Chinese Culture

i * State Opening of Parliament * The Great Tea Robbery * Morris Dancing * St George ~ Patron Saint of England * An Historic Land * Gardens * New Gardens on New Estates * China Invasion * Agragarian & Industrial Revolutions from 1760 * Social Change before Victoria * Social Change from Victoria until now * Parliament: The Cabinet & Ministers * Parliament & Elections * The British People * Agriculture * A Broad outline of Culture of the United Kingdom - with links *

Other cultures often appear strange, or even frightening, to people who have not had first hand experienced of life in another country. We all recognise that there are vast differences between the cultures of East and West. Similarly, there are differences within countries, continents and people who speak the same language. An excellent example is the way that British, American, Australian and other countries, speak English. This section seeks to explore some of those differeneces, and your contributions are welcome. See CONTACT US Alan Cooper & Wang Bo.

Click image to Link

The Great Tea robbery: How our cuppa wouldn't exist if an amazing Victorian hadn't stolen the secret from China's warlords By Tony Rennell

Now, in the likely event that you are at this very moment drinking tea - likely because, as a nation, we pour 150 million cupfuls down our throats every day - you might care to give a nod to the memory of a tall and lean Scotsman by the name of Robert Fortune, a forgotten hero for the millions of us who swear by the amber nectar, the 'liquid jade', the cuppa, a brew, char.

Tea drinking in Britain could have died out if it wasn't for the efforts of a Victorian adventurer

Tea picking: Britain had to infiltrate the way the Chinese grew and produced tea

Green tea and black tea were not different species, as had been thought, but leaves from the same plant differently processed, one fermented, the other not.
He also discovered, to his horror, that the tea we were drinking should carry a health warning. The Chinese were routinely slipping coloured dye into the tea intended for Britain because they thought we wanted it greener than it was naturally. The dye was Prussian Blue, a form of cyanide. For years, tea had been poisoning us.

St. George ~
Partron Saint of England

George of Lydda (ca. 275/281 – April 23, 303) was according to tradition, a Roman soldier in the Guard of Emperor Diocletian, venerated as a Christian martyr.

In Christian hagiography Saint George is one of the most venerated saints in the Anglican Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Eastern Catholic Churches.
He is immortalised in the tale of George and the Dragon and is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers.
His memorial is celebrated on 23 April. He is regarded as one of the most prominent military saints.

In detail... by Michael Collins MA (Oxon) MPhil
In this short essay compiled from secondary sources, I have identified three main themes:

the historical St George
the growth and influence of legends about him in England
the place of St George in English history, literature and institutions

Because the themes are interrelated and affect each other, I present them chronologically.

St George is the patron saint of England and among the most famous of Christian figures. But of the man himself, nothing is certainly known. Our earliest source, Eusebius of Caesarea, writing c. 322, tells of a soldier of noble birth who was put to death under Diocletian at Nicomedia on 23 April, 303, but makes no mention of his name, his country or his place of burial. According to the apocryphal Acts of St George current in various versions in the Eastern Church from the fifth century, George held the rank of tribune in the Roman army and was beheaded by Diocletian for protesting against the Emperor's persecution of Christians. George rapidly became venerated throughout Christendom as an example of bravery in defence of the poor and the defenceless and of the Christian faith.

George was probably first made well known in England by Arculpus and Adamnan in the early eighth century. The Acts of St George, which recounted his visits to Caerleon (Wales) and Glastonbury while on service in England, were translated into Anglo-Saxon. Among churches dedicated to St George was one at Doncaster in 1061. George was adopted as the patron saint of soldiers after he was said to have appeared to the Crusader army at the Battle of Antioch in 1098.

Because of his widespread following, particularly in the Near East, and the many miracles attributed to him, George became universally recognized as a saint sometime after 900. Originally, veneration as a saint was authorized by local bishops but, after a number of scandals, the Popes began in the twelfth century to take control of the procedure and to systematize it. A lesser holiday in honour of St George, to be kept on 23 April, was declared by the Synod of Oxford in 1222; and St George had become acknowledged as Patron Saint of England by the end of the fourteenth century. In 1415, the year of The Battle of Agincourt, Archbishop Chichele raised St George's Day to a great feast and ordered it to be observed like Christmas Day. In 1778 the holiday reverted to a simple day of devotion for English Catholics.

The banner of St George, the red cross of a martyr on a white background, was adopted for the uniform of English soldiers possibly in the reign of Richard 1, and later became the flag of England and the White Ensign of the Royal Navy. In a seal of Lyme Regis dating from 1284 a ship is depicted bearing a flag with a cross on a plain background. During Edward III's campaigns in France in 1345-49, pennants bearing the red cross on a white background were ordered for the king's ship and uniforms in the same style for the men at arms. When Richard 11 invaded Scotland in 1385, every man was ordered to wear 'a signe (sic) of the arms of St George', both before and behind, whilst death was threatened against any of the enemy's soldiers 'who do bear the same crosse or token of Saint George, even if they be prisoners'.

The fame of St George throughout Europe was greatly increased by the publication of the Readings on the Saints, later known as the Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend) by James of Voragine in 1265. The name 'golden legend' does not refer to St George but to the whole collection of stories, which were said to be worth their weight in gold. It was this book which popularized the legend of George and the Dragon. The legend may have been particularly well received in England because of a similar legend in Anglo-Saxon literature. St George became a stock figure in the secular miracle plays derived from pagan sources which continued to be performed at the beginning of spring.

The origin of the legend remains obscure. It is first recorded in the late sixth century and may have been an allegory of the persecution of Diocletian, who was sometimes referred to as 'the dragon' in ancient texts. The story may also be a christianized version of the Greek legend of Perseus, who was said to have rescued the virgin Andromeda from a sea monster at Arsuf or Jaffa, near Lydda (Diospolis), where the cult of St George grew up around the site of his supposed tomb.

In 1348, George was adopted by Edward III as principal Patron of his new order of chivalry, the Knights of the Garter. Some believe that the Order took its name from a pendant badge or jewel traditionally shown in depictions of Saint George. The insignia of the Order include a Collar and Badge Appendant, known as the George. The badge is of gold and presents a richly enamelled representation of St George on horseback slaying the dragon. A second medal, the Lesser George, also depicting George and the dragon, is worn attached to the Sash. The objective of the Order was probably to focus the efforts of England on further Crusades to reconquer the Holy Land. The earliest records of the Order of the Garter were destroyed by fire, but it is believed that either in 1348 or in 1344 Edward proclaimed St George Patron Saint of England. Although the cult of St George was suppressed in England at the Reformation, St George's Chapel, Windsor, completed in stages from 1483 to 1528, has remained the official seat of the Order, where its chapters assemble. The Monarch and the Prince of Wales are always members, together with 24 others and 26 Knights or Ladies Companion.

Much later, in 1818, the Prince Regent, later George IV, created the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George to recognize exemplary service in the diplomatic field. The Order was founded to commemorate the British protectorate of the Ionian islands and Malta, which had begun in 1814. Originally membership was limited to inhabitants of the islands and to Britons who had served locally. In 1879 membership was widened to include foreigners who had performed distinguished service in Commonwealth countries. The Order was reorganized by William 1V into three classes: Knight Grand Cross (GCMG); Knight Commander (KCMG); and Companion (CMG). Nowadays there are women members of each class with the title 'Dame'. The medal of the Order shows St George and the Dragon on one side, and St Michael confronting the Devil on the other with the inscription,'auspicium melioris aevi' ('augury of a better age'). The Chapel of the Order is St Paul's Cathedral.

