hello I'm Jill at in viid and today's lesson is on uh the British political system so this may be of interest to you if you're interested in politics or and interested in this country maybe you're living here in in the UK and would like to understand uh a little bit more about the system about how the system works and what all the terminology is all the vocabulary connected with it so this is just a general introduction to that um and also maybe you're a native English speaker and you you just you're just interested in the subject and would like to hear something about it uh a sort of General summary so here it is so um first of all uh to begin with the main big organ organzation that runs the country who make all the political decisions uh the national Parliament and the government okay so there are 650 MPS all representing different what are called constituencies difficult word to say constituency so the whole country uh is divided up into the these parliamentary constituencies and the people who live there register to vote so everyone has a vote so depending on which constituency you live in you get an opportunity to vote for one of the candidates in each election okay so a candidate is when the elections are held and there may be five or six or seven or more candidates all wanting you to vote for them and they all represent different political parties like these which I've written here in different colors uh because those are the colors associated with those parties um so you get to vote every usually F every five years you can vote for the person you want to have as your local MP Member of Parliament okay uh so there are 650 altogether MPS members of parliament representing 650 constituencies which is a lot of people millions of people okay so out of all of those MPS they are all uh representing different parties they're not all from the same party so um usually the these are the the main parties uh the ones who actually have MPS in Parliament uh this party um they only have one MP so it's quite small uh there a fairly recent political party compared with the other ones they only have one MP um the green party I think maybe only have one MP this depends I mean we're in 2017 at the moment so things can change in politics so it may be different by the time you're watching uh this uh this lesson so anyway um the main parties are the ones in the middle here really um the liberal Democrats don't have quite so many MPS at the moment but I've put them here because they're are fairly sort of central um party in political terms what I've done you've probably heard of the terms leftwing and rightwing uh so um I've put them in the position um where they belong in terms of how uh how their policies on their opinions relate to um left-wing and right-wing views so ukip are are quite right-wing uh labor or socialist and green are quite left-wing and then you have people who are in the middle liberal Democrats are fairly middle um conservatives are a little bit more right wing and these things do change from time to time you you could have a labor government a few years ago which was actually quite rightwing in the way it in the things that it did but at the moment that they the labor leader is quite a left-wing person so you have the same name for the party but there their ideas can change or their their interests and what they want to do can change um so the 650 MPS could come from any of those as well as um National parties because the countries involved it's not just England uh it's Wales as well Scotland and Northern Ireland okay so there are National parties from Wales Scotland and Northern Ireland uh specific to that country who are MPS for their National Party related to that country and there are also a few independent MPS who don't belong to a party but they have been a candidate an independent candidate um and they were popular enough to be voted for and become an MP uh so there are other parts ities as well as the ones I've written here the national parties mostly uh so these three four countries England Wales Scotland Northern Ireland not the rest of Ireland not the Republic of Ireland because they are separate they're a republic they're not part of the UK so um that they have their own system their own political system okay um right so the 6 650 MPS all belong to different parties but um you have to form a government from that so usually it's based on who has the majority at the moment at the time the I'm speaking now in 2017 uh the conservative party has uh is is the government because they had the majority majority of um of seats these are are called seats because they sit they sit down in their seat so it's called a seat but it it means their their position as an MP they're called seats so the conservatives had a majority of seats so they formed a government um in 2015 when we had the last general election when the whole country all all on one day was voting for their MP 2015 the one before that was 2010 so the general elections are usually every 5 years 2010 um no party had a majority in 2010 so the conservatives and the liberal Democrats got together and they formed a coalition so um I'll write it here coition meaning they had to work together to form a government um and uh to to run the country basically so that was a Coalition in 2010 but then the general election in 2015 the conservatives got more seats and they form had a majority so they could form a government without the help of the liberal Democrats who lost a lot of seats uh they lost a lot of popularity um okay um so with there's the conservative government and then the labor party because they are the next biggest party they are seen and they're called the opposition they are called the opposition party because in a democracy you you have your government who are doing things but you need the balance of a party to uh to criticize them and to question everything and sometimes to try to stop them from doing things so you might wonder does anything ever get done uh when you've got people trying to do something and other people trying to stop them uh so that's the democratic system um it's a bit sort of aggressive really um but it means everybody's opinion is heard that way okay so um you can imagine the green party is um very interested in