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Political parties in Britain

A short guide
Cette page en français: ► Les partis politiques en GB

Britain's political parties in chaos

4th September 2019. Conservative party in crisis. When Boris Johnson took over as
Conservative leader, he had a small majority in the House of commons. As from today he runs a
minority government. Two Conservative MPs have defected to the Lib-Dems, and in the House
of Commons on 3rd September 21 Conservative MPs, including several former ministers, voted
against their own government in order to allow Parliament to try to pass legislation to stop Boris
Johnson from taking the UK out of the European Union on 31st October without a deal.

23rd July 2019. Boris Johnson has been chosen by the Conservative Party as their new
leader, and therefore as the new Prime Minister of the UK. Boris received 66% of the vote,
which was open to the 159,000 members of the Conservative Party.
A highly controversial politician, Boris Johnson is going to find it very hard to govern. He is
likely to have a majority of just one seat in the House of Commons (the Lib-Dems are expected
to win back a seat from the Conservatives in a by-election on August 1st), and a number of
leading members of the Conservative Party have said that they will not serve in his government.
Boris Johnson lead the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, and has promised
to do so by 31st October, "deal or no deal"; however Parliament has already voted against a
"no-deal Brexit", and there is likely to be a strong majority in the House of Commons ready to
block "no-deal" if Johnson should appear to be moving in that direction.

18th July 2019. Parliament votes to prevent the next Prime Minister taking the UK out of
the EU without a deal, after Boris Johnson (who is expected to be chosen by the Conservative
Party as their new leader) says that he will deliver Brexit by 31st October' with or without a deal

27 May 2019. European parliamentary election results for the UK

Results: The anti-EU Brexit Partytook the largest share of the vote 31.6%
The Liberal Democrats came second, with 20.3%
Labour clung on to third place with 14.1%, closely followed by
The Green Party with 12.7%
The Conservatives could only take fifth place, with just 9.1%
The remaining votes went to smaller or regional parties, including the Scottish nationalists

24 May 2019
Theresa May resigns as Prime Minister
Theresa May has announced that she will resign as Prime Minister on 7th June. She will stay
on after that for as long as is needed for the Conservative Party to find a replacement. The
current favourite is Boris Johnson.
May is resigning because she has been unable to find a solution to the Brexit crisis.
That is not surprising, given that Britain, the Conservative government, the Cabinet and
Parliament are all deeply divided over the question of Brexit. At all levels, there are some who
are strongly in favour of Brexit, and others who are vehemently against it.
And with a third strongly in favour of Brexit, a third strongly against it, and a third undecided,
finding a compromise that will please everyone is an impossible task. May tried and failed; and
failed repeatedly.
Her successor is not likely to have any more success.
There is no satisfactory solution to this crisis. May tried for consensus, a middle-of-the-road
soft Brexit that might unite people from both sides. In the end it united nobody except the middle
third of "undecided". It displeased two thirds of her party, of Parliament, and of the people; for
those in favour of Brexit it was too little, and for those opposed to it it was too much.
Her successor may go for a "hard Brexit"... but that too will displease two thirds of people in
Britain and in Parliament. Parliament has already voted against a hard Brexit. And Parliament
will reject it again, as long as Parliament is consulted.
Alternatively May's successor may decide to cancel Brexit. That will certainly displease a third
of the people and may be displease up to two thirds of the people.
Brexit has done immense damage to the UK, to politics in general, and to the European
Union. The next British Prime Minister, whoever he/she is, will not be able to solve the problem
any more satisfactorily than Theresa May.
There remain two solutions that will be less damaging than the others. They are for the next
Prime Minister to revoke Article 50, and thus cancel Brexit; or to wash his/her hands of the
problem, and give the fate of Brexit back to the people, i.e. call a second referendum.
A change of prime-ministers will not make the problem go away. It will not lead to a
satisfactory solution to this intractable problem.