Saint George is a leading character in one of the greatest poems in the English language, Spencer's Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596). St George appears in Book 1 as the Redcrosse (sic) Knight of Holiness, protector of the Virgin. In this guise he may also be seen as the Anglican church upholding the monarchy of Elizabeth1:

But on his breast a bloody Cross he bore
The dear remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweet sake that glorious badge we wore
And dead (as living) ever he adored.

The legend of St George and the dragon took on a new lease of life during the Counter Reformation. The discoveries in Africa, India and the Americas, in areas which maps had previously shown as populated by dragons, presented vast new fields for Church missionary endeavour, and St George was once again invoked as an example of danger faced and overcome for the good of the Church. Meanwhile, the Protestant author, John Bunyan (1628-88), recalled the story of George and the Dragon in the account of the fight between Christian and Apollyon in Pilgrim's Progress (1679 and 1684).

The cult of St George was ridiculed by Erasmus after his visit (sometime between 1511 and 1513) to the saint's shrine at Canterbury, where the supposed arm of George attracted a large pilgrim traffic. Edmund Gibbon claimed that St George was originally George of Cappadocia, the Arian opponent of St Athanasius, but this theory, says Gibbon's nineteenth-century editor, J.B.Bury, 'has nothing to be said for it'. Research which established what little we actually know about the historical George was carried out around the turn of the century by the Bollandists, a scholarly society within the Jesuits. On the evidence of fourth century inscriptions found in Syria, one dating from c346, and the testimony of the pilgrim Theodosius, who visited Lydda in 530 and is the first to mention the tomb of St George, they concluded that George had indeed
actually existed.

In more modern times, St George was chosen by Baden-Powell, its founder, to be patron of the Scouting Movement, and on St George's Day, scouts are bidden to remember their Promise and the Scout Law. Baden-Powell recounted in Scouting for Boys that the Knights of the Round Table 'had as their patron saint St George because he was the only one of all the saints who was a horseman. He is the patron saint of cavalry, from which the word chivalry is derived'.

In 1940, when the civilian population of Britain was subjected to mass bombing by the German Luftwaffe (Airforce), King George V1 instituted the George Cross for 'acts of the greatest heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger'. The award, which is second only to the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration, is usually given to civilians and can be given posthumously.

The award consists of a silver cross. On one side is depicted St George slaying the dragon, with the inscription,'For Gallantry'; on the other appear the name of the holder and the date of the award. For lesser, but still outstanding acts of courage, the King created the George Medal. This also is a silver cross, with on one side the reigning monarch and on the other St George slaying the dragon. The island of Malta was awarded the George Cross for its heroism in resisting attack during World War 11.

Some confusion has arisen from the revision of its Calendar of Saints by the Roman Catholic Church in 1969. Saints have long been honoured with different degrees of solemnity. What the Catholic Church did was to downgrade the recollection of St George to the lowest category, commemoration, an optional memorial for local observance. The Church did not abolish St George. Indeed, it maintains a fine Cathedral named for him, opposite the Imperial War Museum in London.

The reason the Church now simply commemorates St George is that, although he certainly existed, so little is definitely known about him. Most of the legends about George are apochryphal and indeed incredible. The Church has never officially held that these legends are literally true, but made use of them to illustrate some of its teachings in times when people were more comfortable with such materials. As early as 496, Pope Gelasius in De libris recipiendis includes George among those saints 'whose names are rightly reverenced among us, but whose actions are known only to God'. The virtues associated with St George, such as courage, honour and fortitude in defence of the Christian faith, indeed remain as important as ever. St George is also, of course, venerated in the Church of England, by the Orthodox churches and by the Churches of the Near East and Ethiopia. The supposed tomb of St George can still be seen at Lod, south-east of Tel-Aviv; and a convent in Cairo preserves personal objects which are believed to have belonged to George.

St George is still venerated in a large number of places, by followers of particular occupations and sufferers from certain diseases. George is the patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, Germany and Greece; and of Moscow, Istanbul, Genoa and Venice (second to St Mark). He is patron of soldiers, cavalry and chivalry; of farmers and field workers, Boy Scouts and butchers; of horses, riders and saddlers; and of sufferers from leprosy, plague and syphilis. He is particularly the patron saint of archers, which gives special point to these famous lines from Shakespeare's Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1, l. 31:

'I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge
Cry God for Harry, England and St George!'.

Indirectly, the spirit of George the soldier saint played a part in modern English history when Sir Laurence Olivier's film of Henry V was issued in 1944 as an encouragement to our armies fighting for the liberation of France.

Sources:

H.Delehaye, Les legendes grecques des saints militaires, Paris 1909

I.H.Elder, George of Lydda, 1949

E. Hoode, Guide to the Holy Land, Jerusalem 1962

G.J.Marcus, Saint George of England, 1939

Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend : Readings on the Saints, Tr. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)

photo: Nick Meers top, Stephen Robson bottom, Jennie Woodcock right. Stourhead, Wiltshire.

National Trust Photographic Library. See National Trust: www.nationaltrust.org.uk

Gardening began in England with the Romans, who constructed the magnificent garden at Fishourne, near Chichester , which was discovered only in the 1960s and measures 6,700sq meters. Its design was regular and ordered, an exercise in elaborate geometry, not unlike the formal Renaissance gardens to be found later in Italy and France .

The medieval garden was constructed in a series of walled enclosures each containing simple plantings of fruit trees, roses and herbs in rectangular beds. In the literature and poetry of this time, the rose was the symbol not only of love, as it is today, but of Christ’s suffering on the cross. Herbs were used for medicinal purposes,as they are in China, but also to hide various offencive odours. At the Elvaston Castle Country Park in Derbyshire is an authentically preserved medieval walled garden of roses and herbs.

In Elizabethan England, aromatic plants were incorporated into elaborate carpet-like patterns known as knots. The Tudor garden was an enclosed square, firmly separated from the natural world beyond, so that it felt more like an extra room than the great outdoors. Flowers, many of them brought from abroad, were planted in geometric shapes, often meticulously balanced emblems, such as coats of arms,separated by low hedges with gravel paths between them. They looked like nothing more than horticultural embroidery. Excellent examples of Tudor gardens can be seen today at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, at Packwood House in Warwickshire.

Topiary - the artistic cutting and pruning of bushes, and mazes are also Renaissance garden traditions. Both techniques were originated by the Romans but elaborated by Italian horticultural designers. The 15^th Century Medici garden in Florence had elephants, a wild boar, a ship with sails, a ram, a hare with its ears up, a wolf fleeing from dogs, and an antlered deer. Topiary today in England may not be as extravagant as that, but outstanding work can be seen at Hampton Court,outside London and the home of King Henry VIII .

The taste for small flower beds arranged in fanciful patterns persisted into the 17^th and 18^th centuries. During this time there developed more interest in elaborate waterworks, with fountains and canals bringing the sound of running water into the garden. The basic square of the Tudor garden became more sophisticated, with tree-lined avenues fanning out from a semicircular patte d’oie (meaning literally 'goose’s foot'). Good examples of these are the gardens at Melbourne hall in Derbyshire and Bramham Park in Yorkshire .

