Nationalist Parties

There are also two large nationalist parties: Plaid Cymru (Welsh National Party) and Scottish National Party (SNP). They want separate parliaments for their countries and many of their members, especially in SNP, are willing to consider total independence from the UK.

In Northern Ireland parties normally represent either the Protestant or the Catholic communities. There is one large comparatively moderate party on each side (the Protestant Ulster Unionists and the Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party) and one or more other parties of more extreme tiers on each side (i.e. the Protestant Democratic Unionists and the Catholic Sinn Fein).

Other Parties

' There are numerous small parties, such as the Green Party, which is supported by environmentalists.

There is also an extreme right-wing party, which is openly racist, called the British National Party (BNP). It supports the repatriation of colored immigrants and their descendants and dependants.

None of these parties had won a single seat in Pa rliament in the second half of the 20^th century. The electoral system in Great Britain makes it possible only for the two parties to be in office, one forms the government, the other opposition.

Assignment:

Complete the following text with the words and expressions from the list, election campaign; support; polling day; balllot box; vote; predict; opinion poll; polling station; candidate.

И •

Щфр1а sometimes try to (a) the result of an election weeks it

tlkll place. Several hundred people are asked which party they prefer, (ПО 11*1 air answers are used to guess the result of the coming election.

Till! la called an (b) . Meanwhile each party conducts its

(0) with meetings, speeches, television commercials, and party

members going from door to door encouraging people to (d)

their party. In Britain everyone over 18 is eligible to

(a) . The place where people go to vote in an election is called

I (f) and the day of the election is often known as

(SI) . The voters put their votes in a (h) and later they

ВГА counted. The (i) with the most votes is then declared the

Winner.

III.6. Elections

Every British subject over 18 who is resident in Britain has a right lO vote. (Members of the Royal Family and lunatics are not allowed to vote). People vote for any one of the candidates in the constituency in which they are registered. The candidate that obtains the most votes in thnt constituency, irrespective of whether he or she has an overall majority, becomes its Member of Parliament and the other votes are 'wasted'.

Anyone over 21 who is entitled to vote (except for clergymen, civil •ervants, felons and bankrupts) can stand a candidate. Candidates are normally selected by the local party associations, but independent candidates can also stand. Each candidate has to pay a deposit (currently L500), which is returned if a candidate obtains at least 5 % of the total number of votes cast in that constituency.

General elections must be held at least every five years, but the Prime Minister has the right to call elections before the five-year term has expired.

The electoral system in Britain is one-candidate or “first-past-the- post" (an allusion to horse-racing). It means that a party can obtain a few MPs in the Commons, because these votes are distributed evenly among the various constituencies. The system is much criticized by its opponents and there is a possibility of it being replaced by another one, th© system of proportional representation.

The following example shows how ‘the-first-past-the-post’ system works.

At the 1997 election, there were 659 constituencies and 659 MPs were elected. It was called a general election, and of course control of

/

the government depended on it, but in formal terms it was just 659 separate elections going on at the same time.

Here are the results from two constituencies in 1997.

Parties	Constituencies
Conservative Liberal Democrats Labour	Chesterfield Totnes 4,752 19,637 20,330 18,760 26,105 8,796

If we add the votes received for each party in these constituencies together, we find that the Liberal Democrats got more' votes than Conservative or Labour. And yet, these two parties each won a seat while the Liberal democrats did not. This is because they were not first in either constituency. It is coming first that matters.