House of Commons (UK)

The House of Commons, or, strictly speaking, the Honourable the House of Commons, is the lower house of the British legislature. Together with the Queen and the House of Lords, it is one of the three components of the British Legislation.

The House consists of 650 elected members, who are known as Members of Parliament or MPs. Each MP is elected by a particular geographical area known as a constituency. By convention, the leader of the party which has the majority of MPs becomes Prime Minister and forms a government, with its members drawn from the House of Commons and, to a lesser extent, from the House of Lords. The party with the second-largest number of MPs becomes the official Opposition ("Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition"), and forms a "shadow cabinet", also consisting of MPs and Lords.

## Contents

* 1 Elections to the House
* 2 Composition
* 3 See also
* 4 References

## Elections to the House[edit]

Elections to the House of Commons are held when the Queen (in practice, acting at the request of the Prime Minister) dissolves Parliament. Elections must be held at least at five-yearly intervals.

Because Britain has three main parties (and a number of minor parties) and because each MP is elected to the House of Commons on the basis of winning the largest number of votes in his constituency (known as "first past the post"), the link between the overall number of votes won by each party nationwide and the number of MPs that it is able to return to the Commons can be relatively weak. The electoral system for the Commons has historically been criticised by the Liberal Democrats, who do particularly badly out of it. A proposed change to the electoral system from "first past the post" to the alternative vote system (as used by the Australians) was rejected by the British public at a national referendum held in May 2011.

## Composition[edit]

The last elections to the House of Commons took place in December 2019. The current distribution of MPs is as follows:[1]

Conservative Party: 365 seats

Labour Party: 203 seats

Liberal Democrats: 11 seats

Democratic Unionist Party (Northern Irish unionists): 8 seats

Scottish National Party (Scottish nationalists): 48 seats

Sinn Fein (Irish nationalists): 7 seats

Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalists): 4 seats

Social Democratic and Labour Party (Irish nationalists): 2 seats

Green Party: 1 seat

Alliance Party (Northern Irish nonsecretarians): 1 seats

Others: 0 seat

TOTAL: 650

As the Conservatives won more than 326 seats, Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a majority and formed a majority government.

## See also[edit]

* Parliament
* House of Lords

## References[edit]

1. ↑ Results of the 2019 General Election. bbc.co.uk. Retrieved on 2019-12-18.