In the middle of the 17^th Century the tulip craze began, which started a trade unlike anything else in the history of commerce. The seeds of the flowers were brought from Europe during the 16^th Century. The flower was called 'the tulipa' on account of the resemblance it bore to a turban, tulbent in Italian. So highly pried were these curious upstanding flowers that the bulbs were more precious than metals. In some cases 2,500 and even 4,600 florins were paid for one root of this sought-after plant,a huge sum of money in those days. (a florin is the equivalent of 10 pence in UK money,one tenth of a pound or 1.5RMB).

It was not until the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries that the French influence was at its peak, epitomised in the magnificent gardens of Versailles, outside Paris. 'The miracle which Monsieur le Notre made,' as Louis XIV termed it. Le Notre, Louis’ landscape designer, captured exactly the grandeur of the French monarchy at its height and gave the Sun King a setting worthy of his place at the centre of the universe, although it was at ruinous expense to the economy and eventually lead to the bloody French Revolution, resulting in France becoming a Republic.

Strong avenues leading from the palace formed the basis of the plan, which was then grandly embellished with domes and triumphal. The contrast between Versailles and the Elizabethan gardens shows that the history of gardens is not a matter of greenery, or even simply of fashion; it reflects closely the philosophical and cultural ideals of each age.

New Gardens on the Great Estates

It was not long before the new sensibility began to materialise on the great estates of England . At Castle Howard, for example, Vanbrugh designed a vast ornamental landscape dominated by magnificent buildings set in grassy spaces. Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds shows the beginning of the crucial collaboration between gardener and architect.

At Stowe, the landscape gardener Charles Bridgeman used the 'Ha-ha', a relatively new device, to greater effect. An 'ha-ha' is the boundary between a garden and a park in the form of a deep, wide ditch that, while acting as a barrier to farm animals, does not disrupt the view. The name is said to have come from the exclamation of 'Ah- ha!' made by the first people who came across it. Thus the formal garden, as an enclosed space close to the house, simply melted away, and the surrounding park lands, as far as one could see; all became part of the gardens.

It was at Stowe that Lancelot Brown worked as a practical gardener from 1740 to 1751. He was later to be called 'the monarch of the landscape' , and to earn the name 'Capability Brown' for his work as the most influential landscape gardener of the 18th Century. Brown would travel by horseback from one aristocratic client to the next, pointing out the 'capabilities of improvement' in each estate, hence earning both his fee and his nickname.

Brown’s ideas about what an improvement was different from those of his predecessors and were controversial for a time. Brown emphasised not colour or statuary, but the basic elements of a site - its contours, water and tree lines. He stripped away all ornamental paraphernalia amid installed gardeners to present, as far as possible, the landscape in its natural state. The Garden was no longer a separate area; he made the parkland sweep right up to the house. Trees and plants were used to punctuate the lines of the land - and punctuate was Brown’s own ideas. In describing his own technique, he said, 'Now, there I make a comma, and there a parenthesis - now a full stop, and then begin another subject.'

Brown was particularly ingenious with water and liked to create elegant lakes. Brown designed as many as 200 gardens, mostly in the Home Counties and Midlands - around London and in central England . Besides Blenheim Palace, a Royal residence, others include Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and Longleat in Wiltshire. All are open to the public on payment of an entrance fee.

Not everybody was impressed and influenced by Brown’s work. Many disliked his 'shaved lawns and thought that his choice of trees, (Brown used only British natives with the exception of the Lebanon cedar), became tiresome. He had no use for flowers as decorations and confined them to the Kitchen garden. One critic even parodied Brown’s description of his work as a literary text by comparing his parks to 'sheets of green paper with a parcel of round clumps scattered over them like so many spots of ink flicked at random out of a pen.' Brown’s work came so close to fulfilling its goal of naturalness, that at times his gardens could not be distinguished from fields.

When Brown died some of his followers continued to work in his style, but without his genius for the serene line enhanced by the inspired interruption. It is hardly surprising that the landowners of England were ready for a change. Sir Humphrey Repton supplied the new blood which was so urgently needed. Born in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1752, Repton spent his early years gaining a European education. When he failed as a businessman in his middle age he turned to landscape gardening, working for many of the high society friends he had won over the years.

Repton made several important modifications, or changes to Brown’s style. He was more interested in the social uses of garden than in its 'picture-esqueness' (literally, its similarity to a picture). He re-defined the relation between gardening and painting, insisting that they were not 'sister arts but rather congenial natures brought together like man and wife –and you should recollect the dangers of interfering in their occasional differences.' The influence of the Grand Tour* designers like Burlington , Kent , and Temple was to be ignored. Repton pushed back the park and reinstated regular forms such as terraces, raised flower beds and conservatories to make the garden (like the old Tudor garden) a social space which was an extension of the house. It is hardly surprising that, with his sensitivity to the ways of social inter-action, Repton eventually designed the gardens of many of the London squares and country houses throughout England.

China Invasion

At this time there was a growing taste for 'chinoiserie' - Chinese style, and oriental fashion strongly influenced the work of Sir William Chambers at Kew . Gardeners sought once again to make the gardens sociable; pagodas, bowling greens, shell grottoes and flowering shrubs both recalled ancient virtue and stressed the achievement of modern culture.

With the Romantic movement during the late 1700 and early 1800's, and its emphasis on the imagination, man’s view of nature began to change. Eager for the lofty sublime of mountains and dramatic scenery, the eye grew impatient with tamed gardens and sought further afield for something to soothe its restlessness. Something of the opposite also occurred, however, if Dorothy and William Wordsworth could not get enough of the spectacular Lake District , they also paid close attention to their small garden at Dove Cottage.

By the beginning of the 19^th Century, the cottage garden had come into its own, with its vegetable patch, fruit trees and abundant flower beds, filled with a myriad of colourful blossoms. The garden in the form of climbing roses and creepers seemed to cover the cottage itself which, in early summer, was festooned with vivid colours - and insects!. Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire is a good example of a grand 20^th Century country garden based on cottage garden principles, and the National Garden Scheme, a charitable trust with offices in Lower Belgrave Street , London , can direct visitors to more than 1,000 privately owned cottage gardens around the country.

By the Victorian Age, gardeners had once again become interested in the details which go into making up a landscape, namely in plants themselves - something that had been ignored by Brown. A period of enthusiastic experimentation and of importation followed, when collectors like David Douglas, William Cobb and Robert Fortune shipped many new species home. These were crossbred with native stocks in the greenhouses which were rapidly being built in Victorian gardens and fast becoming a standard feature in British gardens.

To some, however, the Victorians went overboard in their garden designs, embellishing them with as much zeal as their cluttered and cramped parlours. Urns, statues and other outdoor knick-knacks were mass-produced and packed into every available corner of the garden. The English garden by now was an explosion of colour.

In the present century, the garden has lost none of its attraction for the creative mind as well as for the amateur enthusiast. During the second World War,it was an essential facility to provide much needed food, which was in short supply. Today, although there are many keen amateur gardeners.

* The Grand Tour - during the 18th century,it became popular for people who could afford it, to travel for perhaps a month, 3 - 6 months or even a year, throughout Europe, to expand their cultural understanding, visiting cities such as Rome, Venice, Florence and Paris.

