In Britain, the small Green Party has won its first by-election. A by-election is held between general elections when a seat becomes available among the 650 in the House of Commons, the lower house of Parliament. The upper house is the House of Lords.
At the end of February, Green candidate Hannah Spencer, a plumber and member of the local government council, won a major upset victory in the by-election for the constituency of Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester.
Manchester was once a major manufacturing center in the heart of England. This constituency was created in 2024 following a comprehensive review and redrawing of boundaries for House of Commons seats. Manchester, economically challenged and facing industrial decline, used to be a Labour Party stronghold.
Times have changed, dramatically.
W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the great Victorian British musical impresarios, declared admiringly in their 1882 light opera “Iolanthe” that Great Britain was a two-party nation:
“… every boy and every gal that’s born into the world alive is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative.” The Conservative Party and the Liberal Party were dominant in the Victorian age, through most of the 19th century and into the 20th century.
Even then, however, the overall political environment was changing, and would continue to do so dramatically.
While the government of Great Britain was stable overall, there was sustained and occasionally violent pressure to grant independence to Ireland. Most of Ireland gained independence in 1921 after sustained struggle. Protestant Northern Ireland remained with Britain to comprise the United Kingdom.
Also early in that century, the Labour Party replaced the Liberal Party.
Now, the environment of two-party stability is changing even more. Both major parties are declining. An early indicator was the long-term revival of the Liberal Party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, along with the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, which began in the 1960s.
Source: Korea Times News
