British Electoral System

The maturity of the political system in Britain has gradually shaped the British community. Britain at present is considered to be a Liberal Democratic state and one main component is the capacity of the government to conduct an election to allow the people to voice their needs in the national level. Election is the heart or the core of a democratic state , removing this would deprive the people of their right. After five years or if the Parliament was dissolved by the Queen with of course the Prime Minister's advise, there will be an election using the "First-past-the-post" electoral system. Here the candidates can win seats in the Parliament by plurality of votes that the candidate received in his or her district. But then this form of electoral system attracted number of critics regarding the biases it constituted in the government. According to critics, only the large political parties (Conservative and the Labour Party) benefit in this scenario; those with equally strong support in different districts, gain more seats rather than those who concentrated on one area alone and; the small parties suffered the consequences of having weak and widespread support. British election has been the founding element that will contour the parties' policies and motives.

The British people have already witnessed several elections that later on shaped the political way of life of Britain. These elections are highly competitive among the different parties, each presenting themselves better than the other parties and most especially maintaining their status quo or a probable of increasing their power over their constituents. Party image and public opinion generates the shaping of the British electoral results.

The 1997 British General Election was the time of a new power and rule under the Labour Party. The election on May 1, 1997 was one of the most talked about election in Britain for it passed on the rule of the Conservatives to the Labour. The Labour party under the leadership of Tony Blair, the successor of the late John Smith who died of a heart attack in May 1994, won a landslide victory and gained the largest seat for any administration since 1935. With this new leadership, a breath of fresh air in the political scene brought new hopes from the people that their needs will be addressed properly and immediate action will take place. Despite the Labour Party gaining most seats in the Parliament their victory constituted just 30.9 per cent of the qualified voters. The said election was also favorable among the Liberal Democrats (party) as they increased the number of seats in the Parliament. They also won their first Euro-seats but they still hoped to annex South of England. Among the Conservatives, this election was by far the worst election they have, ending almost 18 years of their supremacy, as they received the lowest seat since 1906 and that they also lost a quarter of the votes they earned in 1992 General election. Listed are the percentages of vote during the election: Labour - 43%; Conservatives - 31%; Liberal Democrats - 17% and Others - 9.3%. With these statistics, indeed the 1997 General Election has been a turning point in the British Government ending the old Thatcherism and the beginning of the preeminence of a new political party, the Labour Party. Alongside with these changes were different views among the public and scholars on what the Labour Party carried out to achieve such a complete turn-around, managing to get victorious despite the power and influence of the Conservative Party. As manifested in the 1997 British General Election both the party image and public opinion from the people secured the votes for the rise of the new rule of the Labour Party.

The British Parliament consists of a number of political parties with different ideologies, platforms and future hopes for Britain but only two parties emerged as the dominant forces, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Each of these parties is concern with how they will present themselves to the public in order to gain the public's trust and to be able to receive the people's submission of loyalty to the party. Previous writers from the Conservatives said that faith of the members to their party leader would result in a disciplined party. Naturally, members' of a certain party must agree on recognizing their party leader as a competent being that would be able to guide, unify and bring order to their party, after all, he or she is a potential Prime Minister in any case their party get the majority of seats in the Parliament. Also, the party leader is the primary person to represent the party and that he or she must be able to act in accordance with party's image to capture most of the voter's sympathy. As Graham Wallas, a political scientist and author of Human Nature in Politics, pointed out the significance of "political image" among the voter's preferences. This is due to the fact that the voters will give support to parties where they can benefit the most and that reflect on their social status, ethnicity and religion. Just in the case of two dominant party, the Labour Party will most likely get support from the less affluent citizens, those from Scotland and the North, the working class and those from the public sector. On the other hand those wealthy citizens, coming from the prosperous South of England and people working in big businesses would most likely be voting for the Conservative Party.

The 1997 election was not just a result of the Labour Party managing to have smooth campaigns or what they called the Mandelson effect, named after Peter Mandelson, the party was able to discipline media function, quick refutation against the oppositions and utilized all of its resources in getting all the support they needed. Margett pointed out that the victory of the Labour Party has resulted with a number of scandals that the Conservative Party faces that ultimately hurt the party that led to its decline in power. During the early 1990s, the Conservative Party faced political sleaze involving some of the party's members. With these scandals, the voters lost their trust on the party being able to fulfill its duty as responsible members of the Parliament. Helen Margetts enumerated cases of sleazes wherein the Conservative Party was involved with. The cases are as follows: 1) the investigation of Sir Gordon Downey involving 10 Conservative MPs who allegedly received cash and gifts for their agreement to ask questions in the Parliament and these resulted for the Conservative MPs to be censured by the Commons' Select Committee on Privileges; 2) Scott inquiry (November 1992), wherein there has been an investigation regarding the government's sale of arms to Iraq during the Gulf War, an immediate expose in 1993 truly damaged the image of the

...