Today, a similar situation exists in the west, where students take a 'gap-year' between graduating and starting out on their careers. Often they work their way round the world, taking part-time or casual jobs. The United States, Canada, Australia and South-east Asia are common destinations, including China.

Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions from 1760.

The middle years of the 18^th Century saw two revolutions in England , neither of them political: the agrarian revolution, which put agriculture on a new and efficient basis, and the industrial, which began to change the land, the economy, and the people dramatically.

In the fields, landlords enclosed their holdings. No longer would tenants lose the value of their working harder than their fellow villagers, or of the innovations they made.

Making each landholder responsible for himself increased efficiency. New Methods of cattle breeding resulted in a higher yield per hoof; gentlemen farmers began introducing new technologies which increased output.

In industry, the revolution took three courses: technology, transport, and organization. Arkwright¡¦s water frame, Hargreaves's spinning jenny, and Crompton's spinning mule made old methods of yarn production obsolete. John Wilkinson developed new uses for iron. James Watt invented the steam engine in 1769. The potholes of the Great North Road improved from new methods of road-building, with innovations from the likes of John McAdam ; more importantly, canal building made inland transport faster and cheaper. Railways were built - Stevenson's Rocket and new technologies from the brilliant genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Many manufacturers formed associations to share information and press for common ends.

These revolutions had great impact on British life. New attention was paid to utility, efficiency, and self-help, under the utilitarian doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. Thrift and hard work were prized as old Puritanism found a new release in political and economic theory and behavior. Citizens undertook new projects to put towns on a more well-organized basis. The children of the poor were put to work repetitive task suited them well, and religious leaders like John Wesley taught that long hours of work in dirty factories, would help the tiny soul avoid eternal damnation.

Factories exacted much from the lives of the poor who operated them; 16-hour days and early deaths faced the workers. The established Church did not concern itself much for their welfare as 'they weren't respectable' ; by the mid 18^th Century, Anglicanism was stuck in a rut from which it would not escape for three generations.

Social Change before Victoria

In 1789, the picture changed dramatically. The revolution in France brought terror to everyone in the higher classes, that England too might be the setting for political horrors. The year 1793, with the mob lopping off Louis XVI's head, brought memories of 1649, and everyone now prepared for war with France. Under the Napoleon Bonaparte , France made war inevitable, and England now prepared to destroy, or be destroyed by, the Gallic juggernaut.

The next 22 years was one of almost almost continuous war as Europe struggled to defeat Napoleon. The early war at sea resulted victory for Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar in 1804, commemorated in Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London . The later continental land war finally resulted in Napoleon's final defeat by the Duke of Wellington, near Waterloo , Belgium , in 1815, which The Duke later described as 'a damned nice thing'. Pitt, meanwhile, had died in 1806.

Back in Britain , the industrial revolution picked up its pace. The revolution was changing the face of the countryside: rural hamlets gave way to factory towns built on the most up-to-date schemes. Provincial banks sprang up to provide capital for further expansion.

In the countryside, poor harvests and the war increased prices for farm goods. More efficient agriculture threw farm laborers out of work. They entered a poverty even more abject than that of the city, leading to the Speenhamland system of 1795 to provide poor persons with relief.

In 1815, after the Congress of Vienna, Britain emerged as the greatest and richest of the European powers. Its mortal enemy, France, lay vanquished. Britain controlled world trade in its world empire, yet the deplorable state of the nation's poor and the unrest among the intelligentsia appeared to herald great social changes and many men were alarmed about the future.

The first third of the 19th Century, in the reigns of George IV (Regent, 1810-1820 and king, 1820-1830) and William IV(1830-1837), was the scene for great reform in Britain . This was largely the result of the industrial and French revolutions with their wholly-new placement of men in what would gradually become more and more a democratic and mass industrial society.

By 1815, the population of Britain mounted to 13 million, with over 1 million in London alone. Steadily, the population shifted from countryside to town as rural labourers and their families, thrown out of work in the fields, tried to support themselves on the meager wages they obtained in the burgeoning factories of Birmingham , Manchester , Leeds, Liverpool, and Sheffield .

London, now one of the largest cities of Europe , became, during the dissolute regency and reign of George IV, a scene for conspicuous consumption and lavish foppery of 'dandies' , like Beau Brummel.

In 1815, Parliament passed The Corn Laws to support the domestic price of grain. Food grew more expensive for the working poor as well as for the industrial classes. The new law directly supported the position of the landed aristocrats still controlling Parliament. It generated two related movements: that to repeal the Corn Laws and the Liberal Free Trade movement, known by the French expression 'Laissez faire' - literally meaning, 'leave it alone'.

In the latter, the principles of Bentham and Adam Smith were to free the expanding manufacturing and trading interests from irritating and inefficient governmental restraints. Industrialism had caused a rift between factory owners and workers, competing for the fruits of their work, with the early victories all to the owners. Some enlightened manufacturers like Robert Owen at New Lanark introduced more co-operative methods which did not spread, but did provide a precedent for later British socialism. The 'two nations' which Disraeli later described had formed. In 1819, at a radical meeting in Manchester , an uneasy guard shot into the crowd of 60,000, and the Peterloo Massacre (killing 11 and wounding 400) exemplified the tension in the air.

Dissenters and non-conformists,15percent of the population, received recognition as political equals in 1828. The Roman Catholic Relief Act, with the help of the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, became law in 1829.

Town government was overhauled; Sir Robert Peel pressed for metropolitan police forces to put down crime; the frequent rioting in the cities over the Corn Law had frightened the middle and upper classes.

Parish administration of the Poor Laws gave way to regional groups which put up workhouses to house the poor, and make them productively spin and weave. Borough councils were set up to help local justices of the peace deal with social welfare. The success was mixed, and the failures of these reforms were pilloried in Dickens’ brilliant 'Oliver Twist'.

The most spectacular reform of all was the great Reform Bill of 1832. The franchise was extended and seats were re-distributed to redress the 70-year long imbalance of population and political representation. The new middle classes in the cities obtained a share in political power. Further extensions of the voting system would come later.

So when young Victoria became queen in 1837, a spirit of ferment pervaded England . New material wealth demanded political accommodation to drive England forward into its great industrial and imperial age.

Social Change from Queen Victoria until now.

London, now one of the largest cities of Europe , became, during the dissolute regency and reign of George IV, a scene for conspicuous consumption and lavish foppery of 'dandies' , like Beau Brummel.

Mid-Victorian Empire, 1837-1874.

In the early years of Victoria' s reign, reforms on several fronts, coupled with the steady and dramatic expansion of national wealth resting on England' s industrial empire, set the tone for the next generation.

The Reform Bill of 1832 had left working-men still unsatisfied with their non-existent role in national politics in spite of their growing economic importance. Robert Owen's experiments in industrial reform had not widely been taken up to encourage trade unionism beyond New Lanark. Poorer workers and their families still faced the prospect of hunger, and they blamed their sorry position on the protectionist policies of the Corn Laws.

