End Of British Party Politics

by Roger Scully

Elections ask voters to choose between political parties. But voters across the UK are increasingly being presented with fundamentally different, and largely disconnected, sets of political choices. This book is about this hollowing out of a genuinely British democratic how and why it has occurred, and why it matters. Electoral choices across Britain became increasingly differentiated along national lines over much of the last half-century. In 2017, for the second general election in a row, four different parties came first in the UK's four nations. UK voters are increasingly faced with general election campaigns that are largely disconnected from each other. At the same time, voters acquire much of their information about the election from news-media based in London that display little understanding of these national distinctions. The UK continues to elect representatives to a single parliament. But the shared debates and sets of choices that tie a political community together are increasingly absent. Separate national political arenas and agendas still have to interact but in some respects the House of Commons increasingly resembles the European Parliament - whose members are democratically chosen but from a disconnected series of separate national electoral contests. This is deeply problematic for the long-term unity and integrity of the UK.

208 pages, Paperback

Published April 5, 2018

Reviews

[Alastair Hannaford · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was a disappointing read. I felt that the author lacked the necessary terms, interchanging the meaning of words frequently and without explanation. When he needed to explain detailed issues he brushed over, ignoring regions below country level, this as such made reading infuriating. While failing to be precise he also failed in being concise getting caught up in tedious details of little relevance compounded by his inability to assign better terminology.