4 May 2019. In local elections, the Conservative party lost over 1300 councillors and the Labour
party lost 84 councillors.
The winners were the Liberal Democrats, campaigning on a clear stop-Brexit platform, who
gained 704 councillors, and the Greens, also campaigning against Brexit, who gained 198
seats. There were also big gains for independent candidates

March 2019 : Brexit is posponed. The British parliament cannot agree on any type of Brexit.
Theresa May's "Deal" with the EU has been rejected by parliament three times. For Brexit
hardliners, it is too soft; for those opposed to Brexit, it is too pointless.
It is clear that there the idea of finding any sort of acceptable "consensus" on Brexit among
British voters and in the British parliament is fantasy.
There can be no consensus on Brexit, as opinions are too divided.

Early March 2019. A new centrist anti-Brexit party, called ChangeUK, has been set up by 7
MPs who have defected from the Labour Party, and three from the Conservative party and one
independent.
Latest: 16th January 2019. Conservative Party split as 118 MPs rebel and
vote against Theresa May's Brexit bill.
For more on this see Brexit timeline

Latest: 12th December 2018. Theresa May wins a vote of no confidence as leader of the
Conservative Party.
This "no-confidence" vote was an internal vote just involving Conservative Members of
Parliament. Right-wing members of the party tried to remove her from office, but failed. Out of
317 Conservative MPs, 200 expressed their confidence in Mrs. May, while 117 expressed no
confidence in their leader.
Mrs. May is now safe for at least a year (unless Parliament as a whole, not just the
Conservative MPs, votes no confidence in her. For the time being, this seems improbable.) But
with 117 members of her own party ready to rebel against her, she is not in a very strong
position.
Some moderate Conservative MPs seem to be hoping that the Party will actually split, and that
the right-wing Eurosceptics will leave to form their own hard-right party, perhaps by allying with
what remains of UKIP. But this seems unlikely.
While they have shown, by the no-confidence vote, that they are in a minority in the party, the
right-wing hard-Brexit-supporting MPs are liable to believe that they will get nowhere by dividing
the party and setting up a new one; better for them to remain in the party where they can hope
one day to take control
In Britain, many ordinary people are calling for a complete realignment of parties, with a big
new centre party including moderates from both Left and Right... which would achieve more or
less the same result, by leaving the far-right to take control of a much reduced Conservative
party. But few if any Conservative or Labour party members and MPs have shown any interest
in this.

July 2018 - The Conservative Party - long divided between the free-marketing neo-liberals on
the far right, and consensual "one nation" pro-European Conservatives in the centre, is in
chaos, following the resignation of two leading Brexiteer ministers from Theresa May's cabinet.
Chief Brexit negotiator David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson resigned from the
government today in protest against the "soft Brexit" agreement reached by the Government
last Friday. The future of Brexit is very much in the balance.
More details here : Is Brexit inevitable?

British general election 2017

The Conservatives lost their majority, but remain the largest party in the House of Commons;
Theresa May has vowed to continue as prime minister, but how long can she remain in power?
And what happens next ?

The British electoral system

Britain uses a historic "first-past-the-post" electoral system. There is just one round of voting,
and the candidate with the most votes wins. That's it. Thus, if there are ten candidates standing
for a seat, candidates A to J, and candidates B to J each get 9.95 % of the vote, 0.4% of the
votes are invalid, and candidate A gets 10% of the vote, candidate A is elected. There is no
runoff.
Though 10% of the vote is a small minority, it is more than any other candidate, and is thus
described as a relative majority , or as a "plurality" in American English.

Topical : The Brexit referendum

A choice of pages :
► NEW & updated: Brexit a timeline of events since the referendum
► Brexit: The arguments and the people

A short history of political parties in Britain

Top UK stores offer free deliveryto Europe and bargain prices

England has the oldest parliament in the world. The English parliament met for the first time at
the Palace of Westminster in the year 1265, but it took more than four centuries before the
concept of "political parties" gave a new dimension to political life in Britain.
Before the birth of political parties in the seventeenth century, the English parliament
consisted of aristocrats and wealthy men who formed alliances and majorities based on specific
factors or loyalties. It was not until after the English Civil War, and parliamentary upheavals
during the Republican years of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649-1660), that the first
English political parties began to take shape. During the years from 1678 to 1681, and the
constitutional crisis known as the Exclusion Crisis, most members of the English parliament
formed into two "parties", named Whigs and Tories. The descendants of these two original
parties are the two parties that formed the coalition government under Prime Minister David
Cameron from 2010 to 2015.

