In his very short introduction to British politics, Tony Wright greatly emphasizes the strength of the British government. The British system of government has no separation of powers. The Prime Minister is elected by the parliament and due to the majority-rule system of British politics, the Prime Minister is always a member of the party who holds the majority in the parliament. Because there is no separation between the parliament and the executive and no judicial branch to determine the constitutionality of legislative material. The parliament and the Prime Minister are incredibly powerful, the Prime Minister and his party can do as they please. Essentially, as Tony Wright points out, there are no checks and balances as in most modern political systems.
However, what Tony Wright does not discuss in great detail is the existence of opposition political parties as a potential check on the ruling government. True, the opposition parties have little ability to thwart legislation proposed by the government. However, this is not important. It is the threat that the opposition party provides that can keep the ruling party in line. In British Politics, the opposition party has essentially a shadow government, whose purpose it is to study the actions of the ruling party, so that if they should win the next election they are prepared to govern immediately. There is always a chance that the general population could become dissatisfied and vote the new party into power. In theory, this threat should prevent the ruling party from moving to far in a certain direction. However, this theory has not been proven to work in practice. Tony Wright himself points out the three political revolutions in Britain after World War II. These revolutions were the Attlee revolution, the Thatcher revolution, and the Blair revolution. In each of these revolutions, the governing parties sought to undue or change much of what the previous parties had enacted. While political parties and election are clearly a weak check on the ruling party, they do serve to prevent the governing party from getting out of control. Maybe a a lack of strong checks and balances is the reason that the British government has remained stable for so long. Revolutions are able to occur in a civilized political realm rather than on the battle field.
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Though I agree that Wright may not have given sufficient credit to the checking power of the party in opposition within the British system of government, he does allude to the oppositional party's function as checking the party in power in some places in the book...For example, unlike the United States' electoral system, in which parties function primarily in terms of representation, Wright points out that "the primary function of the electoral system [in British politics] is not to represent the diverse range of political opinions but to produce governments and oppositions of different parties" (73). Although Wright makes this comment in order to emphasize the British system's lack of acknowledging pluralism, I think he does imply that there is a check involved.
However, he further talks about how the FPTP system and the tremendous allocation of resources to the winning government produce an imbalanced government within the British political system. So, because the winning party has so many more resources at its disposal than the opposition, this check--though existing--is not powerful enough...but in light of Britain's current attempts at accountability reforms, all this may change (as I briefly mentioned in my post).
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