Difference between revisions of "House of Commons (UK)"
KarlJaeger (Talk | contribs) |
m |
||
| Line 41: | Line 41: | ||
[[Category:British Politics]] | [[Category:British Politics]] | ||
| + | [[Category:British History]] | ||
Revision as of 14:03, November 21, 2008
The House of Commons, or, strictly speaking, the Honourable the House of Commons, is the lower house of the British legislature. Together with the Queen and the House of Lords, it is one of the three components of the British Parliament
The House consists of 646 elected members, who are known as Members of Parliament or MPs. Each MP is elected by a particular geographical area known as a constituency. By convention, the leader of the party which has the majority of MPs becomes Prime Minister and forms a government, with its members drawn from the House of Commons and, to a lesser extent, from the House of Lords. The party with the second-largest number of MPs becomes the official Opposition ("Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition"), and forms a "shadow cabinet", also consisting of MPs and Lords.
Elections to the House
Elections to the House of Commons are held when the Queen (in practice, acting at the request of the Prime Minister) dissolves Parliament. Elections must be held at least at five-yearly intervals.
Because Britain has three main parties (and a number of minor parties) and because each MP is elected to the House of Commons on the basis of winning the largest number of votes in his constituency (known as "first past the post"), the link between the overall number of votes won by each party nationwide and the number of MPs that it is able to return to the Commons can be relatively weak. The electoral system for the Commons has historically been criticised by the Liberal Democrats, who do particularly badly out of it.
Composition
The last elections to the House of Commons took place in May 2005. The current distribution of MPs is as follows:
Labour Party: 352 seats
Conservative Party: 196 seats
Liberal Democrats: 63 seats
Scottish National Party (Scottish nationalists): 6 seats
Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalists): 3 seats
Democratic Unionist Party (Northern Irish unionists): 9 seats
Ulster Unionist Party (Northern Irish unionists): 1 seat
Sinn Fein (Irish nationalists): 5 seats
Social Democratic and Labour Party (Irish nationalists): 3 seats
Others (inc. independents): 8 seats
TOTAL: 646
