Lecture 3 The British Political System an Overview



Lecture 3 The British Political System an Overview

Some Terminology

The State and Government

Parliamentary Systems

Presidential Systems

Unitary vs. Federal State

Separation vs. Fusion of Powers

British Social and Political Culture

Dominant Political Culture

Challenges

1. Terminology

a) The state and the government

I have mentioned before that there is a strong distinction between the state and the government and I’m going to spend a little bit of time fleshing this out so that hopefully some of the more subtle distinctions have meaning.

What is the state?

Different Interpretations:

"The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" K. Marx, (1848), The Communist Manifesto

"The state benefits and it threatens. Now it is us and them. It is an abstraction, but in its name men are jailed or made rich ... or killed in wars" M. Edelman, (1964), The Symbolic Uses of Politics

"The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified. Any state more extensive violates peoples rights" R. Nozick (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia

Think about what these different comments mean.

When we talk about the state we are commonly referring to the modern state not the ancien regimes of the past.

The modern state establishes itself in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries.

The most commonly cited description of the state is given to us by a German social theorist Max Weber (1864 - 1920) and he said that having a monopoly of the legitimate use of force is what distinguishes the state from non-state institutions.

Of course non-state institutions can exercise force. The Mafia for example is an institution, which exerts force - but we do not consider it to be legitimate.

Government is best understood as the process of making rules, controlling guiding or regulating. In western political systems like ours, government is sort of synonymous with elected ministers in charge of departments like the treasury, MAFF, defence and so on. Government in some ways is intrinsic to human societies, all human societies have some form of government.

The state by contrast is not intrinsic to human society - there are according to some anthropologists some stateless societies where the business of government is carried on in the name of one person or a group of persons. But, the idea of the modern state is a peculiar form of governance with a number of characteristics.

1. The state is separate from society - distinct public and private spheres.

2. The state is sovereign, or the supreme power within its territory with the legitimate use of force at it disposal.

3. The states sovereignty extends to all within a given territory, even to those employed by the state including government ministers and officials.

4. The personnel of the state are recruited and trained in a bureaucratic manner.

5. The state has the power to tax in order to finance activities on behalf of the population.

This is a very standard definition and one, which is subject to many criticisms and arguments. You will gradually find like most things that defining the state and the government depends on how you look at the world.

As a recent theorist if the state Theda Skocpol (1985) puts it

‘The state properly conceived is a set of administrative policing and military organisations headed by an executive authority...Any state first and fundamentally extracts resources from society and deploys those to create and support coercive and administrative organisations ... the[se] administrative and coercive organisations are the basis of state power’

2. Presidential and Parliamentary systems

That takes us nicely into the whole question of classifying different governmental systems and trying to give some kind of overview of the peculiarities of the British system of government.

The first thing to do is to make a distinction between presidential and parliamentary systems of government. The easiest way to do this is in comparison with the United States because it is so uniquely opposite to the UK system.

In the Presidential system of government like the US there tends to be an institutional and functional separation of powers. That is to say a separation between the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary.

In the parliamentary system of government that we have in the UK the separation of powers is almost uniquely absent. Instead a fusion of powers occurs where the pre-eminent powers of the political system are combined in quite extraordinary ways.

As opposed to the United States where the principle of a separation of powers pre-determined the nature of their constitution, its influence in Britain has been largely minimal. In terms of constitutional law, only in the independence of the (politically unimportant - note though the emerging significance of the Human Rights Act, given the Royal Assent October 1998) judiciary is any perception of separation of power in evidence.

In British government the connection between the three branches is thus retained: The cabinet links the executive and the legislature; the Lord Chancellor, the judiciary and the executive; and the Lords of appeal sitting in the House of Lords, the legislature and the judiciary.

The other striking difference between the UK and The US is the existence of a unitary as opposed to a federal state. (Though, this is not peculiar to parliamentary systems see e.g. Australia).

In the federal state such as the United States or Germany power is shared between national and sub-national layers of government. In the US for example, you find that the individual states have their own legislatures, many have their own constitutions, they have the power to tax and make their own laws so long as they don’t conflict with the federal government.

In the UK the state is unitary. This means that there is a single layer of government supplemented only by an ever weakening tier of local government.

The UK is made up of several nations and regions yet until very recently it was the dominant view that power does and indeed ought to reside in Westminster. Further that any more tiers of government - certainly anything that resembled a federal system - was distinctly unbritish.

Textbooks do tend to describe power in Britain as being located within parliament. However…Note recent changes to Scotland and Wales. Note also the different relationship with Northern Ireland.

Consider the place of the UK within the European Union.

Consider the impact of globalisation. (See the Reith Lectures by Anthony Giddens on the links pages of the website)

3. Political Culture

“the pattern of beliefs and practices which govern social life in a community, especially those that concern the conduct of politics”

British Political culture has been characterised in a number of ways. The dominant view of British political culture is that it is:

Deferential

Secretive

Civic

Consensual

Deference and Secrecy

Deference can be discussed in a number of ways for our purposes deference has been understood as the tendency to defer to authority, not any authority but the authority of a select few who were regarded as those born to govern. The Aristocracy and the Monarchy.

Despite the fact that the working class has had the vote for the last sixty years political leaders have been drawn from groups associated with the traditional aristocracy. It s no surprise that a significant proportion of the working class support the conservative party whose ranks have traditionally been occupied by the landed gentry.

Deference helps to explain why British Government is so secretive. Britain probably has the most extensive set of laws, which deal with official secrets.

This arguably derives from an monarchical legacy to British government where the conduct of government is best carried out by a select few with little or no scrutiny by the public.

God examples of ‘whistleblowing’ in UK Government:

The Ponting affair

The lobby system

The Scott Enquiry

Look these up; what happened? Why are they significant?

Consensus

When we talk about consensus politically we mean that there are a shared set of assumptions about the way we are organised both politically and economically.

All the main parties in the UK are committed to conception of liberal democracy. However the consensus about the political system is starting to break down (Europe, devolution, the constitution; the monarchy).

Consensus over the economy since 1945 arguably ended with Mrs Thatcher in 1979. (markets, assault on welfare etc).

Challenges to the dominant political culture

Welsh and Scottish Nationalism (1965 - 1969 - 1974 - 1978 - 1998).

Thatcherism (1979 and before).

Decline in support for traditional institutions.

New social movements. - The Peace movement; The Women’s Movement; green radicalism and eco radicalism

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