William Lovett, in order to focus worker discontent and agitate for reform, formed the London Working Men's Association in 1836. In 1838, he and Francis Place wrote the 'People's Charter', demanding manhood suffrage and an end to property qualifications for parliamentary office. Supporters of 'Chartism' held a huge mass demonstration in Westminster Palace yard, in the spring of 1839, to present a petition urging Parliament to adopt its reforms. The House of Commons rejected the petition in July. In spite of local strikes and riots, no mass movement was kindled, and over the next decade, Chartism faded away.

Meanwhile, members of the intelligentsia, liberals and radicals alike, pressed for free trade unencumbered with parliamentary favoritism. Cobden and Mill urged the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in 1846, Sir Robert Peel managed to accomplish this, though it cost him his ministry.

In this time of quickening reform, a series of disastrous harvests during the 1840s, especially in Ireland , where virtually the entire potato crop failed in 1846, and again in 1847, forced many British and Irish to migrate to Crown colonies or the United States . This relieved slightly the pressure of a booming population on Britain' s economic resources.

Those who stayed behind could see, early in Victoria' s reign, a British society grown increasingly self-confident of its national destiny, from its industrial riches, its galaxy of colonies, its enlightened and rational philosophers. The Victorians monumentalized themselves in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations - it was Albert, Queen Victorias husband's idea.

The growing prosperity of England made it the 'workshop of the world', ahead of all other European nations and America in industry, commerce, and foreign trade. I t produced one-half of the world's iron; by 1870, England' s foreign trade exceeded that of France , and Italy put together.

Not everyone lavished such unbridled congratulatory praise upon themselves. Victorian England was as self-critical as it was self-congratulatory. The great genius, Charles Dickens, wrote brilliantly of the shortcomings of England during this age: 'Bleak House', 'Little Dorritt', 'Nicholas Nickleby', Oliver Twist', 'The Pickwick Papers, and 'Martin Chuzzlewit' pilloried the pomp of peers and the crass materialism of many in the middle classes. Dickens wrote with great sympathy for the poor, and at times exploded in rage at their condition. Thousands of readers waited for his newest serial every month; he competed with the social realism of Anthony Trollope, whose 'Barchester Chronicles' highlighted many of the social problems of the day. Thomas Carlyle wrote stingingly of the gulf between the rich and poor, "the dandies and drudges", John Stuart Mill, pressed for political reforms like extended suffrage, better education. 'Anarchy', published in 1869, savagely criticised Victorian materialism, splitting British society into three classes: Barbarians (the peerage), Philistines (the commercial middle classes), and the Populace. In 1859, Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species', widely attacked as blasphemous at the time, stirred currents not fully felt until later, that Victorian man - this most noble of all the creatures that God had created, - was a close cousin to monkeys.

Gladstone and Disraeli

William Gladstone, the great Liberal leader, made Britain the continuing champion of democracy abroad (even if pure democracy remained out of the question at home).

Gladstone, who traded jobs with Disraeli very frequently, also swept through the bureaucracy of national administration, and reformed the civil service, the military and the judicial system. Civil Service Commissoners had been established in 1855 to examine candidates and to make merit-based appointments. This ended the system of government patronage that had prevailed in various forms since the days of the Saxon kings and, indeed, had established the foundation of English politics.

Lord Chancellor Selborne(1872-1874) streamlined England's judges in the same spirit as Cardwell modernized the army: he reunited the law and equity courts, separated for centuries, and established the tripartite division of courts: King's Bench, Chancery and Probate, Divorce and Admiralty - under the supervision of the House of Lords acting as the Court of Appeal.

England also reformed its education and public health policies. Commissions enquired into the state of water supplies and sewage facilities, and the Local Government Board (which became, in 1919, the Ministry of Health), saw to urban clean-up. The Education Act of 1870 set up local school boards and made primary education compulsory for children under 13 years old. In 1891, school fees were abolished for elementary schools.

Arrival of the Unions

These changes affected the growing numbers of English: by 1871, London had well over 3 million residents and a ring of well-developed suburbs. Although laborers, there and elsewhere, worked 60-hour weeks, their position had improved substantially from the hellish conditions of the early century. Limits were placed on work hours of women and children, and the Factory Acts regulated the physical conditions of the factories, (which Dickens had portrayed in Hard Times about an earlier generation). Factories grew in size and their ownership changed.

London became the hub of finance for Britain and the world as investment poured out of Britain and overseas both to colonies and the United States.

In 1869, the Trades Union Congress began successfully to press for more protection of unions, secured in the Trade Union Act of 1871. The workers also turned, to self-help. Their Cooperative Movement, in which working men banded together to buy and distribute produce and consumer goods to themselves on a large scale, counted over 800,000 members by 1890. And by 1890, these workers' movements had joined into a national political party for working men: the Labour Party.

However, the Victorian golden age began to wane. The rate of industrial expansion slowed after 1870, as more capital was sent overseas to the colonies in the hope of a better investment return on foreign investment re-invested abroad. Germany began to compete with British manufactured goods, as did America, especially in iron and steel.

By 1875, Britain had to import half of its wheat, as it devoted more resources to industry and less to agriculture, and this percentage continued to increase. The financial crisis in Europe and America in 1873 and 1874 marked a change in Britain's world economic position and it's history.

Later Victorian Years

The social classes of England changed dramatically in the second half of Victoria's reign. Population shifted to the cities. By 1911, London, southeast Lancashire, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Merseyside, and central Clydeside all had populations well in excess of 1 million. Meanwhile, the urban working class continued to expand and grow more prosperous, as real wages doubled between 1860 and 1914, although inflation eroded some of those gains.

The middle class split into tiers. The lower middle class of clerks in the banking and government agencies, lived in suburbs like Croydon, in row after row of identical houses and typically read the Daily Mail. The upper middle class also split once again, into the professional middle class - doctors, lawyers, churchmen, and higher civil servants-mostly educated at the universities and public schools, and the commercial middle class -manufacturers and businessmen, who emulated the professionals in their living situations and in educating their children. Typically, after the classical curriculum of the schools, these children had no taste for manufacturing and increasingly moved out of production and into banking and other service industries. The aristocracy and gentry were affected least by the new industrial economy. They occupied the most prominent positions in Parliament and the Army, and they recouped their agricultural losses after 1870 with increasingly diverse investments, especially in growing urban property values.

More Complaints about Life.

In1906, a Liberal-Labour coalition captured Parliament. Herbert Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908, and pushed through free school meals for children, old age pensions, and the Development Act. Liberal David Lloyd George got passed a National Insurance Bill in 1911, giving workmen insurance in times if illness and unemployment, paid for by workers, employers, and the government. Victorian self-help was dead and the British Liberals finally acknowledged the defects of laissez-faire liberalism, although no underlying lack of faith in capitalism animated most of the reformers.

A series of strikes, including the serious Railway Strike of 1911, demonstrated that workmen still demanded more of the nation's pile of wealth. The young Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, gained great notoriety for his unsympathetic attitude to the strikers. Ireland's continuing serious disorders threatened civil war.

Victorian Age Aflame: the Explosion of World War

Recritment of enthusiastic volunteers supplied troops until 1916 when, for the first time, able-bodied men from age 18 to 45 were conscripted and sent to France . Meanwhile at home, thousands of women operated the munitions and material factories with massive government intervention (under the Ministry of Munitions which Lloyd George directed). The government organized the entire national economy on a war footing in this first modern 'all out war', so very different from the rather isolated engagements of gentlemen and their retainers of medieval and early modern times. World War One was the first mass war.

