Slide 23

Slide 22.

Slide 21.

Slide 20.

The Prime Minster and all the Secretaries of State together comprise an executive body of government called the Cabinet. The cabinet is the collective decision-making body. The prime minister chooses a cabinet and members of a cabinet are formally appointed by the monarch.

The Cabinet meets usually once a week on Thursday morning to discuss the most important issues of government policy, and to make decisions. Cabinet meetings are confidential and all members are bound by any decision that it takes in a practice called collective responsibility. The Cabinet has numerous sub-committees which focus on particular policy areas.

The UK has a devolved system of government. The three devolved administrations are:

· The Scottish Parliament.

· The Welsh Assembly

· The Northern Ireland Assembly

All the three bodies have different powers from one another.

The United Kingdom does not have a single legal system. Today the UK has three distinct systems of law: English law, Northern Ireland law and Scots law. A new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom came into being in October 2009 to replace the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. The main role of the Supreme Court is to hear appeals from courts in the United Kingdom's three legal systems: England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is the highest court of appeal for several independent Commonwealth countries, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown Dependencies.

Both English law, which applies in England and Wales, and Northern Ireland law are based on common-law principles. The essence of common law is that the law is developed by judges in courts, applying statute, precedent and common sense to the facts. The courts of England and Wales are headed by the Senior Courts of England and Wales, consisting of the Court of Appeal, the High Court of Justice (for civil cases) and the Crown Court (for criminal cases).

Scots law is a hybrid system based on both common-law and civil-law principles. The chief courts are the Court of Session, for civil cases, and the High Court of Justiciary, for criminal cases.

The idea of political parties first took form in Britain and the Conservative Party claims to be the oldest political party in the world. Political parties began to form during the English civil wars of the 1640s and 1650s. First, there were Royalists and Parliamentarians; then Tories and Whigs.

Today there are three major political parties in the British system of politics:

· The Labour Party - the centre-Left party;

· The Conservative Party (frequently called the Tories) - the centre-Right party currently led by David Cameron;

· The Liberal Democrat Party (known as the Lib Dems) - the centrist party.

In addition to these three main parties, there are some much smaller UK parties (notably the UK Independence Party and the Green Party) and some parties which operate specifically in Scotland (the Scottish National Party), Wales or Northern Ireland.

By convention, the leader of the political party with the largest number of members in the House of Commons becomes the Prime Minster (formally at the invitation of the Queen).

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11