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Cabinet of the United Kingdom

Senior decision-making body of the UK government

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  • 6 chapters

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The UK's Ministerial Code states that the business of the Cabinet (and its committees) is mainly the determination of major issues of policy, questions of critical importance to the public and questions on which there is an unresolved argument between departments. The cabinet is essentially the peak strategic and political decision-making body of the government. Its members are bound by constitutional and quasi-constitutional conventions and norms, including collective responsibility and cabinet solidarity.

The work of the cabinet is classified; it is supported by the Cabinet Office, the lead department of the civil service. Cabinet ministers (secretaries of state) are questioned in the Houses of Parliament, as part of ongoing scrutiny of government performance. This questioning is often led by the minister's opposite number: the portfolio's shadow minister. Analogously to the cabinet itself, members of the shadow cabinet are chosen, from within the parliamentary ranks of the official opposition, by the leader of the opposition. Shadow cabinet is thus a structure allowing for some pre-election policy development and preparation organised by portfolio; it operates in some ways as the peak body of the nation's primary alternative executive government.

History

Until at least the 16th century, individual officers of state had separate property, powers and responsibilities granted with their separate offices by royal command, and the Crown and the Privy Council constituted the only co-ordinating authorities. In England, phrases such as "cabinet counsel", meaning advice given in private, in a cabinet in the sense of a small room, to the monarch, occur from the late 16th century, and, given the non-standardised spelling of the day, it is often hard to distinguish whether "council" or "counsel" is meant. The OED credits Francis Bacon in his Essays (1605) with the first use of "Cabinet council", where it is described as a foreign habit, of which he disapproves: "For which inconveniences, the doctrine of Italy, and practice of France, in some kings' times, hath introduced cabinet counsels; a remedy worse than the disease". Charles I began a formal "Cabinet Council" from his accession in 1625, as his Privy Council, or "private council", and the first recorded use of "cabinet" by itself for such a body comes from 1644, and is again hostile and associates the term with dubious foreign practices.

There were ministries in England led by the chief minister, which was a personage leading the English government for the monarch. Despite primary accountability to the monarch, these ministries, having a group of ministers running the country, served as a predecessor of the modern perspective of cabinet. After the Union of 1707 between Scotland and England and the ministry of Lord Stanhope and Lord Sunderland collapsed, Sir Robert Walpole rose to power as First Lord of the Treasury. Since the reign of King George I the Cabinet has been the principal executive group of British government. Both he and George II relied heavily on selected groups of advisers, as they were not native English speakers and were less familiar with British politics. The term "minister" came into being since the royal officers "ministered" to the sovereign. The name and institution have been adopted by most English-speaking countries, and the Council of Ministers or similar bodies of other countries are often informally referred to as cabinets.

The modern Cabinet system, including the Cabinet Office, was introduced between 1916 and 1922 under Prime Minister David Lloyd George. A Cabinet secretariat was established in December 1916, and formal minutes and conclusions began to be recorded.. Although the Cabinet Manual publicly sets out the principal rules, conventions and procedures governing Cabinet business, the records of individual Cabinet and Cabinet committee proceedings—including agendas, papers, minutes and correspondence—are generally not published contemporaneously.

This development grew out of the exigencies of the First World War, where faster and better co-ordinated decisions across government were seen as a crucial part of the war effort. Decisions on mass conscription, co-ordination worldwide with other governments across international theatres, and armament production tied into a general war strategy that could be developed and overseen from an inner "War Cabinet". The country went through successive crises after the war: the 1926 general strike; the Great Depression of 1929–32; the rise of Bolshevism after 1917 and fascism after 1922; the Spanish Civil War 1936 onwards; the invasion of Abyssinia 1936; the League of Nations Crisis which followed; and the re-armament and resurgence of Germany from 1933, leading into the Second World War.

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