A Parliamentary Government: the Executive Power

Abstract

The constitutional principles which govern the executive power in Britain are in essentials simple, familiar and, on a cursory reading at least, not greatly different from those that are upheld in many other examples of parliamentary government. There is a collegial executive, the cabinet, which usually has just over twenty members and is the ultimate source of authority for governmental decisions. The cabinet is presided over by the Queen’s first minister, the prime minister, who also determines who its members shall be. Ministers in the cabinet are collectively and individually ‘responsible’ to Parliament, though what this means is sometimes a matter of some uncertainty, not to say obscurity. The government as a whole is larger than the cabinet, containing nowadays up to a hundred members or thereabouts. The government in this sense constitutes a hierarchy of ministerial positions of differing status — cabinet members who are mainly secretaries of state or in a few cases holders of so-called ‘great offices of state’ like the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ministers not in the cabinet and in principle subordinate to a secretary of state, ministers of state who are somewhat lower in status than ministers, and finally parliamentary secretaries on the lowest rung of the ministerial ladder. It is generally held that all members of the government are bound by the principle of collective responsibility, and perhaps too by individual responsibility, though this is less clear-cut since within the government as a whole there is a loosely defined hierarchy of responsibilities and powers.