Until the early 20th century, alone or in coalition with other groups, these two political parties
in turn formed successive British governments, based on the results of parliamentary elections.
Initially, the Whigs were the party of the liberal and reforming aristocracy. In contrast to the
Tories, the Whig Party attracted people more favorable to constitutional reforms, and in 1832 led
the most significant modernization of the British Parliament, the Reform Act, which rebalanced
parliamentary constituencies, and greatly expanded the electoral base to the middle classes. In
the 1850's, the Whig Party became the most important element of a union of Whigs and
Radicals who took the name "Liberal Party". This centrist party continued until 1988, when it
merged with the new but smaller Social Democratic Party to form today's Liberal Democrats
. The word Tory designated early supporters of strong royal power; Tories were monarchists
and traditionalists, especially at the time of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. During the
eighteenth century, the Whigs dominated British politics, and the Tory party played a relatively
small role in the political life of the United Kingdom.
This changed in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, when the rise of reformism
and radicalism in Europe, which was to lead notably to the French Revolution (1789), gave a
new impetus to defenders of the status quo and conservatism. The Tories re-emerged as a
major force in British politics in 1770 - but this time as a modern party in favor of maintaining the
best traditions of Britain, but at the same time strongly supporting the new opportunities created
by the industrial revolution and imperial and commercial expansion. During the 19th century - as
today - the Tory party, which became the Conservative Partyin 1834, was torn between its
traditionalists and its reformers. Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative prime minister from 1874 to
1880, was one of the great reformers of the 19th century.

After the First World War, a new party came to power in the British Parliament, the Labour
Party. The first Labour MPs had been elected in 1900 as representatives of the Independent
Labour Party. The Labour Party formed a minority government in 1924, but it did not last. Labour
first formed a majority government in 1929. The rise of the Labour Party came however at the
expense of the other non-Conservative party, the Liberals, and Labour replaced the Liberals as
the main alternative to the Conservatives.
From 1929 to 2010, power alternated between the Conservatives and the Labour Party.
Following the general election of 2010, no single party emerged with an absolute majority of
MPs; so for the first time in living memory, a coalition government was formed, with the
Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats sharing power.
Former stability of the political landscape

British prime ministers of recent years.

Left to Right Gordon Brown and Tony Blair (Labour), John Major (Conservative), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat,
deputy PM) and David Cameron (Conservative, PM in 2014)

As this historical overview shows, the British political landscape in general has until very
recently been characterized by a remarkable stability. The British electoral system, a system of
"relative majority" (known as the " first past the post" system) 1, has not changed for more than
four centuries, and is favorable to large parties and stable governments. It tends to prevent
parties fragmenting into smaller factions or clans, and encourages consensus positions around
strong party leaders.
In a referendum in 2011, British voters reaffirmed their commitment to this historic electoral
system, rejecting a new system that would have introduced an element of proportional
representation.
Britain's three major parties are all now more than a century old, and the system makes it
very hard for new parties to get a foot on the ladder. The rise of the Labour Party in the early
20th century was the result of major changes in society. Since then, no new party has
succeeded in establishing itself in England, and new parties that are created remain marginal in
terms of representation, or merge with larger ones. The situation is different in other parts of the
United Kingdom, where nationalist parties have broken into the political landscape, even to the
point of becoming the principal political party in Scotland.
However, the result of the European elections held in May 2019 show that an earthquake has
hit the formerly stable political landcape. In the European elections,the traditional "main"
parties, the Conservatives and Labour, took just 25% of the vote between them, with the
Conservatives taking their lowest share of the vote since the nineteenth century... less than
10%. Over 66% of the votes were taken by other parties, notably the new Brexit Party (31%) ,
the Liberal Democrats (20%) and the Greens (12%).