In June, 1916, the British launched an offensive on the Somme and lost 60,000 men on the first day and over 420,000 men by the end of the offensive. In August and September, 1917, at Passchendaele , Britain lost 300,000 men; thousands drowned in the mud of Flanders . By war's end, 750,000 men had died and 2,500,000 were wounded, many permanently disabled. Never before and not yet since has Britain lost so many people in combat in one war.

The carnage cost Britain half of its generation of young men. As a result of war , women re-gained the status they had not had since Saxon times. They entered a wide range of clerical and administrative jobs previously open only to men. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all women over 30 years of age.

Coping with a Shattered Europe

The post -World War One years were difficult for victorious but exhausted Britain .

Then, the industrial and economic unrest of the working classes, suffering dramatically from their displacement following the full employment and production of the war years, vented itself in the Great Strike of 1926. Baldwin 's government had refused to continue to subsidize the declining mining industry and prompted virtually all the unions into a nine-day relatively non-violent general strike. During this time liberal Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates took holidays from the university to drive buses and operate other services, like police, necessary for the public safety. But then, suddenly, the Trades Union Congress called off the strike; it was a total defeat for workers, especially miners. The closest thing Britain had ever seen to open class war came to an abrupt and bloodless end. However, the display of worker solidarity, although brief, revealed the deep fissures of class division in Britain and created a new suspicion of workers for owners, especially among the miners.

The remainder of the decade passed with increasing despair for many poorer workers, in both industrial and agriculture, as the prosperity of rural Britain continued to erode to troublesome new depths. With falling farm prices, many small farmers were caught in a debilitating cycle of debt to buy seed. Money from crop sales was used to pay off the debt, with crop failure of low farm prices frequently leading to foreclosure. Pollution added to the squalor in industrial communities like Jarrow, Merthyr Tydfil,and Wigan . These industrial towns had higher infant mortality, much higher frequency of tuberculosis (TB), and a shorter life expectancy among their residents than did commercial areas in the south and east. Two-thirds of the nation's wealth was held by less than one percent of the population.

Economic Collapse and the Menace of Foreign Fascism

Ramsay MacDonald (briefly prime minister in 1924) became prime minister again in 1929 in a spirit of reform. But in October, the American stock market crashed, with its ripple effect dragging the British economy into the downward spiral. By 1932, unemployment reached 3 million, with a vast burden on the government to pay social insurance. British industrial structure, depending on coal, steel, textiles, and shipping, was in a weak position with respect to world competition. British industry had low capital investment, was overmanned, and inefficient. Germany swept from debauchery to debauchery in the hyper-inflationary and dissolute 1920s, with a ruined economy broken by reparations from the war,and a national pride smoldering over the terms of the Peace which greatly restricted it from developing an army or the industrial Ruhr .

Discontent put Adolf Hitler, a nationalist and fascist, into office with the National Socialist (Nazi) party in 1933, and war became simply a matter of time as Hitler seized first Austria and then the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Chamberlain went to negotiate with Hitler at Berchtesgaden , Bad Godesberg, in September, and essentially caved into Hitler's expansionist foreign policy, returning to Britain with the soon to be disproved, declaration that he had secured 'peace in our time'. In March, 1939, Hitler invaded Prague , and public opinion, in a fury, demanded that Chamberlain end his acquiescent policy toward the Third Reich. Chamberlain engaged to protect Poland were it invaded; Hitler invaded Poland on Sept.1, 1939, and Britain declared war on Germany two days later. The public mood was less expansive but perhaps more stern than in World War One; social tensions were temporarily suppressed as the entire British Empire now mobilized itself to defend against the menace of continental fascism. In the spring of 1940, Hitler occupied France . The invasion of England for the first time since Napoleon threatened, seemed imminent.

In May, 1940, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill headed a government which Labor and Liberals joined, creating a coalition. He embodied the dogged determination of Imperial Britain to thwart the Germans, and his regular radio addresses mustered public opinion squarely behind him. His 'We'll fight them on the beaches...' speach is probably the most famous speach made by a British Politician.

By mid-August, the Blitzkreig had begun the Battle of Britain as the Luftwaffe attacked in nightly bombing raids intended to weaken the countryside before a massive land invasion. Attacks began on airfields and airplane factories and then expanded to London , Bristol, Coventry , Plymouth , Liverpool, Hull , Swansea and other cities. Meanwhile the Royal Air Force dispatched Spitfires and Hurricanes to harry the attackers during the autumn. By Christmas, the threat of immediate invasion subsided, although the Blitz continued, eventually resulting in 60,000 civilian deaths during the war.

Beginning in 1941, the 'Lend Lease' arrangement with the United States ensured a steady supply of war materials. Britain focused its attentionfirst on protecting its middle Eastern interests, and in 1942, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery routed his German counterpart, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, at El Alamein to drive the Germans from North Africa. In the following year, a beachhead was established in the dissolving fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy. In the east, after the disastrous loss of Singapore, Britain halted the Japanese assault on Burma (Myanmar). Finally, in June 1944, the British and Americans opened a European land war in France with the invasion of Normandy.

It was only a matter of time before the Third Reich capitulated in May, 1945. only 270,000 British died, roughly one-third the casualties from the previous World War.

Once again, war needs resulted in centralization of the economy. This time, however, the intervention would be more long-term, as a new sense of egalitarianism swept through Britain , resulting from common hardships like rationing and the Blitz. Full wartime employment had kindled new faith in central government planning.

The Beveridge Report of 1942 proposed a comprehensive national system of social security, maternity and child benefits, all to be financed through graduated central taxation. Beveridge also urged implementation of a national health and unemployment insurance system and old age pensions. The Uthwatt and Barlow Reports proposed schemes to revivify industry and agriculture. The Treasury followed the recommendations of Lord Keynes, now one of its officers. Nationalization of major industries and the Bank of England was proposed. The Butler Education Act of 1944 provided a new comprehensive system of education on the primary, secondary, and technical levels. And in the summer of 1945, this social spirit caused the fall of the Churchill coalition. Labour swamped the Conservatives, and Clement Atlee became prime minister in a nation that, now that the war was over, found the imperialistic Churchill, although admired and revered, not the man to lead Britain in the social era now underway.

Experimenting with prosperity

Clement Atlee's government (1945-1951) now launched a program of social democracy founded on a mixed economy of public and private sectors to make Britain a Welfare State. The nationalization of industry proposed during the war now became a reality: the coal, railways, aviation, gas, electric, and telephone industries were nationalized, as was the Bank of England. Aneurin Bevan in 1946 proposed the National Health Service and it took effect in 1948, making medical care 'free' for all citizens.

National insurance was put into effect in 1946; child allowances were raised, as was the age at which a child could leave school. The government began to revitalize depressed industrial areas like Wales , Durham , Cumberland , and central Scotland . The trade unions, anxious to give social welfare a chance, accepted wage freezes with relatively little complaint. Gladstone' s liberalism had seemingly vanished from its old stronghold, the British government.

Of course, some post-war industrial and economic dislocation was inevitable, as was the difficulty in managing the war debt which had blown up like a balloon to unprecedented levels. Rationing of scarce commodities and consumer goods did not end until nine years after the war. Wages in general for non-union workers rose and the growth of mass leisure activities, like professional sports and commercial movies, marked a more expansive life than many had ever known. 'The Festival of Britain', held in 1951 to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, led to the revitalization of the South Bank of the Thames in Landon.

