Summary: book "Britain for Learners of English", James O'Driscoll


The three main parts of the Parliament



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The three main parts of the Parliament
House of Commons – All of the MPs are elected by the UK citizens (4 or 8 years) in the general election. Each represents their own constituency.
House of Lords – All of the peers. They are unelected. They are nominated experts in their fields. The Prime minister has a large say in who becomes a Peer.
The Monarch – the king or queen at the time. They have less power now but still have the sign-off on laws and on Peerages.
The Whigs and The Tories
The Whigs and Tories were British Political parties that developed in the latter part of the 17th century.
The constitution
Britain is a constitutional monarchy. It is a country governed by a king or queen who accepts the advice of a parliament. Therefore, it is also a parliamentary democracy (a country whose government is controlled by a parliament elected by the people. it does not have a constitution. It has rules, regulations, principles and procedures of running the countries, but there is no single written document which can be appealed to as the highest law of the land. Nobody can refer to article 1 or something like that. Instead, the principles and procedures come from a number of different sources. They have been built up over the centuries. Some of them are written down in laws agreed by Parliament, some have been spoken and then written down and some have never been written down at all. There is no written law about who can be Prime Minister or what the powers of that are, even though he or she is probably the most powerful person in the country. Instead, these have been established and are constantly being modified, by custom and practice.
Constitutional Monarch, limited monarchy a monarchy governed according to a constitution that
limits and defines the powers of the sovereign.
Why does Britain not have a written constitution Does it need one
Essentially because the country has been too stable for too long. The governing elites of many European nations, such as France and Germany, have been forced to draw up constitutions in response to popular revolt or war. Distributing prohibited | Downloaded by Ngan Tien (nganctddongnai@yahoo.com.vn)
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Great Britain, by contrast, remained free of the revolutionary fervour that swept much of the Continent in the 19th century. As a result, this country's democracy has been reformed incrementally over centuries rather than in one big bang.

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