Learn about the UK political system & elections

hello I'm Jill cutting vids and today's lesson is on the British political system so this may be of interest to you if you're interested in politics or and interested in this country maybe you're living here in in the UK and would like to understand a little bit more about the system about how the system works and what all the terminology is all the vocabulary connected with it so this is just a general introduction to that and also maybe you're a native English speaker and you just you're just interested in the subject and would like to hear something about it a sort of general summary so here it is so first of all to begin with the main big organization that runs the country who make all the political decisions the national parliament and the government okay so there are 650 MPs all representing different what are called constituencies difficult word to say constituency so the whole country is divided up into these parliamentary constituencies and the people who live there register to vote so everyone has a vote so depending on which constituency you live in you get an opportunity to vote for one of the candidates in each election okay so a candidate it's Wendy actions are held and there may be five or six or seven or more candidates all wanting you to vote for them and they all represent different political parties like these which I've written here in different colors because those are the colors associated with those parties so you get to vote every usually for every five years you can vote for the person you want to have as your local MP Member of Parliament okay so there are six hundred and fifty altogether MPs members of parliament representing six hundred and fifty constituencies which is a lot of people millions of people okay so out of all of those MPs they are all representing different parties they're not all from the same party so usually these are the main parties the ones who actually have MPs in Parliament this party they only have one MP so it's quite small they're a fairly recent political party compared with the other ones they only have one MP the Green Party I think maybe only have one MP this depends I mean we're in 2017 at the moment so things can change in politics so it may be different by the time you're watching this this lesson so anyway the main parties are the ones in the middle here really the Liberal Democrats don't have quite so many MPs at the moment that I've put them here because they're a fairly sort of central party in political terms what I've done you've probably heard of the terms left wing and right wing so I put them in the position where they belong in terms of how how their policies on their opinions relate to left wing and right wing views so you Kipp are quite right-wing labor or socialist and green are quite left-wing and then you have people who are in the middle Liberal Democrats are fairly middle conservatives are a little bit more right-wing and these things do change from time to time you could have a Labour government a few years ago which was actually quite right-wing in the way it in the things that it did but at the moment that they the Labour leader is quite a left-wing person so you have the same name for the party but they're their ideas can change or their their interests and what they want to do can change so the 650 MPs could come from any of those as well as national parties because the countries involved it's not just England its Wales as well Scotland and Northern Ireland okay so there are national parties from Wales Scotland and Northern Ireland as specific to that country who are MPs for their national party related to that country and there are also a few independent MPs who don't belong to a party but they have been a candidate and independent candidate and they were popular enough to be voted for and become an MP so there are other parties as well as the ones I've written here the national parties mostly so these four countries England Wales Scotland Northern Ireland not the rest of Ireland not the Republic of Ireland because they are separate there are a republic they're not part of the UK so that they have their own system their own political system okay right so the 650 650 empties all belong to different parties but some you have to form a government from that so usually it's based on who has the majority at the moment at the time that I'm speaking now in 2017 the Conservative Party has is the government because they had the majority majority of seats these are called seats because they sit they sit down in their feet so it's called a seat but it means their their position as an MP they called seats so the Conservatives had a majority of seats so they formed a government in 2015 when we had the last general election when the whole country are all on one day was voting for their MP 2015 the one before that was 2010 so the general elections are usually every five years 2010 no party had a majority in 2010 so the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats got together and they formed a coalition so I'll write it here coalition meaning they had to work together to form a government and to run the country basically so that was a coalition in 2010 but then the general election 2015 the Conservatives got more seats and they found Adam jority so they could form a government without the help of the Liberal Democrats who lost a lot of seats they lost a lot of popularity okay so with the Conservative government a member labour party because they are the next biggest party they are seen and they're called the opposition they are called the opposition party because in a democracy you have your government who are doing things but you need the balance of a party to criticize them and to question everything and sometimes to try to stop them from doing things so you might wonder does anything ever get done when you've got people trying to do something and other people trying to stop them so that's the democratic system it's a bit sort of aggressive really but it means everybody's opinion is heard that way okay so you can imagine the Green Party is very interested in the environment that's why they're called Green so labour traditionally are more interested really in what they call working people except lots and lots of people are working people but they have a kind of a class view of that which is perhaps a bit out of date now days were not divided into three classes anymore so it's