the cabinet and to remain a member of the cabinet thereafter. Collective
responsibility also meant that if Parliament wished to remove a government
from office it had to remove the whole administration; it could not remove part
of it or pick ministers off one by one, although individual ministers have
resigned for political and personal reasons.
The concept of cabinet government implies that power and responsibility
will be shared equally between all members of the cabinet. In fact theprime
minister, as chairman of the cabinet and, in most systems which have cabinet
governments, the person who appoints the other cabinet ministers, wields a
power which is generally seen as superior to that of other members of the
cabinet individually and even to that of the cabinet as a whole. In the last few
years of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership, however, it was increasingly
felt that the idea of ‘first among equals’, which restricts prime ministerial
power, had been largely abandoned. Her successors in office may have initiated
a return to a traditional form of cabinet government, but the dominant force in
British politics is now indisputably the prime minister. In the British system of
cabinet government, a great deal of decision-making and policy preparation is
undertaken not by the full cabinet, but by cabinetcommitteeswhich cover
specialized areas of policy; membership of the most important of these
committees, particularly the economic committee, is greatly prized among
cabinet members. One of the reasons for the prime minister’s influence over
the cabinet is indeed that he or she is the only member who is likely to be on all
the important committees.
Britain’s system of cabinet government has been exported to other coun-
tries, notably those of theCommonwealth. However, the norms and
practices of cabinet government may vary considerably from one country to
another. When the Labor Party comes to power in Australia, for example, it
elects the members of the cabinet, thus denying the prime minister one
important source of power and patronage. Although there is a body in the
US political system called the cabinet, which consists of the politically
appointed heads of departments, it has no decision-making power and exists
only to advise the president when the latter wants to be advised.
Capitalism
At its most simple and value-free, the term capitalism is used to describe any
economic system where there is a combination of private property, a relatively
free and competitive market, and a general assumption that the bulk of the
work-force will be engaged in employment by private (non-governmental)
employers engaged in producing whatever goods they can sell at a profit.
Capitalism has its ownideologyand economic theory, like all politico-
economic systems. The original theory of capitalism was essentially that an
Capitalism