ABSTRACT
The House of Commons legally occupies the centre of the British system of government. The British political system is described as a Parliamentary one. The British legislature is anything but legislative in its main function. It provides a forum for the Cabinet’s announcements of policy. It receives the annual financial statement. The business of maintaining a government implies much more than merely keeping a group of ministers in office. The Council for Civil Liberties, by the public speeches it organized and the prominent citizens it drew together, was certainly more effective than the Parliamentary Opposition in persuading Mr. MacDonald’s National Government to alter the Incitement to Disaffection Bill. The Conservative Party has absorbed both the Tory and the Whig under the threat of the new element of Labour, and the battle in the Commons is now between the propertied and the unpropertied.
