NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The national executive is always known as the Government. It is formed from the winning political party at the nationwide General Election. This is the party which has the most members in the House of Commons. These are Members of Parliament (MPs). The national executive is therefore also voted in (or out) by the people.

The leader of that winning party becomes Prime Minister. He or she chooses other members of that party to be in charge of different aspects of government—for example, foreign affairs (the Foreign Secretary), money and taxation (the Chancellor of the Exchequer), law and order (the Home Secretary). The most important of these Secretaries of State are the Senior Ministers who form the Cabinet. This is the top committee of government; but there are many other members of the Government (more than 100) doing different jobs. These are the Junior Ministers. All Ministers are assisted in their government departments by thousands of permanent officials in the Civil Service.

The Government makes the day-to-day decisions about the public life of the country: foreign policy—even war and peace; the level of taxation; expenditure on roads, hospitals, education, and welfare. The policies of the executive in these areas provide the framework within which we live our everyday lives. It is the executive which decides how that policy is to be carried out, and the executive is actually responsible for carrying it out. It is helpful to take an example:

THE INVISIBLE PALACE —PART 2 THE CONSTITUTION • 39

LAW AND ORDER

• We know that if anyone is accused of committing a crime, he is first charged and then brought before a court. The court will decide if he has committed the offence, and if so what the punishment should be; but there is much more to a system of 'law and order' than that. Taw and order' involves making laws to protect people from any form of crime or disorder, providing a police force to investigate and enforce these laws, and the means of rehabilitating or punishing anyone who breaks them—for example, the probation service and prisons.

The Home Secretary is the Minister responsible for law and order. He is a member of the Cabinet and part of the executive (Government). The Home Secretary obviously cannot do all this work on his own. He is in charge of a great Department of State (the Home Office), and together with his junior Ministers who have special responsibilities in the Department, he must make the major decisions as to how it is run. The Home Office is the Government department in which civil servant employees (all persons employed by the State or 'the Crown' are called civil servants) deal with matters of law and order and the reform of the criminal law.

The Home Secretary, his Home Office ministers, and the thousands of civil servants who work in the Home Office are the branch of Government which must be responsible for law and order matters. This of course includes how we deal with the problems of crime and criminals. They will put forward legislation (new laws) to tackle crime. This will include the various ways in which criminals can be punished. Parliament will then decide whether to pass these laws.

The executive, in the form of the Home Secretary and the Home Office, is in overall control of all the other tens of thousands of civil servants who are concerned in keeping law and order—the police service, and the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) which incorporates the work of the probation service and the prison service. It decides how they should do their work and how that work should be organised. That is the purpose of government.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1027