ABSTRACT
Understanding political institutions and behaviour without awareness of social and economic factors in the society of the country concerned is to understand only part of the complete picture. In democratic systems like Britain – where government, in theory at least, serves the people – it is political demands generated by society to which the system is supposed to respond. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of factors – inventions within the indigenous cotton manufacturing industry, abundant coal reserves and plentiful cheap Irish labour immigration – combined to transform Britain’s economy. Britain has a major north-south divide, with a more prosperous south and a more depressed north, where so many of the traditional industries died out a couple of decades ago. London is relatively untypical, too, having not only a vibrant financial and business service economy but a multicultural society as well.