Tories regained power in 1951 under Churchill and held it uninterruptedly, under Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Sir Alec Douglas-Home, until 1964, but they allowed Atlee's social welfare policies to grow freely.

Good-Bye to the Old Time Empire

The two decades following World War Two contained the final dissolution of the worldwide British Empire as one colony after another gained political independence from Britain . The Atlee government granted independence to India , Pakistan , Burma , and Ceylon between 1947 and 1949. This was the alternative to the increasing fiscal and political burden of maintaining British authority by force in the face of various nationalisms ever more articulate in figures like Ghandi in India .

Territories in East and West Africa gained independence in the 1950s; the Central Africa Federation broke up in 1963 and resulted in independence for Zambia and Malawi . Only Honduras , the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Aden , Fiji , and a few other isolated places remained under direct British rule. Other British territories or protectorates ended in the middle East and the far East. Britain , meanwhile, has seen its policies ever more closely entwined with those of the United States in foreign affairs; the present NATO alliance dates from 1949.

In Europe , new efforts were made to arrange economic affairs on Europe-wide basis, but Britain's effort to join European Common Market was rebuffed by Charles deGaulle in 1963. British public opinion never really supported such a move in the face of historical insularity. Britain finally entered the European Economic Community in 1973.

Slower growth and declining productivity worried few, but academic economists as the typical household, with fewer children, grew more affluent in an increasingly comfortable consumer society. More families had cars, and many could afford annual vacations on the Mediterranean coast.

Welfare State Under Siege

Such expansive and prosperous times were not to last. During Harold Wilson's Labour government (1964-1970), many of the simmering difficulties of Britain emerged in more open conflict. Young people, as their counter-parts elsewhere in Europe and the United States , protested the bland conformity of their society. They gave their energy to the growing protest over nuclear armaments, first in 1985 at the Aldermaston Marches from Trafalgar Square to the Aldermaston weapons research center in Berkshire , 50 miles ( 80km ) away. The movement gradually grew into the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, advocating unilateral abandonment of nuclear weapons in Great Britain .

Welsh and Scottish nationalists mobilized for a greater voice to be given their indigenous cultures; people from all over Great Britain began widespread movements for greater ecological concern and protection of the natural environment from the ravage of industrial waste.

Ethnic immigrants from India and Pakistan faced prejudice limiting their access to housing, education, and jobs. Catholics and Protestants in Ulster fought savagely new political settlements; the IRA used terrorist tactics to press its political goals, with bombings, assassination, and riot as some of its chief political techniques.

Now, too, the economic fabric of the social welfare state began to unravel, as the British learned that their declining productivity and flat growth could not support the increasing burdens placed upon them by the economically unproductive and society at large. Balance of payment crises prompted a devaluation of the pound in 1967, and the Conservative ministry of Edward Heath (1970-1974) fueled inflation with a foolishly expansive monetary policy, hoping to generate money to pay the country's ballooning welfare costs. Steady declines in Britain's share of world economic markets resulted in increased unemployment after 1973, and with it, increased social unrest.

Declining living standards, resulting from inflation and a decline in real purchasing power, prompted dozens of strikes, especially in the mining industry, in 1972 and 1974. The second strike assisted the downfall of Heath's government and its replacement with the Labour government of Harold Wilson (1974-1976), which acceded to the miner's demands.

International energy prices sky-rocketing in 1973, hastened Britain's economic decline as its goods grew even less competitive, but this dark cloud had a silver lining in the renewed interest in discovering domestic energy sources, especially in the North Sea with natural gas. Since that time, Britain has become self-sufficient in energy, but any revenues generated from oil exports depend on the volatile price of petroleum in the world market.

To keep pace with rising prices, trade unions began to demand wage increases of 30 percent per year. Inflation peaked at 20 percent in 1980. By 1980, unemployment had risen to 2,000,000, a total not previously reached since the 1930s. The labour government of James Callaghan (1976-1979) tried to defuse union pressures with job protection in return for relaxed wage demands, but a series of strikes in 1978-1979 brought the electorate to the end of its tether and Margaret Thatcher - Great Britain's first woman prime minister - and the Conservatives were swept back into office.

Thatcher had to cope with mounting tension over unemployment and nationalist protests in Wales and Scotland as well as the continuing violence of the IRA. For a time in 1981, in the same summer as the world-televised Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, racial tension burst into the open in the Toxteth and Brixton riots.

Withdrawal from the Empire continued as Thatcher's government granted full self-government to Zimbabwe in 1979 but vestigial Imperialism gained a torrent of public approval when, after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in the spring of 1982. Britain dispatched a task force of 10,000 troops over 8,000 miles ( 12,800km ) to the south Atlantic to restore British sovereignty to the tiny islands. This resulted in massive public adulation of Thatcher, as dreams of the old Empire sparkled briefly back to life in a popular consciousness tried of domestic difficulties.

After the Falklands War, Britain returned quickly to the perennial unrest of the past 20 years. Consensus seemed to have hidden itself, as Tony Benn, of the Labour Party, has urged a grass-roots return to socialism and counter Thatcher's hard line policy against further concessions to unions. The Conservative mandate in 1983 against a declining Labour party no doubt reinforced Thatcher's economic policies. Thatcher broke the back of the miners in 1984-1985 as their strike, under the direction of Arthur Scargill, shattered, leaving many to question the future of trade union power in Great Britain .

Recent trends in Britain under the leadership of Tony Blair's 'New Labour', with a closer alliance with the United States than many would like, their controversial involvement with the US in the Iraq wars, allegations of corruption, sleeze - that is the unsavoury if not illegal behaviour of MP's and Government Ministers, make the future marvelously and unfortunately, unpredictable.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Britain's incomparably rich and variegated past is its generally evolutionary political change, compared with Continental Europe , in spite of sharply-felt and expressed discontents. Even the great revolutions of the 17^th Century occupied relatively few members of the population and were essentially conservative reactions. As for the medieval civil wars, they too, concerned a relatively narrow stratum of the population. During the Civil War of the mid 17th century, a farm labourer is recorded as having remarked, 'What? Has they two fallen out then?'

Parliament: The Cabinet & Ministers.

Her Majesty's Government is the body of ministers responsible for the conduct of national affairs. The Prime Minister is appointed by the Queen. He is also, by tradition, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service. By modern convention, the Prime Minister always sits in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister receives an annual salary, and his official residence is No. 10 Downing Street in London. The Prime Minister presides over the Cabinet, is responsible for the allocation of functions among ministers and informs the Queen at regular meetings of the general business of the Government.

Minister are appointed by Queen on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The most senior ministers (usually about 20) compose the Cabinet, which meets under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister for a few hours each week to decide government policy on major issues. Ministers are responsible collectively to Parliament for all Cabinet decisions; individual Ministers are responsible to Parliament for the work of their departments.

The Privy Council

The Privy Council was formerly the chief source of executive power in the State; its origins can be traced back to the King's Council (or Court), which in the 13th century gave the sovereign private 'privy' advice on the government of the country. It remained powerful until the 18th century when most of its work was taken over by the Cabinet.

