{"id":22916,"date":"2018-04-29T10:42:56","date_gmt":"2018-04-29T09:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22916"},"modified":"2018-04-29T10:42:56","modified_gmt":"2018-04-29T09:42:56","slug":"british-political-institutions-3-the-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22916","title":{"rendered":"British political institutions (3): the government"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I like to attend short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London and I&#8217;m now doing a six-week course on <em>&#8220;British Political Institutions&#8221;.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0The third session of the course was delivered by the City Lit&#8217;s Director Mark Malcolmson and covered the executive, that is the government of the Cabinet and junior ministers.<\/p>\n<p>I have myself written a guide to the British political system and you can read about government <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Britishpoliticalsystem.html#Government\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In this session of the course, we had a discussion about the electoral system which, in Britain, is the first-past-the-post (FPTP), like the USA but unlike most countries which have a version of proportional representation (PR). FPTP is said to provide a clear result and a majority government, but we were reminded of several occasions &#8211; some very recent &#8211; when this has not been the case:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The minority Labour Government of February-October 1974 (when I was a Special Adviser in the Northern Ireland Office and fought the two General Elections of that year)<\/li>\n<li>The Liberal-Labour (Lib-Lab) Pact of 1977-1978 \u00a0(when I was a Special Adviser in the Home Offcie) which involved Liberals generally supporting the minority Labour Government without actually joining the government<\/li>\n<li>The coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats from 2010-2015 when the Lib Dems had ministers at every level of government on the basis of a detailed joint policy programme<\/li>\n<li>The current agreement between the minority Conservative Government and the Democratic Unionist Party whereby the DUP &#8211; in return for lots of extra expenditure in Northern Ireland &#8211; support the government on &#8216;confidence and supply&#8217; terms<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In my view, the case for proportional representation &#8211; on both moral and practical grounds &#8211; is a strong one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I like to attend short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London and I&#8217;m now doing a six-week course on &#8220;British Political Institutions&#8221;.\u00a0\u00a0The third session of the course was delivered by the City Lit&#8217;s Director Mark Malcolmson and covered the executive, that is the government of the Cabinet and junior ministers. I have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22916"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22921,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22916\/revisions\/22921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}