when does the british prime minister call for an election
Snap election The conditions for when a snap election can be called have been significantly restricted by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 to occasions when the government loses a confidence motion or when a two-thirds supermajority of MPs vote in favour. Prior to this, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had the de facto power to call an election at will by requesting a dissolution from the monarch â€“ the limited circumstances where this would not be granted were set out in the Lascelles Principles. There was no fixed period for holding elections, although between 1997 and 2015 there was a convention that the government should hold elections on the same date as local elections on the first Thursday of May. Since World War II, only the 2015 general election was held on the latest possible date (7 May 2015), due to being the first general election at the end of a fixed-term Parliament.
Politics of the United Kingdom The UK political system is a multi-party system. Since the 1920s, the two largest political participation have been the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. Before the Labour Party rose in British politics, the Liberal Party was the other major political party along with the Conservatives. While coalition and minority governments have been an occasional feature of parliamentary politics, the first-past-the-post electoral system used for general elections tends to maintain the dominance of these two parties, though each has in the past century relied upon a third party such as the Liberal Democrats to deliver a working majority in Parliament. A Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government held office from 2010 until 2015, the first coalition since 1945.[1] The coalition ended following Parliamentary elections on 7 May 2015, in which the Conservative Party won an outright majority of 330 seats in the House of Commons, while their coalition partners lost all but eight seats.[2]