Great Britain's party system is regarded as the model two-party system. Its fundamental characteristics are introduced in the following text along with the political parties active in it. This text also includes links to the websites of the most important parties. Other sections deal with the following aspects:

There is no law governing political parties in Great Britain. Parties are understood as an expression of initiatives born out of society for which the state is not responsible and for which the state provides no financial aid. This situation has also led to a situation in which reliable information about the membership of parties and their finances, that is, the identity of large donators is not available. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that politically active citizens in Great Britain are much more likely to organize or join one of the many interest groups than they are to be active in a political party. The total membership of all political parties is estimated at between 600,000 and 700,000. In contrast, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has over 800,000 members. All of Britain's political parties have financial difficulties. The funding deficit of the Labour Party in 1998 was estimated at around 5 million pounds (...).

The British party system is often referred to as a two-party system. This is because ever since the end of the war in 1945, only two parties, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, have held power. The number of parties in Parliament, however, is larger than this and it has become difficult to talk about one competitive party system that applies for the whole of the UK.

The Conservative Party (the Tories) is the successor to the Tory Party, the party of landowners, the gentry. It has no official date of foundation. It was formed during the 1830s. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) transformed the Conservative Party and its organization, focusing its political policies to becoming a patriotic potential people's party. Foreign policy was based on uniting the nation in its common interest of maintaining the empire and helping it to flourish, while domestic policy was to focus on introducing a more moderate class system through reform of social laws.

Edward Heath, prime minister between 1970 and 1974, was unsuccessful in his attempts to steer his party down the path of economic liberalism. Heath was a true European and took Great Britain into the EG in 1973.

Heath was the first chairman of the party to be elected leader of the Conservative Party following vote by the parliamentary party. Up until 1965 the decision as to who would become party leader had been settled during internal discussions.

In 1997, William Hague introduced a system for selecting the leader of the party in which the membership had the last say. By the end of the 90s he was attempting to make an ageing Conservative Party more attractive for younger voters and to expand its grassroots support. Most of the Conservative Party's most loyal supporters attended public schools and work in private businesses. Over 90 percent of Conservatives are property owners and over a quarter belong to higher-income groups (1994 = 30,000 pounds annual salary and above).

Hague sees his party as a last bastion fending off attacks on British institutions by the European Union and by constitutional reforms proposed by the Labour Party. At the Conservative Party Conference in 1998, William Hague drew the public's attention to his proposal to introduce a special English parliament alongside the one in Westminster as a counterbalance to the parliaments set up in Scotland and Wales. This idea, however, was abandoned by Hague in December 1998 after the Conservative Party thought it might prove counter productive; this proposal would have meant splitting up the United Kingdom and a weakening in legitimacy for parliamentary sovereignty.

The Conservative Party faced great difficulties during the 90s in persuading the public to support its policies. Indeed, after the Labour Party had assumed the mantle of a party dedicated to economic prudence, the Conservatives found it increasingly difficult to come up with an economic alternative. According to the party's own figures, its membership shrunk from around three million members in 1950 to around 250,000 in 1998. A combination of expensive election campaigns and insufficient donations with falling contributions form the membership has left the party's finances in poor shape. Many of the Conservative Party's traditional donations from the business community have dried up.

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Up until 1920 the Liberal Party had been the second largest in British politics and had enjoyed a major role. The Party was founded in 1859 as a successor to the Whigs, the party of landowners and wealthy businessmen. 19th century liberalism was influenced strongly by William Gladstone (1809-1898) and focused mainly on the demand for free trade, in the interests of a growing industrial middle class, and the establishment of autonomy for Ireland which would guarantee it a limited amount of home rule. It also focused on other issues and was at the forefront in extending the right to vote, abolishing slavery, introducing laws to protect children, passing the poor law, the Factories Act, working time law and the reforming regional government.

After World War One, the Labour Party replaced the Liberals as the strongest opposition party and potential ruling party. While regularly achieving a share of the vote between 10 and 20 percent, the Liberal party mostly had no more than a dozen seats in parliament. Over the last few decades, the Liberal Party became a refuge for supporters of disarmament and ecological issues. Even supporters of European integration, federalism and those in favor of a system of proportional representation have found a political home in the Liberal Party. The party is particularly active at a local level, which is also where the party's grassroots lie. It is here that the party is able to draw upon the knowledge of a great number of politically active specialists on firm issues such as education and health. In 1995 ten percent of all local councils were controlled by the Liberal Party alone (44 percent were Labour controlled, but only 4 percent Conservative controlled).

