour. This discussion gives a broad overview of politics and the media, about the agenda of politics and its framing, and what shapes it. The chapter then covers the classic question of the influence of the media in British politics. It also considers the importance of social media, and how it is now part of all media today, especially in relation to elections and referendums. Finally, the chapter looks at media and social media campaigning in elections. It introduces the concept of chaotic pluralism as a way of characterizing today's social media-dominated and fluid political environment.

11. Conclusion

This concluding chapter presents a summary of the common themes and key points about British politics, which help make sense of current events, such as whether turbulence and instability now characterize British politics, and whether democracy can work well in these conditions. It provides a table containing summaries of each chapter, which relate to the themes of the book: party government and executive power, political turbulence, blunders/policy disasters, and the difficulties of achieving agency. With these and other insights, it is possible to assess whether there is anything left for traditional understandings of British democracy or whether the country is in uncharted waters, without any clearly understood democratic mechanisms and not capable of producing effective policy outcomes. Overall, how does Britain fare as a democracy with its old and new features? The chapter then looks at the debate about the quality of UK democracy.

9. Governing from Below

This chapter studies a key aspect of delegation in British politics: decentralization and local/national self-government. It deals with local government in England, and government in the devolved territories/nations of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Decentralization in British politics has formed into a complex pattern, where there are different dynamics in the various territories: relative centralization in England, power-sharing in Northern Ireland, pragmatic devolution in Wales, and then a strong push towards independence in Scotland. For a question about how centralized or decentralized British politics is, the answer would need to be based on where a person lives, with England rehearsing the conventional arguments about constitutional centralization and the rest of the country increasing decentralization, if not a form of federalism. The chapter then assesses the question of the rationale and general stability of the system, with respect to the integrity of the UK as a whole.

10. Delegating Upwards

This chapter highlights the challenges presented by international politics. Much of what happens in British politics occurs because of Britain's relationship to the international stage. Relationships to other states, international bodies, and the international economy need to be managed by the UK's political leaders and foreign and defence bureaucracies, to manage how to deploy Britain's voice in international matters. Then there is the delegation of powers to international organizations and the making of treaties. The chapter specifically examines foreign policy and focuses on how functions are delegated to international organizations. It tells the story of the European Union (EU) as one of the most important international delegations culminating in the story of Brexit. This leads to a discussion of the UK's defence and security role. One key theme of the chapter is how success and failure in international politics feed back into domestic politics.

Parliamentary Representation: Should MPs Prioritise Their Own Views or Those of Their Voters?

The 2016 European Union referendum revealed fundamental divisions in British politics and society more broadly. It also raised key questions around representation and the role of Members of Parliament. Should they follow their own judgement or their constituents’ preferences when the two are not aligned? This study uses data from the Representative Audit of Britain Survey to examine what parliamentary candidates believe the answer to this question should be. We find that most candidates expect Members of Parliament to prioritise their own views. This belief is particularly prevalent among incumbents and those who do not think of Members of Parliament as career politicians. We also find a gender effect as male candidates are more likely to think that Members of Parliament should prioritise their own views than female candidates. Interestingly, however, there is no evidence of a Brexit effect when we compare the views of 2015 and 2017 general election candidates.

Creating a ‘Pure and Simple Despotism’

This chapter seeks to locate the political economy of conquest within a wider context of British politics in the age of transoceanic global conflict. The Second Anglo-Maratha War was both the most extensive project of military conquest as well as the least debated colonial misadventure. This war—the most ambitious project of military conquest of the long eighteenth century—was also a secret war. The orderly flow of information about a growing list of subjects—the financial health of the Company, political negotiations with Indian polities, military projects—had become a vital part of early colonial rule. Imperial governance relied on the availability of this information to such an extent that when its transmission was disrupted by/under Richard Wellesley, tectonic shifts in the EIC’s bid for hegemony could not be critically scrutinized. The structures that constituted a distinctive early colonial order—ideological privileging of the military over the civilian, elaborating a legal framework for conquest, nourishing a machine of war, restructuring the hierarchies of power, reconceptualization of land as territory yielding revenue—were animated in the war against the Marathas. The financial exhaustion wreaked by the war typified the political economy of conquest that created an early colonial order in South Asia.