British politics

Politics in the United Kingdom takes place within the context of a democratic parliamentary system dominated by three major parties.

Institutions

Parliament

See also Parliament

The cornerstone of the unwritten British constitution is Parliamentary supremacy, or Parliamentary sovereignty.

Britain is one of a small number of nations without a written constitution, and the British legislature, Parliament, is free to legislature however it pleases. In British law, the only authority higher than parliamentary legislation is the law of the European Union, and Britain is subject to EU law only by virtue of the fact that Parliament has chosen to accept it.

Parliament consists of the Queen, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The Queen today takes no part in active politics (the last time that a monarch refused to ratify a law passed by the Lords and Commons was in 1714).

Parties

The three main parties

The British political spectrum has historically been dominated by the Labour Party on the left, the Conservative Party on the right, and the Liberal Party (now the Liberal Democrats) in the centre between them ("liberal" in British political terminology is often used to mean "centrist" or "moderate", rather than "left-wing").

In recent times, there has been a perception that the main parties are crowding together on the centre groups. In the 1990s, Labour moved decisively away from the traditional left (angering many of its more traditionally-minded supporters), to the point where it was perceived by many as being less left-wing than the Liberal Democrats. Since the advent of David Cameron as its leader in 2005, the Conservative Party has moved away from the territory of the traditional right (in this case too, angering many of its more strongly conservative or Thatcherite supporters).