In 1988 the liberal Party joined forces with the Social Democratic Party, a right-wing splinter group of the Labour Party, to form the Liberal Democrats. Paddy Ashdown was the party's first leader until 1999. In 1997 he abandoned the party's long-running policy of remaining neutral and not siding with either of the large parties. He regarded the future of the Liberal Democrats as being at the side of the Labour Party, whose policies he regarded as being closest to those of his own party. Surprisingly, the Liberal Democrats lean more to the left than Labour on many areas of policy, but especially on questions of the economy and social policy. In contrast to the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, over 90 percent of Liberal Democrats are in favor of raising taxes to pay for additional government spending. The Liberal Democrats also have seats in a cabinet committee dedicated to making constitutional changes. The Liberal Democratic Party has around 100,000 members.

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The Labour Party was founded in 1900 as the "Labour Representation Committee" as the political arm of the trade union movement - it was given its present name in 1906. This explains both its remaining financial dependency on the trade unions and its internal organization. Individual members share a platform with block membership groups from trade unions and socialist organizations. Block memberships are created by organizations such as trade unions levying a contribution to the Labour Party as a part of their other charges. The number of votes allotted to any one trade union is calculated according to the size of its contributions to the Labour Party. These votes can be used at Labour Party conferences to sway decisions (block votes). Until 1981 the party leader was elected by the parliamentary party, but has since been decided by an election committee made up of trade union representatives, party associations and the constituencies to which the MPs belong. The last reform of the party in 1993 gave each of these bodies one third of the total votes.

During the premiership of Clement Attlee (1945-1951), who somewhat surprisingly won the first post-war election from Winston Churchill, the foundations for the British welfare state were laid following a policy of nationalization and socio-political reforms (including the establishment of the National Health Service and the setting up of a comprehensive system of social security). The Labour Party had to wait until the 1960s before retuning to power under the leadership of Harold Wilson (1964-1970), but failed in its plans to modernize the economy largely due to resistance from the trade unions. Attempts by both Wilson after 1974 and James Callaghan (1976-1979) to work with the unions by including them in the decision-making process on wages and pricing policy plunged the country into a deep economic crisis, which was clearly reflected in Britain's productivity deficit. The political alliance between the Labour Party and the trade unions broke down in 1978/79 because of the trade union movement's unwillingness to persuade its membership to embark down a path of painful but necessary reforms of industry (...).

On a tide of policy and organizational progress started by Niel Kinnock in 1983, continued by John Smith (1992-1994) and finished by Tony Blair, the Labour Party began to strengthen its inner-party democracy by mobilizing individual members and abandoning its nationalization policy and skeptical stance on Europe. The Labour Party threw out its Trotskyite wing in the early 1980s. After a wide-ranging process of internal discussion, the party became more focused on market economy principles. Since 1993 both representatives of constituency associations and trade unions are expected to gain the approval of their members before casting their votes at the Labour Party Conference.

Highly symbolic of these changes was the way in which the party agreed to drop article 4 from its statue. The nationalization policy was at the heart of article 4. In so far as it is possible, the Labour Party is trying to distance itself both financially and organizationally from the trade unions. Faced with the drop in trade union membership, this is a measure that is necessary anyway. Moreover, by 1995 only 30 of the 70 trade unions falling under the umbrella of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) were collective members of the Labour Party. The proportion of votes carried by the trade unions was reduced to 50 percent. Thanks to the collective membership rights of trade unions, formally speaking the Labour Party still has several million members. The future, however, is likely to belong to individual members and their numbers equaled those of the Conservative Party in the early 1990s. Membership numbers increased when Tony Blair took over the leadership of the party, only to fall slightly following his first year in office. Membership is currently at around 350,000.

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Since the early seventies, the party system in Northern Ireland has been detached from the one in Great Britain and influenced almost entirely on the troubles in Northern Ireland. The moderate protestant unionist vote is represented by the Ulster Unionist Party, which was formed out of the Conservative Party and is led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate, David Trimble. The radical unionist vote is represented by the Democratic Unionist Party (founded and led by Ian Paisley). On the  catholic nationalist side is the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party which was founded as part of the civil-rights movement during the sixties (led by the party's founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, John Hume). Radical nationalist support goes to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army led by Gerry Adams.

A four-party system has established itself in Scotland and Wales. In addition to the Conservatives, Liberal democrats and Labour Party, the nationalist parties have also been able to find a role for themselves in local politics. The Labour Party had been the strongest party in Scotland for many years. Today, the Labour Party is being challenged by the Scottish National Party (SNP), which has replaced the Conservatives as the second strongest party in Scotland. The nationalist Plaid Cymru Party in Wales has not been so successful. Its support is limited to rural, religious, non-conformist and Welsh-speaking regions of the country. The most dominant party in Wales is the Labour Party followed a long way back by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

[Taken and translated from: Roland Sturm: Politische Willensbildung; in: Informationen zur politischen Bildung 262, "Großbritannien", Bonn BpB 1999]

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Subjects:  Human Rights  I  Democracy  I  Parties  I  Examples  I  Europe  I  Globalisation  I  United Nations  I  Sustainability

Methods:    Teaching Politics    II    Peace Education    II    Methods