How does parliament control the executive?
Answers
They exert control through patronage and the whips system (the whips are officials whose job it is to make sure that the government wins votes, sometimes through quite devious and underhand tactics). There are various levels of seriousness of whipped votes, with a "three line whip" being the strongest. An MP who rebels against the party whip many times is unlikely to find himself promoted. Of course, some MPs don't care about this. They are the Awkward Squad, and they exist in both the parties. In Labour, they tend to be on the left of the party. In the Tories, they tend to be on the Eurosceptic right. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn used to rebel a lot against the Labour whip.
In the UK, the executive had pretty strong control over parliament. If a government has a strong majority (eg. Blair), it is very rare for a government to be defeated. There used to be a norm that a government defeat was a major deal that could often bring down a government. That norm has been relaxed. Whilst still rare, government defeats do not bring down governments any more except in the most grievous of circumstances.
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