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A short history of political parties in Britain

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A short history of political parties in Britain

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England has the oldest parliament in the world.  The English parliament met for the first time at the Palace of Westminster in the year 1265, but it took more than four centuries before the concept of "political parties" gave a new dimension to political life in Britain.

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Before the birth of political parties in the seventeenth century, the English parliament consisted of aristocrats and wealthy men who formed alliances and majorities based on specific factors or loyalties. It was not until after the English Civil War, and parliamentary upheavals during the Republican years of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649-1660), that the first English political parties began to take shape.

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During the years from 1678 to 1681,  and the constitutional crisis known as the Exclusion Crisis, most members of the English parliament  formed into  two "parties", named Whigs and Tories. The descendants of these two original parties are the two parties that formed the coalition government under Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2015.

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Until the early 20th century, alone or in coalition with other groups, these two political parties in turn formed successive British governments, based on the results of parliamentary elections.
Initially, the Whigs were the party of the liberal and reforming aristocracy. In contrast to the Tories, the Whig Party attracted people more favorable to constitutional reforms, and in 1832 led the most significant modernization of the British Parliament, the Reform Act, which rebalanced parliamentary constituencies, and greatly expanded the electoral base to the middle classes. In the 1850's, the Whig Party became the most important element of a union of Whigs and Radicals who took the name "Liberal Party". This centrist party continued until 1988, when it merged with the new but smaller Social Democratic Party to form today's Liberal Democrats

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The word Tory designated early supporters of strong royal power; Tories were monarchists and traditionalists, especially at the time of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. During the eighteenth century, the Whigs dominated British politics, and the Tory party played a relatively small role in the political life of the United Kingdom.

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This changed in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, when the rise of reformism and radicalism in Europe, which was to lead notably to the French Revolution (1789), gave a new impetus to defenders of the status quo and conservatism. The Tories re-emerged as a major force in British politics in 1770 - but this time as a modern party in favor of maintaining the best traditions of Britain, but at the same time strongly supporting the new opportunities created by the industrial revolution and imperial and commercial expansion. During the 19th century - as today - the Tory party, which became the Conservative Party in 1834, was torn between its traditionalists and its reformers. Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative prime minister from 1874 to 1880, was one of the great reformers of the 19th century.

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After the First World War, a new party came to power in the British Parliament, the Labour Party. The first Labour MPs had been elected in 1900 as representatives of the Independent Labour Party. The Labour Party formed a minority government in 1924, but it did not last. Labour first formed a majority government in 1929. The rise of the Labour Party  came however at the expense of the other non-Conservative party, the Liberals, and Labour replaced the Liberals as the main alternative to the Conservatives.

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From 1929 to 2010, power alternated between the Conservatives and the Labour Party.
Following the general election of 2010,  no single party emerged with an absolute majority of MPs; so for the first time in living memory, a coalition government was formed, with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats sharing power.