Talk:British politics

I have moved the text that was in this article to Politics of the United Kingdom as this closer resembles the standard title for articles on the political systems of individual states and countries. (JDH)

"According to Duverger's Law, a first-past-the-post voting system naturally leads to a two-party system. This certainly seems to be tha case in British parliamentary politics.

The three main parties"

Anybody else see a contradiction here?! I don't know if the Lib Dems would count as a major party by Duverger's criteria, so I don't feel I can correct this - anyone care to try? Verloren

So why was this moved to British politics from the far more appropriate Politics of the United Kingdom? - Khendon 14:26 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)


 * It was merged, not moved. We had duplicate articles that someone kindly fixed... :) Martin

Okay, I was imprecise :-) But why under this title not the other? "United Kingdom" is well-defined, and is the jurisdiction covered; "British" is much more fuzzy, and arguably covers a different area to the one intended by this article. - Khendon

Suggestion; I think most of the detail should be removed from this article, leaving a "skeleton" very briefly describing each of the various bits, and describing how they relate to each other. Also, some of the subtopics should be consolidated (House of Commons and House of Lords would do better being one article). How about a page structure like this?


 * United Kingdom politics
 * United Kingdom Government
 * United Kingdom Parliament
 * United Kingdom regional government
 * Welsh Assembly
 * Scottish Parliament
 * English regional government
 * United Kingdom local government
 * United Kingdom elections
 * United Kingdom political parties
 * United Kingdom civil service

-- Khendon 15:37 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)


 * Isn't that what we've got? (though I think the Main article links should go back in) Martin
 * After all, this article is barely three pages long - that's not of a size when it needs to be cut down, surely? Martin

It's not the size of the article that is the problem; it's the fact that the division between what's in the main page and what's in the "subpages" is quite arbitrary, leading to both redundancy and gaps. Either all the information about any given subtopic should be included in the main page, or only enough to see how the subtopics fit together. For example, in the current article everything in the House of Commons and House of Lords subsections should be factored out, leaving just the short paragraph about what Parliament is. The rest is (or should be) duplicated in other pages. -- Khendon 16:00 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Why has someone deleted most of the information on this page. It was not "redundant information" as someone put it. Most of that information was perfectly valid and informative, and was obviously the result of someones hard work. The whole point of merging it was so that all the relevant information about British politics would be all on one page. Could the deleted information not be copied and pasted into separate articles instead of merely being deleted and thus wasted. User:G-Man

...*ahem* That was in fact a cock-up. Sorry. I thought I was deleting a paragraph or so of stuff, and I've no idea how I simultaneously missed seeing *and* deleted so much text. If nobody has fixed it by tomorrow, I'll put it back in. - Khendon

Okay, I've removed the bit I intended to remove yesterday;


 * British politics mostly revolves around the House of Commons which is popularly known as parliament. Which governs in the name of the British monarch -- the official name of the British legislature is "the Queen in Parliament". The British monarch is a constitutional monarch, so in practice the form of government is a representative democracy it has also been labeled a Liberal democracy.

Can we agree that this bit is truly redundant, since all its information is repeated elsewhere in the article? - Khendon

Er yes thats fair enough if yu ask me.

So why was this moved to British politics from the far more appropriate Politics of the United Kingdom? - Khendon 14:26 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

My logic behing merging this page here instead of "politics of the united kingdom" was that if someone was searching for information about British politics they would be more likely to type in "British poitics" than "politics of the United Kingdom" but I have set the old "politics of the United Kingdom" page as a redirect.G-Man


 * which seems pretty reasonable, actually, especially with the redirect. Who was it that said we have an image problem with "UK" anyway and most people didn't know what the h*ll it is? :) I wonder if that's true? Nevilley 18:21 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)


 * A Hong Kong shopkeeper asked me where I came from, and when I replied "Britain", she said, "Oh, you speak very good English!" Deb 18:28 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

I think this needs to be moved back to Politics of the United Kingdom. It's created an enormous number of double redirects. -- Minesweeper 09:32 Apr 27, 2003 (UTC)