UK Parliament - A Confrontation Style Democracy

“I love argument. I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.”

~Margaret Thatcher

In a previous post, I had contrasted the UK’s multi-party political system with the US’s two party dominated politics. Although the UK does have two better known and established political parties, the Conservative Party (Tories) and the Labor Party, the UK system still allows 3rd party candidates to get elected to parliament and have a say in the political process. As I explained before, both the US and the UK have a “winner takes all/first past the post system” that discriminates against 3rd party candidates. So why does UK’s system seem to discriminate less? One possible reason is the confrontational nature of UK’s parliament which allows for: a more entertaining political debate, direct confrontation and debate between leading politicians, and free screen time in which people actual care and pay attention. Allow me to demonstrate this confrontational nature of debate with several entertaining clips.

Firstly, here is a younger Tony Blair attacking the Conservative Prime Minister John Major. Blair’s Labor Party went on to beat Major’s Conservative party in the 1997 election. The Labor party has been in power ever since.

Next, Prime Minister Blair uses his quick wit to put down the opposition Tory Members of Parliament (MPs) over their knowledge of Europe.

Now, we fast forward to 2006 and the conservative leader of the opposition William Hague takes part in a back and forth with an old college, the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescot. The zingers keep coming from both sides in this clip.

In the last keep, we rewind to 1996, where the Conservative MP is slapped down for the speaker for trying to get the Prime Minister to talk about opposition policies (the parliament rules dictate that the prime minister cannot talk about anything other than his own government’s policies).