Parliaments in Britain

The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy, that is to say it has a monarch (a king or a queen) as its Head of State. Nevertheless, the Monarch has very little power and reigns with the support of Parliament. Parliament consists of two chambers known as the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
The Parliament
The Parliament (Congress in the USA and Stortinget in Norway) is made up by the House of Commons-the Commons or the Lower House, and The House of Lords- the Lords or the Upper House.
The House of Commons are the legislative ones. They have most of the power in the Parliament, where the House of Lords have lost their power.

The Lower House is therefore the ones to:
- Make laws
- Decide the level of public spending and of taxes
- Watchdog over the government
- A recruiting office for the top jobs in government
- Can give different groups in Britain a voice
- Can or cannot give its assent to the government, can defeat a government and force it to resign.
The Lower House or the House of Commons consists of 659 members, one from each constituency and they are members of the party that won in the constituency. They are called MPs- Member of Parliament. The members of the Parliament represent the country- it’s not the same to be a member of the Parliament- being an MP, as being a member of the Government-because the one party with most seats in the Parliament rules the country.

The House of Lords
The House of Lords is the Upper House or Second Chamber. Today they don’t have the power they had before.

The Government
There are about 100 members of the Government. The Prime Minister also has a Cabinet- a group of twenty ministers. They are his closest and often called the Secretary of State

The Prime Minister
The leader of the party that gets most seats in the House of Commons is elected as Prime Minister.