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The Basics
British Politics: The Basics
Fully updated and expanded, the second edition of this still compact text on British politics expertly analyses the major changes in British political life, placing them revealingly within the context of the evolution of British society from absolute monarchy to representative democracy. The author considers each of the major components of British politics in digestible chapters, such as the Monarchy and the House of Lords, the Commons, voting behaviour, parties and pressure groups, the prime minister and cabinet, devolution, local government, and foreign policy. The book includes two new chapters on the EU referendum and Brexit, and the extraordinary December 2019 election, as well as coverage of events such as the coronavirus pandemic, and the respective travails of the increasingly split two major political parties. This readable and comprehensive introduction will be of key interest to A-level students, undergraduates and those new to the study of British politics.
- GenresNonfictionPolitics
446 pages, Paperback
Published November 4, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 19, 2025
Rounded up from 3.5. A good introduction to British politics. A simple read but not patronising. I found the chapters on the judiciary and local government particularly illuminating
Like a lot of people, I know what the various bits are, but not how the function together.
It is repetitive, as others reviewers have said. That's fine between chapters, so you can read each chapter individually, but sometimes you find it within chapters, too. It also needed a better proofread: there are sentences missing words, or with extra words - presumably orphans from a previous edit that got overlooked.
There is some information on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but mostly just with regard to devolution, so there is an English bias. For instance, although the book acknowledges that Scotland has a different judicial system, there's precious little information about it, and a diagram of the English judicial system is described as showing the UK judicial system.
Because of when the book was published, there's an overemphasis on the 2015 election, which seems irrelevant to the modern reader who knows that the Conservatives were just about to detonate the Brexit bomb and change the whole situation.
Like a lot of people, I know what the various bits are, but not how the function together.
It is repetitive, as others reviewers have said. That's fine between chapters, so you can read each chapter individually, but sometimes you find it within chapters, too. It also needed a better proofread: there are sentences missing words, or with extra words - presumably orphans from a previous edit that got overlooked.
There is some information on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but mostly just with regard to devolution, so there is an English bias. For instance, although the book acknowledges that Scotland has a different judicial system, there's precious little information about it, and a diagram of the English judicial system is described as showing the UK judicial system.
Because of when the book was published, there's an overemphasis on the 2015 election, which seems irrelevant to the modern reader who knows that the Conservatives were just about to detonate the Brexit bomb and change the whole situation.
October 31, 2019
On first glance, the book looked promising. It had a solitude structure covering all major themes, tables and graphs to suggest fact-based analysis. However, the structure proved to be filled with vague content, often repeating itself, giving the distinct feeling that the author was struggling to fill those 309 pages he promised. Short on facts, more opinion than one expects from such books, and a lot of it unsubstantiated, that even I could disprove.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews