The politics of Canada functions within a framework of parliamentary democracy and a federal system of parliamentary government with strong democratic traditions. Canada is a constitutional monarchy where the monarch is head of state. In practice, executive authority is entrusted to the Cabinet, a committee of ministers of the Crown chaired by the Prime Minister of Canada that act as the executive committee of the King's Privy Council for Canada and are responsible to the democratically elected House of Commons.
The Conservative and Unionist Party, commonly the Conservative Party and colloquially known as the Tories, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Labour Party. It is the opposition party having lost the 2024 general election. The party sits on the centre-right to right-wing of the political spectrum. It encompasses various ideological factions including one-nation conservatives, Thatcherites, and traditionalist conservatives. The party holds the annual Conservative Party Conference, at which senior Conservative figures promote party policy.
The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) is an independent advocacy organisation in the United Kingdom which promotes electoral reform. It seeks to replace first-past-the-post voting with proportional representation, advocating the single transferable vote, and an elected upper house of Parliament. It is the world's oldest still-extant electoral reform campaign.
Bumbu is a drink made from rum, water, sugar, and nutmeg. Cinnamon is sometimes substituted for or added to the nutmeg. Modern bumbo is often made with dark rum, citrus juice, grenadine, and nutmeg.
Sir Vernon Bernard Bogdanor is a British political scientist, historian, and research professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History at King's College London. He is also emeritus professor of politics and government at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.
Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He was Leader of the Opposition from 1994 to 1997 and held various shadow cabinet posts from 1987 to 1994. Blair was Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007, and was special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East from 2007 to 2015. He is the second-longest-serving prime minister in post-war British history after Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving Labour politician to have held the office, and the first and only person to date to lead the party to three consecutive general election victories.
Michael James Meadowcroft is a British author, politician and political affairs consultant. He served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Leeds West from 1983 to 1987.
Norman Jay Ornstein is an American political scientist and an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington, D.C., conservative think tank. He is the co-author of It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.
Sir David Edgeworth Butler was an English political scientist who specialised in psephology, the study of elections. He has been described as "the father of modern election science".
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is headed by the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor. Its stated priorities are to reduce re-offending and protect the public, to provide access to justice, to increase confidence in the justice system, and to uphold people's civil liberties. The Secretary of State is the minister responsible to Parliament for the judiciary, the court system, prisons, and probation in England and Wales, with some additional UK-wide responsibilities, e.g., the UK Supreme Court and judicial appointments by the Crown. The department is also responsible for areas of constitutional policy not transferred in 2010 to the Deputy Prime Minister, human rights law, and information rights law across the UK.
Terence John Pitt was a British political researcher and adviser. He became well known behind the scenes as the long-serving head of the Labour Party's research department, and worked for other bodies. In 1984 he made the move into elected politics as a Member of the European Parliament but died only two years later at the age of 49.
Keith David Ewing is professor of public law at King's College London and recognised as a leading scholar in public law, constitutional law, law of democracy, labour law and human rights.
Political funding in the United Kingdom has been a source of controversy for many years. Political parties in the UK may be funded through membership fees, party donations or through state funding, the latter of which is reserved for administrative costs. The general restrictions in the UK were held in Bowman v United Kingdom to be fully compatible with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Michael Steed was a British psephologist, political scientist, broadcaster, activist and Liberal Democrat politician. He wrote extensively on political parties and elections.
Electoral reform is a change in electoral systems which alters how public desires are expressed in election results.
John Philip Glen is a British politician and former management consultant who has served as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General since November 2023. A member of the Conservative Party, he served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Salisbury in Wiltshire from 2010 to 2024. Glen was formerly Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Arts, Heritage and Tourism from 2017 to 2018; Economic Secretary to the Treasury and City Minister from January 2018 to July 2022; and Chief Secretary to the Treasury from October 2022 until November 2023.
Political finance covers all funds that are raised and spent for political purposes. Such purposes include all political contests for voting by citizens, especially the election campaigns for various public offices that are run by parties and candidates. Moreover, all modern democracies operate a variety of permanent party organizations, e.g. the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee in the United States or the Conservative Central Office and the Labour headquarters in the United Kingdom. The annual budgets of such organizations will have to be considered as costs of political competition as well. In Europe the allied term "party finance" is frequently used. It refers only to funds that are raised and spent in order to influence the outcome of some sort of party competition. Whether to include other political purposes, e.g. public relation campaigns by lobby groups, is still an unresolved issue. Even a limited range of political purposes indicates that the term "campaign funds" is too narrow to cover all funds that are deployed in the political process.
On 23 June 2016, a referendum took place in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gibraltar to ask the electorate whether the country should remain a member of, or leave, the European Union (EU). The result was to leave, triggering calls to begin the process of the country's withdrawal from the EU commonly termed "Brexit".
Jurij Toplak is a constitutional scholar, university administrator, election law, and human rights expert. He is professor at University of Maribor and the head of the Cultural Formations research group at the Alma Mater Europaea University, and recurring visiting professor at the Fordham University School of Law in New York. Since 2016, he has served as the provost and vice-president of the Alma Mater Europaea university. The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe published his legal comments. Toplak is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and serves as the co-chair of the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL) Freedom of Expression research group.
Reform UK is a right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. Founded in November 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating a no-deal Brexit, it won the most seats at the 2019 European Parliament election in the UK, but did not win any seats at the 2019 general election. The UK withdrew from the European Union (EU) in January 2020. A year later, in January 2021, the party was renamed Reform UK. During the COVID-19 pandemic the party advocated against further lockdowns. Since 2022, it has campaigned on a broader platform, in particular pledging to reduce net migration, supporting low taxation, and opposing the government's net-zero energy policy. Following Nigel Farage's resumption of the party leadership in early June during the campaign for the 2024 general election, opinion pollsters and analysts reported a sharp increase in support for the party, and it gained five Members of Parliament (MPs).
