The UK held an election this last Thursday, but it wasn’t a regularly scheduled election,
it was a snap election, as sort of a way to say “Okay for real though, Brexit, for real
this time.”
If you’ve heard anything about the results, you know that it ended up being fairly controversial
and anything but a landslide.
After a few requests yesterday, I put my topic this weekend to a vote on twitter.
This is why you should follow me on there.
As you can see, UK Politics only earned 43% of the vote, so just like the Tories, it wins.
Wait what?
Not all democracies work the same way, and here in America we have a number of misconceptions
about other democracies in the world.
Particularly when it comes to the United Kingdom.
Because of that, in an attempt to explain how the British government works, I’m going
to relate it to how the US government works.
So while this video is supposed to explain the UK to non-Brits, I suppose any Brits watching
could reverse engineer what I’m about to say in order learn about the US, so yeah,
two for one!
First we need to get some structure and vocabulary out of the way.
The United Kingdom is a country that exists in the British Isles.
Some of you may know this, but the official name of the UK is the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland.
Where is Great Britain?
This is Great Britain, the largest island in the British Isles.
On Great Britain, there are three countries.
England, Scotland, and Wales.
So the United Kingdom is a country, which consists of four countries, England, Scotland,
Wales, and Northern Ireland.
If it helps, you can think of these four countries like states, they have their own governments
and parliaments which capitulate to the overall United Kingdom government, just like states
which fall under the federal government.
The term British refers to the collective government of the UK, and while you can call
all of the people British, some of them might take offense to that.
Anyway…
The first misconception: The queen is just a figurehead.
This is something Americans like to say because it’s something they’ve heard over and
over either from the media or in school… maybe as a way to delegitimize the idea that
the UK is still a monarchy?
But it’s simply not true.
Here in America we have a president.
This president has many roles, like head of government, head of state, chief executive,
and commander-in-chief.
These are all very different jobs, all lumped into one person.
But in the UK, they have two people.
The Prime Minister, or PM, who is the head of government and chief executive.
And the Monarch, who is the head of state and the commander-in-chief.
Since in America, one person does all of these things, we don’t really pay attention to
what the differences are, and may not even really realize they exist.
So let’s break them down a bit.
The head of state is the leader of the people, not necessarily the government.
In the United Kingdom, the government serves in her majesty’s name and by her permission,
but I’ll get to that later.
In America, most of the background responsibilities of the head of state are performed by the
Secretary of State.
In the UK, all of these responsibilities are on the Queen.
She appoints all ambassadors to other countries.
In fact, the British Ambassador to the United States is not “The British Ambassador,”
he is a representative of the Crown, not the government, and is therefore “Her Majesty’s
Ambassador to the United States of America” and the United States does not have an ambassador
to the UK.
It’s the “Ambassador of the United States to the Court of St. James.”
Which is the royal court of the Queen.
In practice, obviously, they are ambassadors to and from the government, but in reality,
they are ambassadors to and from the Crown, separate from the government.
The Queen is also the commander-in-chief of the military.
In the United States, when you swear in, you are swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution
– which says that you will obey the lawful orders of the President.
But in the United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth Realm, you swear allegiance to the Crown.
Not the constitution, not the government, not your country.
All of the ships in the navy are HMS, Her Majesty’s Ship.
Now, in practice, the government, under the Ministry of Defence, spelled with a C, directs
the day to day operations of the military.
But in the end, she is the commander-in-chief.
She has the ability to declare war, not parliament.
It’s the reverse in the US.
The President directs the day to day operations, and the Congress declares war.
The Queen has a number of other functions that don’t necessarily come with a nice
neat label.
Like the President, she appoints all judges, in England and Wales anyway.
The court system there is royal.
Until 2005, the House of Lords, which I’ll get to in a moment, acted as the Supreme Court,
but now there is a separate body, still appointed by the Queen.
The Queen is also the head of the church.
Since we are a secular government and have no state religion, we don’t really have
an equivalent to that in the US, but if it helps, you can think of her as the Anglican
Pope.
And like the President, she has final veto power, or Royal Assent, on all acts passed
by parliament – which then makes it a law.
Just like how the President signs a bill from Congress which then makes it a law.
The Crown has not exercised its veto power in over 300 years, but it is still there and
is still possible.
To make matters more complicated, the Crown is also the head of state for most of the
Commonwealth Nations, like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand… which is why she is on
all of the money there.
She has less power there, but power nonetheless.
So now let’s talk about the Prime Minister, the head of government and the chief executive.
This means that this person is the actual leader of the government and runs its day
to day operations.
The Cabinet is chosen by the Prime Minister and they mostly run government departments,
much like the cabinet in the US.
In the US we have a Secretary of State, a Secretary of Defense, and twenty others, not
all of them are heads of government departments.
In the UK they have a Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, a Secretary
of State for Defence, and again, strangely enough, twenty others.
These names are usually shortened to Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary – again
spelled with a C. Unlike the US, the UK Cabinet does not require approval from parliament.
So how is the Prime Minister chosen?
This is what the election on Thursday was about, but the people don’t directly vote
for Prime Minister.
We don’t directly vote for President either, but that’s a complicated and- there are
dozens of videos out there on the Electoral College and for those of you who follow my
channel regularly, you know that I have a pretty strict “no beating dead horses”
policy when it comes to my content- so I’ll just leave it at.
So again, how is the Prime Minister chosen?
The United Kingdom has two houses of parliament.
The House of Lords and the House of Commons.
