Lesson video

Hi, and welcome to lesson three of the unit.

How does the political system work in the UK? Today, we're going to explore the role of political parties.

We're going to look at who they are and what they do in UK politics.

So you are going to need your notes from last lesson.

You need some paper.

You need a pen, probably the pen is out to actually work, a quiet place to sit to complete the lesson.

So if you need to grab any of that or you need to get some equipment, please pause the video now and go and do that.

Restart it once you are ready.

In today's lesson, we're going to explore three key questions.

We are going to look at what a political party is.

We're going to look at what political parties are found in the U.

K.

and we're going to look at how political parties differ.

So our first key question is what is a political party? We're going to think of a general party.

Just a party that many of you have been to.

Why do people have them? What is the purpose of having a party? So if you want to, you can just jot down a few ideas, or you can just have a think about it in your head.

It is up to you.

So I've got to kind of celebrate something, you know, so you can soon have a birthday party.

You might want it to come together as a family or maybe a community or a group of friends.

You may want to show appreciation so you have a party to say thank you to somebody.

You might want to have a party to make an announcement.

So I think like a baby shower is quite popular for people to say, "Oh, I'm having a baby." or you might have a party to gather with those you know or those you share an interest in.

Now it's going to be quite common to have a party with people you know.

And the people you know, you generally share an interest with.

A political party then is an organised group of people who share similar ideas and values and want to win an election to become the government.

You might want to pause the video now and just note down that definition of a political party.

So what do you put the parties do? What kind of the political parties are really important within a democratic society? What I'm meaning about links the citizens of the society to politics.

Now they do a number of different functions and carry out a number of different roles.

But their three main functions can be categorised into these three headings.

They represent their voters, the people who vote for them and the people who elect them.

They represent them or stand for them so within the political system.

They help people to understand politics and they run the country.

If you remember about the last lesson, we looked at the workings of a general election.

So if a political party is elected, then the power, then they've won the country.

Now what we're trying to do is thinking about those three categories so representing the voters, helping people to understand politics, and running the country.

I would like to make a table of all the different functions, which I'm going to give you.

What I would like to do is read each of these sentences and categorise them under the correct heading of the table I have just shown you.

I'll just flip back in case you forgot the headings.

So represent voters, help people to understand politics, and run the country.

You might want to pause the video here to kind of knock that down and start it again.

You can have it on this page.

So pause the video now and categorise those sentences under the correct headings please.

Okay, well done.

Well done for giving that a go.

These are my answers.

So political parties represent voters by they represent a particular and unique set of political ideas and this gives people choice when they're voting because if everyone thought the same ideas then there wouldn't really be any choice, would there, within the political system.

They give the public people to hold to account about the running of the country.

The public have someone to say, "Well, actually, something's gone wrong.

"What are you going to do about this? "How are you going to fix it if you're the people in charge?" Also, it gives someone to go to if there's a problem, what needs to be addressed politically.

So if we remember back to the last lesson, then each constituency, each area is represented by an MP.

And that's who people can go to if it's a national issue or they can go to a local counsellor if it's a local issue.

They help people understand politics so they host parties.

They host conferences where they explain their policies and ideas.

Every year around September, October time, most of them have the parties, conferences, they share with people what they think of certain things.

Members of the party can go along and hear these and they run social media accounts as well, so people can follow all the major political parties and hear them say what they think about an issue, what issues are happening.

They run the country so if they were elected to power, then they can make policy and laws.

If they're not elected into power, they can also hold the government to account.

Remember Parliament, the role of the opposition is real important in that.

Hopefully, you got those in the right order.

If not, you can just correct them and give some of the tick using a different colour pen.

Well done for that.

What I would like to do now is take a minute or how long it takes you to list all the political parties that you have heard of in the UK.

So remember the UK is England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Pause the video now and make a list of all the political parties you have heard of.

The electoral commission have 347 parties registered with them.

The Electoral Commission are those who make sure the elections run and are fair in the UK.

But we don't have time to look at all 347 of them.

So we're going to look at the 11 who were elected, came into Parliament during the last election.

Now you might want to compare this list with the list you have.

Maybe add some ones you didn't get.

Some of these parties are found across all four nations of the UK and are quite popular and you might have heard of them before.

Just for an example, the Conservative Party you probably heard of before and they stand across all four nations.

Some of them are a bit smaller and only stand in one of the four nations.

So for example, the SNP, the Scottish National Party, only stand in Canada and Scotland.

These are some of the main political parties in the UK.

So the the Alliance Party, the Conservative Party, the Cooperative Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, Green Party, Labour Party, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, Scottish National Party, Sinn Fein, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party.

These are some of the logos.

You might have seen them around.

This is what gives a party part of it's identity.

Now each political party had its own items. What makes them them? All the political parties are different in some way.

Some of them might share some ideas and values, but they're all distinctive in their own little way.

Traditionally, political parties are organised along what's called a political spectrum.

If you think of a spectrum as a line.

They're classified along this line in some way and, historically, there are three ways this has been done, left wing, centrist and right wing.

Left wing parties have something in common.

Centrist parties have something in common and right wing parties have something in common.

But a lot of people work in politics or political scientists or academics, and even some politicians themselves, are saying that this isn't very useful anymore because of the way politics has changed.

Parties are kind of merging, right's coming left and left's going right and there's right centre and left centre.