the environment that's why they're called Green so labor traditionally um are more interested really in what they call working people except lots and lots of people are working people but they have a kind of a class view of that which is perhaps a bit out of date nowadays that we're not divided into three classes anymore so it's rather difficult to and they're in a a lot of um confusion at the moment because of their their new leader not everybody is happy with him some some people love him some people hate him so um there we are um liberal Democrats as I say lost a lot of seats so they don't have a lot of power at the moment conservatives have a small majority so they can do things but with a lot of people trying to stop them and so it goes on um UK IP ukip as they're called United Kingdom independence party they were set up specifically to to try to um persuade people the country to leave the European Union so they were set up oh years ago and people at first thought this was crazy why would we want to leave the European Union but gradually uh they they got more and more you know people listening to them and eventually um there was a referendum so referendum um where people were given an opportunity to vote did they want to stay in the European Union or did they want to leave and the it was very close but the people who voted to leave was slightly higher than the number who wanted to stay so we are now going through um what's called brexit which is British exit the British exit from the EU it's called brexit for convenience so when now going through a process of brexit where we we are gradually being extracted from the European Union taken out of the European Union but I think it's going to be a very long slow complicated process with a lot of negotiations going on but that's a result of the referendum when everybody who wanted to voted one way or the other and the majority wanted to leave so that's what's being done now at the moment um okay so um so you set themselves up especially for this purpose and now they have succeeded that is going ahead people wonder um what do they do now can they continue as a party it's not very clear because one their main leader has stopped being leader and they've had two new leaders so far who have not been all that successful so people wonder now uh whether the ukit party will continue or whether it will just disappear gradually okay so that's the main National system there um we also have local political systems called local councils so the area where you live uh in London for example there are more than 30 local councils because London is so big um London is divided up into Council areas and elections are every four years for councils the people who are voted for are called counselors um they again each council is divided up into smaller areas called Wards so wherever you live in London you are in a ward which is in a bigger Council area and each Ward might have two or three counselors for that Ward so there may be 20 Wards in in a council area so there are quite a lot of wards they're just smaller areas to help Administration to make it easier to deal with um and then with the council there is often a mayor as well the mayor who is either just chosen by the councilors or some local councils people can elect the mayor as well they have a paper voting paper where they can choose their mayor and London itself has a much bigger uh the London assembly and we have a a mayor for London an overall mayor of London for the whole London area as well as having Mayors in different smaller councils so there are lots of political systems all one on top of another okay uh so finally just for fun I thought I'd tell you about a a party uh political party who have never had an MP um but they have had a few counselors and Mayors um they they're called the official monster raving Looney party um a raving Looney um is a a crazy person so they were they were called that because they wanted to appear crazy like very eccentric eccentric so somebody in 1963 a long time ago started this party and he his name it it wasn't his real name but he called himself screaming Lord such and um he used to dress in very strange clothes and it was just to make people laugh really but it was also as a kind of a protest and people would vote for them what's called a protest vote if people don't like all the other candidates and they don't like what all the main political parties are doing they might vote for a a crazy party like this as a protest vote to say well we prefer that crazy person in the funny clothes to these serious political people who don't seem to be helping us very much so that's sometimes what has happened uh so they they've never had an MP in Parliament um they've never had enough votes for that but sometimes in a local Council uh people disliked the local Council so much that they decided to vote for the official monster raving Looney party instead and a few counselors were actually elected and one of them maybe one or two even became the mayor of their local Council uh and perhaps they they did a good job so when you see um on television sometimes when there has been an election and then people stay up very late that night and into the early hours of the morning count ing the votes and then eventually all the candidates are standing on a stage and somebody from the local council is announcing how many votes each candidate received one of those candidates may be from this party and they're very easy to to to spot to notice because they are dressed in a in a very colorful um costume usually of some sort or another very colorful and maybe with a big funny hat or something uh so you can spot the raving monster Looney candidate just by looking and they stand there waiting to hear how many votes they've received so that sort of brightens things up when uh people are a bit tired of politics um which is going on all the time so it's easy to get tired of it because there's always something happening so okay so that's just a very simple overview really but I hope uh I hope it's been useful for you with a bit of vocabulary and a bit of information you may not have known about before so do go to the website in bid.com where there's a a quiz on this subject thanks for watching and see you again soon bye