The Political landscape in Britain today

2016 - 2019 - Parties in turmoil
In the May 2019 European Union parliamentary election, the ruling Conservative Party fell
to a historic low of under 10% of the vote. The far right, in the shape of Nigel Farage's "Brexit
party", took over 31.6%, while the three main anti-Brexit parties, the Lib Dems (20.3%) the
Greens (12.1%) and ChangeUK (3.4%) took a combined share of 35.8%. Labour, the main
opposition party, saw its share of the vote fall to 14.1%

The "Brexit" referendum has plunged the main British political parties into turmoil, with both
main parties Conservative and Labour being (irreparably?) divided about Britain's relationship
with the European Union.
The Conservative party has been split down the middle by opposition between pro- and anti-
Europeans; but with a few exceptions, most of the Conservative MP's who formerly campaigned
against Brexit have fallen silent since the election of Mrs. May.
The Labour Party is riven by dissention between a militant party membership, and the party's
generally moderate MPs. Labour MPs overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence in leader
Jeremy Corbyn, who nevertheless refused to stand down as he was elected overwhelmingly by
party members.
Of the three main traditional parties, only the Liberal-Democrat party has emerged intact from
the chaos: the Lib-Dems always have been, and remain, firmly pro-European.
The Labour Party remains torn between a hard-left Eurosceptic party membership, and a
largely social-democrat Parliamentary party (its MPs). Internally fractured, Labour was seen,
since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader, as being unable to present itself as a credible
challenge to the Conservative government. By April 2017 opinion polls showed that support for
Labour had fallen to a historic low (around 25%), prompting Mrs. May to call another general
election. However, thanks to an excellent campaign, Labour seriously narrowed the gap, and
though they did not beat the Conservatives in the June 2017 election, they increased their
representation in parliament, depriving the Conservatives of the absolute majority they had
enjoyed since 2015.
Since then Labour has been plagued by issues of anti-semitism and criticism that the party
under Corbyn is an ineffectual opposition that is not standing up to Mrs. May's Brexit dealing.
Although latest opinion polls (December 2018) show that a majority of Labour supporters want a
second referendum on Brexit, and many Labour MPs want this too, Jeremy Corbyn has refused
to give official party backing to the call for a second referendum.

Main British parties (excluding regionalist parties / nationalsts )

Right-wing or conservative parties

The Conservative Party
The Boris Johnson era
The Conservative party has been taken over by the hard right. Boris Johnson has filled his
Cabinet (government) with men and women who campaigned for Brexit, and has appointed
arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg to the position of Leader of the House of Commons. The
Leader of the House is the member of the Government who is in charge of organising the
business of the House.
The centrist Conservatives who were prominent in all of Theresa May's cabinets - men such as
Philip Hammond, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Rory Stewart or David Gauke, former
Justice Secretary - have either refused to work with Boris Johnson, or have been dropped from
the government.
Under Johnson, the Conservative Party has become the party of Hard Brexit – forcing
traditional moderate Conservatives to question their party loyalty. Many supporters and a fair
number of former party members have abandoned the party, some of them becoming
independents, others (even including former Conservative deputy Prime Minister Michael
Heseltine) joining or supporting the Lib Dems. Others will follow, as Johnson plans to expel
"rebels" from the party.
On September 3rd, one more MP defected from the Conservative Party to join the Lib Dems,
while 21 "rebels" sided with the Opposition parties in the House of Commons, to take control of
the Parliamentary timetable out of the government's hands, and let Parliament determine its
own agenda.
Johnson is a highly controversial and highly ambitious politician who was previously
sacked twice from ministerial posts and was once sacked from his job as a journalist for
the Times newspaper, for making up facts. Yet he is a charismatic populist who has a
strong following among older Conservative voters, precisely the group that make up the
majority of members of today's Conservative party
The Theresa May government
The May government, the government in charge of negotiating Britain's exit from the European
Union (Brexit) was a strange mix of right-wing nationalism and centrist "compassionate
Conservatism". In her speech to the Tory Party conference in Autumn 2016, Theresa May
sounded almost like a leader of the Labour Party in her promises to help the "Jams" (those who
are Just-About-Managing to get by in life) ; yet on Brexit, her rhetoric has been that of strident
nationalism. In a move to appease the hard-liners in her party, and much to the alarm of the
Conservative centre, she pledged not only to take the UK out of the EU, but also out of the
Single European Market, the free trade area that extends beyond the EU.
As from June 9th 2017, May had to depend for support on an agreement (not a coalition)
with "friends and allies" in the right-wing protestant Democratic Unionist Party of Northern
Ireland, to form a government. This was a marriage of convenience which failed to give May the
success she was hoping for. She resigned in 2019 after her Brexit agreement, carefully
negotiated with the EU, was rejected three times in the House of Commons.
This is the British party of the right, including a broad range of traditional conservatives and
royalists, neo-liberals and social conservatives. For the last forty years, the party has been
deeply divided over issues of sovereignty and the role of Britain in the European Union. A
majority of party members are in favour of a revision of the terms of Britain's membership of the
European Union, and the holding of a referendum on withdrawal. But other Conservatives,
including industrial and business leaders, are strongly pro-European. Recent leaders have been
beset by problems trying to reconcile the strongly opposing views of party members on this
issue.
In 2016, the divisions were sharply amplified during the campaign for the Brexit referendum;
two thirds of the Party's MPs - essentially the centre-right moderate wing of the party - were in
favour of remaining in the EU; one third, the Conservative sovereignist hard-liners and the neo-
conservative faction, were in favour of leaving. However, grass-roots Conservative party
activists are on the whole further to the right than their MPs.
Since the resignation of David Cameron, the Party has moved to the right, as pro-Brexit and
sovereignist MPs have taken up key positions in Mrs. May's cabinet.