rather difficult to and they're in a lot of confusion at the moment because of them the new leader not everybody is happy with him some some people love him some people hate him so there we are Liberal Democrats as I say lost a lot of seats so they don't have a lot of power at the moment conservatives have a small majority so they can do things that with a lot of people trying to stop them and so it goes on UKIP you Kipp as they called United Kingdom Independence Party they were set up specifically to try to persuade people the country to leave the European Union so they were set up all years ago and people at first thought this was crazy why would we want to leave the European Union but gradually they they got more a law you know people listening to them and eventually there was a referendum so referendum where people were given an opportunity to vote did they want to stay in the European Union or did they want to leave and that it was very close but the people who voted to leave was slightly higher than the number who wanted to stay so we are now going through what's called brexit which is British exits the British exits from the EU called brexit for convenience so we're now going through a process of brexit where we really being extracted from the European Union taken out of the European Union but I think it's going to be a very long slow complicated process with a lot of negotiations going on but that's a result of the referendum when everybody who wanted to voted one way or the other and the majority wanted to leave so that's what's being done now at the moment okay so so you kit set themselves up especially for this purpose and now they have succeeded that is going ahead people wonder what do they do now can they continue as a party it's not very clear because one their main leader has stopped being leader and they've had two new leaders so far who have not been all that successful so people wonder now at whether the UK party will continue or whether it will just disappear gradually okay so that's the main national system there we also have local political systems called local councils so the area where you live in London for example there are more than 30 local councils because London is so big London is divided up into council areas and elections are every four years for councils the people who are voted for are called councillors they again each council is divided up into smaller areas called wards so wherever you live in London you are in a ward which is in a bigger council area and each ward might have two or three councilors for that ward so there may be twenty wards in in a council area so there are quite a lot of wards they're just smaller areas to help administration to make it easier to deal with and then with the council there is often a mayor as well the mayor who is either just chosen by the councillors or some local councils people can elect the mayor as well they have a paper voting paper where they can choose their mayor and London itself has a much bigger the London Assembly and we have a mayor for London an overall Mayor of London for the whole London area as well as having theirs in different smaller councils so there are lots of political systems all one on top of another okay so finally just for fun I thought I'd told you about her a party a political party who have never had an MP but they have had a few councillors and mares they they're called the official monster raving loony party a raving loony is a crazy person so they were they were called that because they wanted to appear crazy like very eccentric eccentric so somebody in 1963 a long time ago started this party and his name it wasn't his real name but called himself screaming Lord Sutch and he used to dress in very strange clothes and it was just to make people laugh really but it was also as a kind of a protest and people would vote for them what's called a protest vote if people don't like all the other candidates and they don't like what all the main political parties are doing they might vote for a crazy party like this as a protest vote to say well we prefer that crazy person in the funny clothes to these serious political people who don't seem to be helping us very much so that's sometimes what has happened so they've never had an MP in Parliament they've never had enough votes for that but sometimes in a local council people would disliked the local councillors so much that they decided to vote for the official monster raving loony party instead and a few councillors were actually elected and one of them maybe one or two even became the mayor of their local council and perhaps they did a good job so when you see on television sometimes when there has been an election and then people stay up very late that night and into the early hours of the morning counting the votes and then eventually all the candidates are standing on a stage and somebody from the local council is announcing how many votes each candidate received one of those candidates may be from this party and they're very easy to spot to notice because they are dressed in a very colorful costume usually of some sort or another very colorful and and maybe with a big funny hat or something so you can spot the raving monster loony candidate just by looking and they stand there waiting to hear how many votes they've received so that sort of brightens things up when people are a bit tired of politics which is going on all the time so it's easy to get tired of it because there's always something happening so okay so that's just a very simple overview really but I hope I hope it's been useful for you with a bit of vocabulary and a bit of information you may not have known about before so do go to the website in vidcom where there's a quiz on this subject thanks for watching and see you again soon bye

Channel: Learn English with Gill (engVid)

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Keywords: learn English, English, ESL, English grammar, vocabulary, English vocabulary, engVid, speak English, accent, British accent, British English, lessons, IELTS, TOEFL, anglais, inglés, Englisch, англи́йский, angielski, إنجليزي, Inggris, Hoc Tieng Anh, TESL, TEFL, spoken english, speaking skills, presentation skills, native speaker, slang, job skills, native accent, tenses, UK, England, UK elections, brexit, UKIP, british election, england election, referendum, UK vote, britain vote

Id: f98HtyjcWxE

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2017