British Party Politics

I didn’t know a lot about British politics before reading Tony Wright’s book, other than the basic structure of the legislature and executive and names like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Margaret Thatcher.  I didn’t realize that the party system in Parliament was laid out, and more importantly accepted, the way that it is; that in accordance with the first-past-the-post electoral system the party in power, which may have received only a few more votes than the opposition party, can essentially pass any legislation it wants without running into any significant obstacles. The dynamics of this system are really interesting to me, because the regimes I’m most familiar with have a much less friendly relationship with similar styles of governance.   The U.S. legislature is designed to prevent unilateral policy domination as far as possible, while rising democracies in the developing world are criticized, and often penalized in terms of donor aid and support, for developing what has been termed the “dominant one party” system, in which party turnover and equality of policy creation are markedly low. The view from the outside, or at least from where I’m standing, would have to be curious about why the “shadow” party, and the citizens who support it and the other opposition parties, so willingly accept a near-complete lack of political influence and interest articulation whenever they happen to lose an election.  However functionally efficient the system may be, it seems like it requires a certain extreme amount of trust that the party in power won’t completely screw everyone else over.  Maybe this is indicative of how deeply this particular system of government organization is ingrained in British history, consciousness, and culture, because I’m not sure how it would survive in “newer” democratic states.