The Conservative Party is made up of local Associations which play a major role in the
selection of candidates and the appointment of the party leader. The importance of this local
structure reflects the very old tradition of territorial representation in British politics, a tradition
dating back to the Middle Ages. However, "Central Office" often imposes candidates on local
associations to enable up-and-coming stars to enter parliament, as was the case with Margaret
Thatcher.
In her short speech to the press, on taking up her job as Prime Minister, Theresa
May positioned herself very clearly as a "one-nation" moderate Conservative, keen to build a
new Britain for ordinary people, not just for the wealthy. It was a speech that could equally well
have been made by David Cameron, or most of the recent leaders of the Labour Party.

New - 2019. The Brexit Party

Nigel Farage, who founded UKIP, has now quit UKIP and founded a new anti-EU party called
simply the "Brexit party". With no policies other than to call for a 'hard" Brexit, the BP has
nevertheless immediately become the UKs most popular political party in terms of voting
intentions for the forthcoming European Elections.
The BP has attracted most of the voters who previously supported UKIP, plus those
Conservative voters who believe in Brexit. As a result, recent EU election voting intention polls
put the Brexit Party on about 27%, with the Conservatives on just 12%.

UKIP - The UK Independence Party

A sovereignist party that wants Britain to withdraw from the European Union. The party has little
in the way of policies, apart from Europe-bashing, but is surprisingly popular with voters
disgruntled with the perceived failures of the main parties . In the 2015 election, UKIP obtained
just one member of Parliament, a sitting MP who had moved over from the conservatives. UKIP
has several members in the European Parliament.
In 2016, UKIP provided the foot-soldiers of the campaign to take Britain out of the European
Union; but the non-UKIP part of the Leave campaign has sought to distance itself from UKIP
since the referendum, worried at the damage that UKIP's xenophobic campaigning has done to
Britain.

BNP - British National Party

An extreme right-wing party , with nationalistic and xenophobic views. No members of
parliament

Parties of the centre

The Liberal Democrat party - the Liberal Democrats , or Lib Dems
A party of the centre, formed in 1988 by the merger of the Liberal Party and the Social
Democratic Party (SPD) , the latter being made up of dissidents from the Labour party. The Lib
Dems are thus a mixture of social conservatives and social democrats. The party is the most
pro-European of the major British parties, and until 2015 shared power with the Conservative
Party in the coalition government.
Many of those who voted Lib-Dem in 2010 were furious when the party chose to go into
colaition with the Conservatives, and in the 2015 election, the Lib Dems lost most of their MPs.
However, following the election of left-winger Jeremy Corbyn to the head of the Labour party in
September 2015, and the subequent internal divisions in the Labour party, support for the Lib-
Dems has begun to rise again
In 2016, expectations have been raised further since the Brexit referendum vote. The Liberal-
Democrats are starting to appear as the only credible party at the Centre of British politics, as
the Conservative party moves to the right, and the Labour Party moves increasingly to the left.
In December 2016, an unknown Lib-Dem candidate achieved a dramatic success by beating the
Conservatives, with a swing of 21% away from the Conservatives, in a parliamentary by-election
fought almost entirely on the issue of Brexit.

In the June 2017 election, the Lib-Dems increased their number of MPs from 8 to 11, taking
seats from the Conservatives and the Scottish Nationalists. However they did not emerge as the
new party of opposition, and as well as gaining seats, they lost some.
2018. In spite of being the only one of the three major parties that is committed to opposing
Brexit, and in spite of gaining 60,000 new members in 2018 the Lib-Dems continue to show very
poorly in opinion polls compared to Conservatives or Labour.
2019. As the only party that has been clearly and consistently opposed to Brexit, the Liberal
Democrats are staging a remarkable comeback. In the European Parliamentary Elections, they
came second, beating both the Conservatives and Labour. They are expected to increase their
representation in Parliament in August by retaking the Brecon and Randnorshire seat from the
Conservatives in a by-election. The party has also been buoyed by the election of its youngest
and first female leader, Jo Swinson, aged 39.

The Greens - The Green Party

A centre-left party, in many ways rather middle-class, committed to the promotion of
environmental issues. One Member of Parliament (since 2010)

The parties of the Left

The Labour Party
The Labour party covers virtually the whole spectrum of left wing politics in Britain, and includes
a smaller party known as the Co-operative party. Until 2010, since the time of Tony Blair, it had
been dominated by the social-liberal centre-left (initially known as New Labour): the collectivist
"Old Labour" views were very much in a minority . From 2010 to 2015, under the leadership of
Ed Miliband, it remained essentially a centre-left party; but in September 2015, with the election
to the leadership of a left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party has moved into a new
period in its history. (see below)
The party is supported and funded by the British trade unions, but it is not controlled or
significantly influenced by them, and this influence was further reduced in 2015. Very weak
following the recession of the 1970s, the party was largely reformed later by Tony Blair, who
transformed it into a modern social democratic party.
The Labour Party is made up of local parties (Constituency Labour Parties), most British
trade unions and other associations. These structures send delegates to party conferences,
depending on the number of their members. Party Conferences define the general lines of party
policy, but conference decisions are not binding on the parliamentary party . Until 2014 Labour
party leaders were elected by three electoral colleges, individual members , Labour MPs, and
trade unions, each college representing a third of the final result. The last leader, Ed Miliband,
was elected by the weight of union vote, even though both Labour MPs and individual members
preferred his brother David Miliband. After his election, and to reassure not only the country but
also a large number of his constituents , Ed Miliband sought to emphasize his total
independence from the unions. In 2014, he announced plans to reduce the role of the unions
even further in the election of the party leader. A new electoral process was introduced,
whereby the leader is elected by paid up members of the party and anyone else who signs up
and pays to vote in the electoral process.
Following the party's defeat in the 2015 General Election, Miliband stepped down as leader of
the Labour Party. In September however, Party members and other electors chose as the new
leader of the labour Party a radical left-winger, Jeremy Corbyn –the most left-wing leader the
party has ever had. Corbyn's election has sparked a serious rift in the party, and within hours of
his election, eight members of the shadow cabinet had announced that they would not be part of
Corbyn's team. Others are expected to follow.
For Corbyn's supporters, his election marks a return by the Labour party to its core socialist
values; for his opponents, it has simply made the Labour Party unelectable for at least ten
years.... if not longer. Opinion polls persistently show that while Labour party militants may
favour a strong left-wing agenda, British voters as a whole do not.
In 2016, during the Brexit referendum campaign, Jeremy Corbyn was repeatedly accused of
showing only half-hearted support for his party's official position, which is in favour of Britain
remaining in the European Union. In the days following the vote, eleven members of his
Shadow cabinet either resigned or were sacked, and a motion has been tabled calling on
Corbyn to step down, on the grounds that he does not show the leadership qualities that the
party needs if it wants to have any hope of winning another General Election.
However, in September, Corbyn was reelected as leader of the Labour Party, with an
increased majority, thanks to a surge in membership