The House of Lords is the upper house and consists of 800 appointees by the Queen, yet
another way that the Queen still has significant power.
House of Lords is actually the shortened name, the official name is “The Right Honourable
the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
in Parliament assembled.”
They’re mostly hereditary position, but they are bishops of the church, who are the
Lords Spiritual, and most of the Lords, Dukes, Barons, and Counts, who are the Lords Temporal.
All acts of Parliament, go through them before going to the Queen.
They can scrutinize and amend acts, but they can’t prevent them from becoming law.
So if you want to talk about who the figurehead is in this situation…
The House of Commons is the elected lower house, kind of like the US House of Representatives.
The United Kingdom is divided up into 650 constituencies.
You can kind of think of them like the 435 congressional districts in the US, but those
are way larger.
You have to remember that the UK is the size of Oregon, with the populations of California
and Texas crammed in.
Typically, a constituency in the UK represents about 70,000 people, whereas in the US, it
varies dramatically because of the way we apportion them by state, with the lowest being
526,000 in Rhode Island and the highest being 994,000 in Montana, but still on average,
about ten times as many people.
(710,000) Anyway, each of these constituencies is represented by a Member of Parliament,
or MP.
And this is what people are voting for, they don’t vote for Prime Minister.
Each constituency is a race for both local representation and for national government.
Each Member of Parliament is chosen by a simple majority which just means whoever got the
most votes.
Which means there are some constituencies represented by MPs who only got 24% of the
vote, but they were the highest voted candidate.
And that can happen because the UK has a multi-party system, unlike the US and our two-party system
– they still only have two main ones, but in the election on Thursday, nine parties
won seats.
The United States has 538 electoral votes for President, and someone has to get 270
in order to win.
The United Kingdom has 650 constituencies, so a party must get 326 to win.
I said party there, because again, people are not directly voting for Prime Minister.
They vote for their MP, who represents a party.
The party that gets the most MPs choses their Prime Minister, you usually know who that’s
going to be before you vote.
But what happens when no party gets the required 326, which is what happened on Thursday?
They can form a Coalition Government.
The Conservatives, or Tories, won 318 seats.
The Labour Party, spelled with a U, won 262.
These are the two main parties and you can kind of think of them as the Republicans and
Democrats and they hold somewhat similar views on the issues with their US counterparts.
The next biggest party is the Scottish National Party with 35 seats, and as you might have
guessed, only ever wins in Scotland, and since Brexit they’ve been pushing for independence.
Then with 12 seats, the Liberal-Democrats, who formed a Coalition government with the
Tories in 2010.
And then the Democratic Unionist Party, with ten seats, are the ultra-right wing party,
if it helps, you can think of them like the Tea Party.
And then there are four other smaller parties which I’m not going to talk about because…
c’mon the screen is already pretty full.
So the Conservatives and the Liberal-Democrats had formed a Coalition Government in the past,
which just means the two parties getting together to cross that 326 threshold, elect the main
party’s candidate as Prime Minister, and they usually share some cabinet positions.
Why didn’t they this time?
Because of Brexit.
The Liberal-Democrats are very much against Brexit, while the Conservatives are apparently
now for it.
I say that with some uncertainty because the Conservatives weren’t always for it.
In the last general election in 2015, in order to sway UKIP (UK Independence Party) voters,
the Tories promised to allow a referendum on the UK leaving the EU or British Exit or
“Brexit.”
That unstated coalition made them win.
The Tories didn’t really think that the people would go for it, but in 2016, they
did… so David Cameron resigned.
Since then there has been a lot of turmoil in the UK over whether the people really honestly
knew what they were voting for, so the new PM, Theresa May called for a snap election.
As I said in the beginning, this was more or less a re-vote on Brexit without calling
it that, in order to save face.
So now that we’re caught up, back to the election results on Thursday.
The conservatives didn’t get the 326 majority, so in order to make the process easier anyway,
they have to form a coalition government with one of the other parties.
Labour is against Brexit, the Scottish National Party is against it, the Liberal Democrats
are against it, but the DUP is for it.
And that’s who they’re going to form a coalition with, which will put them at 328
seats.
And that’s why I also didn’t mention the smaller parties, because while they could
form a coalition with the Green Party and their one seat, that won’t really make a
difference.
The coalition with the DUP is controversial because of their super right-wing stance on
the issues, like being against abortion, gay marriage and other LGBT rights, but they are
for UK independence from the EU, so there you go.
Could the Labour party have formed a coalition to get the needed 326?
In theory, yes, but it would have had to include the DUP AND three other parties… so no.
So the Prime Minister is chosen by whichever party has a majority in the House of Commons.
Who then asks the Queen for permission to form a government.
They could, in theory, do away with everything that is already established and form an entirely
new government, which would likely be chaos and they’d probably lose in a vote of no
confidence, which is kind of like impeachment but way easier, so they don’t.
But then they fill the cabinet to lead the various ministries.
And because of that, the UK government is described as a one-party government.
Unlike in the US where the President can be from one party and the Houses of Congress
can be from the other.
Everything from the Prime Minister on down all belong to a single party.
The second largest party in the House of Commons is then known as the Opposition, and their
leader is the Leader of the Opposition.
That person doesn’t really have any power outside of the one on one debate they have
with the Prime Minister in sessions of parliament.
So the next time you hear the American media say that Theresa May was elected or you hear
that the Queen is just a figurehead or tourist attraction, hopefully now, you’ll know better.
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