It's all just a little bit complicated now.

It' no easy way of classifying them.

However, saying all that, they are still used quite frequently.

This is a political spectrum.

We have the centre in the centre, the left wing, and right wing.

Now this is a very simplified version of it.

It's a very summarised version.

It is a lot more complicated than this.

But if you're a left wing political party, then you typically want things to change.

You don't want things staying the same.

You want things to happen.

You are often quite in support of government intervention.

You want the government to get involved.

You want the government to help.

You want to nationalise key public services.

So nationalisation of key public services basically means you want things to be run by the government.

So things like the railways, how we get out water is currently run by private organisations.

When you're a left wing political party, typically, you want that to be under control of the government so the government can control it.

So it is run not for profit.

However, if you are right wing political party, then you often want the opposite.

So you like things to stay the same pretty much.

You don't like change all of a sudden.

You think things should be thought about a bit more and things should be left how they are.

You think the individual should be left to get on with it and they should do their own thing.

But you know, as a government, that you'll help them if they need it.

And you think that service like railways, like water should be run for profit because that's what makes them better, That's what makes them work harder.

Now, like I said, it is a bit more complicated than that, but we're just going to look at those things.

And then the centre, obviously, tries to bring the two sides together and tries to take bits from each.

Now, if you want to write that down to add to your notes, you are more than welcome to just pause the video now but you don't have to.

So what I would like you to do is access the worksheet attached to this lesson.

I want you to read the slides, which are labelled "Party, Key Promises." There are five of them.

What I would like to do, just based on the ideas on your sheet.

Decide which party you would vote for if you could vote in a general election.

You don't have to agree with everything they say but the party you agree with most.

What I would like to do is just finish these sentences with your ideas.

That's the party I would vote for is, and then you write down the name of the party.

The policy you most like, so what thing they suggested you like the most and why on the policy you least liked because and why.

Pause the video, access the worksheet, and pop back and we'll go through some ideas.

Please pause the video now to complete the task.

I've not got a set answer for this because it's all down for opinion, but you could have had Conservatives or Labour, Green, et cetera, and the policy you liked so it could be that you liked what they were doing for health.

You liked what they're doing for education.

You liked what the comments about your environment on the party use.

It could be because you didn't like something, they were doing something to maybe something that's very important to you.

You didn't like the education policy.

You didn't like what they were doing about taxes, anything as far.

And figuring out which party you support is all about developing your own political identity.

It might be quite common that you'd have a very different identity to your friends, your family.

And that's fine because everyone thinks different things.

So you could have had the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Labour, Brexit, all the Conservatives.

That is what each of them stood.

That's what each party was.

Party one was the Dems. Party two the Green Party.

Party three for the Labour.

Party four with the Brexit party and party five with the Conservatives.

Now I don't know that might surprise you, or you might have already known you support them, or you might not have known.

How has this changed your opinion about political parties in any way? Just things you think about and reflect on.

But remember there are also lots of other reasons why someone might support a political party.

It's not just based on what their manifesto says.

So the next task I would like you to do is access the worksheet again, and on the worksheet, you'll see task five.

And this has summaries from the 2019 general election.

Kindly provided by the Day Newspaper, which is a newspaper for young children.

I would like you to copy the table, or if you'd rather do it another way, you can do it simply too.

And each of the column has a question on it.

And what I would like to do is read through the worksheet and use the information to answer that question.

Now the pack can, the table asks you to do the Conservatives and Labour and that's purely because they are the two biggest.

There is also a third row, which you can choose whichever party you want to do.

It might be that you got the Green Party in your last task and you want to know a bit more about them.

So the third party is completely up to you.

So here's the table.

So I've got the party name, party's view on taxes, party's view on the NHS, and any other information you think you'd like to know for the future.

These are your notes that you're building up.

However, if you select the SMP, Plaid Cymru, or the DUP, the NHS and taxes aren't included.

This is because of what we have is called a devolved system of government.

Again, we'll look at this a bit later in lesson six.

But you can either, just write some information about them or you can pick your own things you would like to compare.

So pause the video now to complete that task.

Here are some answers for the task you've just completed.

Well done for having a go at that one.

So you've got the Conservative Party.

The party leader is Boris Johnson.

The party view on taxes, so what they said in their last manifesto, is that they aren't going to increase tax.

Instead, they're going to try and give tax cuts.

They want to give people more freedom and they may increase the NHS budget by an additional 20 billion pounds by 2023.

So Labour is led by Sir Keir Starmer, QC.

They want to increase taxes because they think that if we increase taxes, then we can develop public services more.

And again, they want to increase, as well, the NHS budget by 26 billion.

Now these were written during the manifesto at a very different time in the world.

As things happen in real life, parties might change ideas.

So with COVID and things, it is very interesting to see what all political parties saying about how they're going to increase budgets and decrease budgets, et cetera.

So please do keep an eye on the news and you can find out what's happening.

For your third row, hopefully, you've included your own party there on that.

That brings today's lesson to an end.

So, hopefully, you can now define what a political party is.

You can give examples of different political parties in the UK, and you can explain some key policy differences between UK political parties.

That brings today's lesson to an end.

Please don't forget to complete the exit quiz after the lesson.

Hopefully, you can receive the next one.

Have a good day.

Bye.