In April 2017, polls showed the Labour party to be at a historic low level of around 25% – with
many traditional Labour voters moving towards the Conservatives on account their support for
Brexit and their rhetoric on immigration.
When Theresa May called the surprise general election, it was expected that Labour would
lose a lot of seats as more and more traditional voters in working-class areas moved over to the
Conservatives. However thanks to poor campaigning by the Conservatives and very good
campaigning by Jeremy Corbyn, Labour instead gained 29 seats and the Conservatives lost 12,
and lost their absolute majority in Parliament.
In January 2019, in spite of the Conservative government's huge unpopularity, Labour
has notsurged ahead in the opinion polls, as normally happens when a government is very
unpopular. Polls suggest that this is essentially due to Jeremy Corbyn who has refused to take
any clear personal position on Brexit. Corbyn continues to say that he is in favour of a "better"
Brexit, while opinion polls show that a big majority of Labour voters, specially the young, are
against Brexit.

Respect
The party of a populist left-wing Labour party dissident, George Galloway, who was its sole MP
until 2015.

The Communist Party of Great Britain

Very marginal, the party has only ever had two elected MPs. It was never a mass party, not
even when at its peak in the 1940's.
Main regional and nationalist parties
England does not have any serious regional parties, however, regional or nationalist parties are
now very important in the political landscape of other countries that make up the United
Kingdom.

SNP - Scottish Nationalist Party

Currently the most important political party in Scotland, and the party in power in the Scottish
Parliament . A left-of-centre nationalist party, that organized a referendum on Scottish
independence in autumn 2014. In the referendum, Scots voted to remain part of the United
Kingdom.
In 2016, following the result of the Brexit referendum vote in which Scotland overwhelmingly
voted to remain in the European Union, party leader Nicola Sturgeon is currently looking at the
possibility of holding a second Scottish independence referendum before the UK actually leaves
the European Union (if that should actually happen, which for the time being, remains a
possibility).

In the 2017 General Election, the SNP lost 19 of its 50 seats in the UK parliament, as many
Scots turned away from the issue of Scottish nationalism towards parties in favour of remaining
in the UK. However the SNP still holds an absolute majority of Scottish seats in the UK
parliament.

Plaid Cymru - Welsh nationalist party

Major Welsh party, which did control the Welsh Assembly, but is now on a par with the Labour
Party, which is also very well established in this part of the United Kingdom. In 2017 Plaid
Cymru (pronounced Plied Coomry) has three MPs in the UK parliament.
Democratic Unionist Party 2
The DUP, the conservative Protestant majority party in Northern Ireland (Ulster), is very
favorable to the maintenance of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, but not to Britain
remaining in the European Union. They are in favour of Brexit, and reject the idea that Northern
Ireland could have special status in the UK after Brexit; however they want Britain - or at least
Northern Ireland - to retain full access to the European market (in the framework of a
"Comprehensive free trade and customs agreement with the European Union") , positions that
may be hard to reconcile.
The DUP was first formed in 1971 as a hard-line Protestant break-away party, dissatisfied with
the direction taken by the official Ulster Unionist party, which was closely allied with the
Conservatives.

In June 2017, the DUP agreed to support the Conservatives in the Westminster Parliament,
allowing Theresa May to form a new government in spite of losing her absolute majority in the
House of Commons. The DUP has 10 MPs. Without their support, Theresa May would have a
minority government.
Sinn Fein 2
The majority party among the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, in favour of the withdrawal of
Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, and the reunification of Ireland.
SDLP
Social Democratic Party and Labour Party of Northern Ireland, a non-sectarian social
democratic party made up of both Catholics and Protestants.

Notes:
1. The system of relative majority; The winner of any election is the person who gets the greatest number
of votes, even if this is not an absolute majority of the votes cast.
2. The Northern Ireland Assembly is currently in the hands of a coalition between DUP and Sinn Fein ,
once bitter enemies of each other. However the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended in 2016
following the failure of the DUP and Sinn Fein to continue working together.

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Picture top of page: Whigs and Tories are strongly opposed on reforming the British parliament in 1832.
Satirical cartoon by Robert Cruickshank,

Boris Johnson... controversial new leader of the conservative Party, and British Prime
Minister
Debate in the Ho

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