The British Conservative Government’s Political Elite, and the European Union: Safeguarding British Interests (With Special Reference to: 2010 – 2016)

Each Cabinet member is individually responsible to the Commons. This is for the purely departmental aspect of their duties and also for matters of personal conduct. “If he commits a personal fault, like Mr. Profumo in 1963, or if he makes a hash of departmental management, like Sir Thomas Dugdale in 1954, and the House feels he should resign and the Cabinet is unwilling to protect him then a minister may have to resign, though the convention is more honoured in the breach than the observance. For policy, however, the entire Cabinet assume a collective responsibility: ‘one out, all out’. A minister who disagrees with the policy must either grin and bear it, or resign. The secrecy of Cabinet proceedings serves to make this doctrine of collective responsibility practical.”³⁶
The opposition is a built-in check and balance to the government. “It has five distinctive characteristics and five distinctive functions. It is organised; permanent; representative (of something like half the nation who look to it to fight their battles); a participant in selecting issues for debate; and the alternative to the group in power.”³⁷ If the government is no longer capable of holding onto power and collapses, the opposition will take office. “This is the logic of the two-party system. It is a zero sum game: what the government side loses the opposition side gains: ‘the more there is of mine the less there is of yours.”³⁸
For quite a long time the United Kingdom has been alternately governed by the Conservative Party or the Labour Party. As was seen in Chapter One, “originally a two-party system evolved for historical reasons as early as the seventeenth century; and it has been maintained partly by the electoral system which penalises minority parties,”³⁹ such as the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance in the 1987 General Election. “It is also maintained, though, because it is seen to possess valuable attributes.”⁴⁰ One might add that the two-party system is, in fact, the key to understanding how the Constitution really works; it is responsible for six of its characteristics: “the near certainty that one party or the other will have a clear majority in the House; the consequent formation of a Cabinet drawn from this majority party; the stability of this Cabinet, since its majority is guaranteed; the durability of this Cabinet for the full term of the Parliament’s life; the unambiguous responsibility of the Cabinet for what happens during its term of office; and the presentation to the electorate of a clear choice between the government party and the opposition.”⁴¹

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