Today its role is largely formal, advising the sovereign to approve certain government decrees, so-called 'orders-in-council' and issuing Royal Proclamations.

Government Departments and the Civil Service

Government departments and their agencies are the main instruments for implementing government policy when Parliament has passed the necessary legislation, and for advising ministers.

The principal Government departments include: the Treasury; the House Office; the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; the Overseas Development Administration; the Department for Education; the Department of the Environment; the Department of Health; the Department of National Heritage; the Social Security Department; the Department of Employment; the Ministry of Agriculure, Fisheries and Food; the Department of Trade and Industry; the Department of Transport; the Office of Telecommunications; the Lord Chancellor's Department; the Ministry of Defence; and nine Scottish Departments responsible to the Secretary of State for Scotland. What a biring list!

Since the British Government's assumption of direct responsibility for Northern Ireland in 1972, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has been the Cabinet Minister responsible for Northern Ireland affairs. The work of the nine Northern Ireland departments is subject to the direction and control of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

The government departments are staffed by members of the Civil Service, whose duty is to assist in carrying out the administration of laws passed by Parliament. Changes of Government do not involve changes in departmental staff, who continue to carry out the duties whichever party is in power. Civil servants are recruited mainly by competitive examination.

There were 541,800 civil servants in January, 1994. About half of all civil servants are engaged in the provision of public services. These include paying sickness benefits and pensions, collecting taxes and contributions, running employment services, staffing prisons, and providing services to industry and agriculture. A quarter are employed in the Ministry of Defence. The rest are divided between central administrative and policy duties; servicewide support services, such as accommodation, printing and information; and largely financially self-supporting services, for instance, those provided by the Department for National Savings and the Royal Mint.

The total number includes about 48,000 'industrial' civil servants, mainly manual workers in government industrial establishments. Four-fifths of civil servants work outside London. Responsibility for central coordination and management of the Civil Service is Divided between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office (Office of Public Service and Science).

The diplomatic service is a separate service, with its own structure, linked to that of the Home Civil Service. This service of some 45,00 or so people, provides the majority of the staff for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and at British diplomatic missions and consular posts abroad.

The local authorities run many of the public services. County councils provide large-scale services, while district councils are responsible for the more local ones. At present in England, county councils are responsible for strategic planning, transport planning, highways, traffic regulation, education, consumer protection, refuse disposal, police, the fire service, libraries and personal social services. District councils are responsible for environmental health, housing and refuse collection. In carrying out their duties, local authorities must act in accordance with, and within the limits of, powers conferred on them by Parliament; they are also subject to a certain amount of supervision by the central Government. Nevertheless, they remain independent bodies, and discharge their responsibilities in their own right. They also appoint and control their own staff.

Local government expenditure accounts for about 25 per cent of public spending.

Local government capital expenditure is financed primarily by borrowing and from capital receipts from the disposal of land and buildings. Local authorities in Great Britain raise revenue through the council tax.

Parliament & Elections.

The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy: the head of State is a King or a Queen. In practice, the Sovereign reigns, but does not rule. The United Kingdom is governed, in the name of the Sovereign, by His or Her Majesty's Government - a body of Ministers who are the leading members of whichever Political arty the electorate has voted into office, and who are responsible to Parliament.

The system of parliamentary government is not based on a written constitution. There is no written constitution in the United Kingdom. The British constitution is not set out in any single document. It is made up of Statute Law, Common Law and Conventions (conventions are rules and practices which are not legally enforceable but which are regarded as indispensable to the working of government). The Judiciary determines Common Law and interprets the Statutes.

The United Kingdom is a unitary, not a federal, State. All four countries of the kingdom are represented in the Parliament at Westminster (London). The term "parliament" originally meant a meeting for 'parley' (a French word which means 'to speak') or discussion. Parliament consists of the Sovereign, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The there elements meet together only on occasions of symbolic significance, such as the State Opening of Parliament, when the House of Commons are summoned by the Queen to the House of Lords.

The main functions of Parliament are:

- to pass laws;

- to provide, by voting for taxation, the means of carrying on the work of government;

- to examine government policy and administration, including proposal for expenditure; and

- to debate the major issues of the day.

A Parliament has a maximum duration of five years, but in practice general elections are usually held before the end of this term. The life of a Parliament is divided into sessions. Each usually last for one year - normally beginning and ending in October or November. There are 'adjournments' at night, at weekends, at Christmas, Easter and the late Spring Bank Holiday, and during a long summer break usually starting in late July. Some criticise the excessively long 'holiday' periods and late or all-night sessions which are often deemed to be ineffective due to MP's fatigue.

The Sovereign formally summons and dissolves Parliament and generally opens each new annual session with a speech from the throne.

The present Houses of Parliament were rebuilt between 1835 and 1857 after having been destroyed by fire and were designed by Sir Charles Barry on a classical plan with Gothic detailing by Augustus Welby Pugin. The public are admitted to the 'Stranger's Gallery' in the House of Lords (2:30 p.m. Mon, Tues and Wed, 3p.m. Thur, 11 a.m. Fri) and the 'Public Gallery' in the House of Commons (4:30 p.m. Mon-Thur, 9:30a.m. Fri). Secutity is often tight with access limited to the press or those by special invitation or permission.

The House of Lords

The House of Lords is made up of the Lords Spiritual and the Lords Temporal. The Lords Spiritual are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and 24 senior Bishops of the Church of England. The Lords Temporal consist of all hereditary 'Peers' of England, Scotland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, but not peers of Ireland); Life Peers created to assist the House in its judicial duties Lords of Appeal; and all other Life Peers. The main function of the House of Lords is to bring the wide experience of its members into the process of lawmaking, some say... other disagree and say that it is just a 'club' for the rich and famous and is not relevant to modern government.

The House of Commons

The House of Commons is elected by universal adult suffrage - voting by the people, and consists of 651 Members of Parliament - MP's. Of the 651 seats: 524 are for England, 38 for Wales, 72 for Scotland, and 17 for Northern Ireland. Each member represents an area (or constituency), and holds his seat during the life of a Parliament. It is in the House of Commons that the ultimate authority for law-making resides.

Parliamentary Electoral System

Members of the House of Commons are elected either at a General Election, when all the seats are contested, or at a by-election held when an MP dies or resigns, or is given a peerage- sent to 'The Other Place' - The House of Lords. A General Election must be held every five years and is often held at more frequent intervals.

For electoral purposes Britain is divided into constituencies, each of which returns one member to the House of Commons. Elections are by secret ballot. British citizens, together with citizens of other Commonwealth countries and citizens of the Irish Republic resident in Britain, may vote provided they are: aged 18 or over, included in the annual register of electors for the constituency known as The Electoral Roll, andnot subject to any disqualification such as being imprisioned or insane.

Each elector may cast one vote, normally in person at a polling station. People entitled to an absent vote may vote by post or by proxy, although postal ballot papers cannot be sent to addresses outside Britain.

External links

Click image to LinkThe Great Tea robbery: How our cuppa wouldn't exist if an amazing Victorian hadn't stolen the secret from China's warlords By Tony Rennell

Morris Dancing

Click image to Link
The Great Tea robbery: How our cuppa wouldn't exist if an amazing Victorian hadn't stolen the secret from China's warlords By Tony Rennell