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You are here: UK History > Evolution of British politics > History of political parties
Though modern Britain has a number of political parties, politics is dominated by a two party system and elections are held by a First Past the Post voting system.
When representatives first began to sit together as governments were being formed, there were factions but not individual parties, this didn’t really come to being until the 1600s when politicians were split over the issue of excluding James Duke of York, later James II, from the line of succession.
From this, the two opposing factions of the Whigs and the Tories emerged.
Initially Whig and Tory were terms of abuse that were introduced during the debates over James II’s accession. Whig, which has origins in Scottish Gaelic, was originally a term for horse thieves and became the name for those that rebelled and wanted to remove James from power. Tory on the other hand was an Irish term suggesting an outlaw and was applied to those who supported James’ right to ascend, despite being a Catholic.
The Glorious Revolution, which saw James deposed and the throne given to his daughter and son in law, saw a change in dynamic between the two parties. The outcome had been a joint decision and after, Tories would accept some of the Whig ideology. Under Queen Anne, the Tories mostly represented resistance to religious tolerance and often supported Anglicanism.
After the death of Queen Anne, the future of the Tories seemed rocky. George I was brought in as a nominee of the Whigs and the Tory’s leader fled to France. In the years that followed, parliament was mostly dominated by Whigs, though around 100 men who identified as Tories remained members of the House of Commons.
The reign of George III brought about a change in meaning for Whig and Tory. There was technically no individual official parties operating under those names, only a sense of connection to these ideologies. Real party alignments only really began to take shape in 1784 with the American Revolution. After 1784, William Pitt the Younger became the leader of a new Tory Party which represented the interests of the country gentry, merchant classes and official administerial groups. In opposition was a new Whig Party led by Charles James Fox, who represented the interests of religious dissenters, industrials and others who sought reforms. The French Revolution further divided the two parties and after 1815, something that resembles the modern Conservative and Liberal parties emerged. The tories under Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli formed the modern idea of conservatism, with the name Tory still in use. However, the term Whig fell out of use and the Liberals were born with much of the ideology being created by the likes of Gladstone and John Russell.
In the early 19th and 20th centuries, the Liberal Party, which grew out of the Whigs, was one of the two major political parties in the UK. The party arose from the alliance of the Whigs, the Peelites and the Radicals in the 1850s and despite being divided over the idea of Irish Home Rule, the party spent time as a majority government, especially when winning a landslide in the 1906 General Election with their policy of welfare reforms.
By the end of the 1920s, the Labour Party had replaced the Liberals as the main rival to the Conservatives. The Liberal Party went into decline after 1918 and in 1988, the Liberals and Social Democrat Party merged to form the Liberal Democrats.
The British Labour Party grew out of the trade union movement of the late 19th century and quickly surpassed Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives from the 1920s. The first Labour Government was under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and the party was a junior partner in the wartime coalition from 1940-45. After the 1945 general election, a landslide under Clement Atlee saw the establishment of a welfare state with the National Health Service, as well as nationalising a fifth of the economy and joining NATO. Later under Harold Wilson, it promoted economic modernisation.
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