Executive power rests with the prime minister and cabinet, which must have the support of the elected House of Commons. The leader of the majority party or coalition usually becomes prime minister and appoints the cabinet. Former chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) Rishi Sunak was named Conservative Party leader and prime minister in October 2022.

The monarch is the ceremonial head of state. King Charles III succeeded his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in September 2022 and was formally coronated in May 2023.

The bicameral Parliament’s more powerful lower chamber, the House of Commons, has 650 members directly elected to serve five-year terms. Most members of the unelected House of Lords, numbering 785 in December 2023, are appointed for life by the monarch on the advice of the prime minister. The body, which includes both partisan and nonpartisan peers, largely plays an oversight role in reviewing legislation passed by the House of Commons.

In the December 2019 snap elections, the Conservatives won 365 seats in the House of Commons, while the opposition Labour Party won 202. The Scottish National Party, which advocates for Scottish independence from the UK, won 47; the Liberal Democrats took 11, and smaller parties or independents captured the remainder.

Elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly’s 90 seats were held in May 2022. In a historic result, the left-wing republican Sinn Féin became the Assembly’s largest party with 27 seats. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which supports Northern Ireland remaining in the UK, fell to 25. The nonsectarian, liberal Alliance Party gained 9 seats, for a total of 17. Two independents and four other parties won the remainder.

Local council elections took place across England in May 2023, resulting in a considerable loss of seats for the Conservatives and gains for most other parties.

The UK’s electoral framework is robust and well implemented. Parliament maintains a direct role in electoral management, notably through its involvement in the drawing of district boundaries. However, the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 will limit its future involvement. Parliament’s role was further eroded by the March 2022 repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011, which had limited the prime minister’s ability to force snap elections.

Under the Elections Act 2022, voters in England and Wales must show identification documents (ID) to vote in general elections and some local contests. The May 2023 local elections were the first in which voters were required to present ID. Interim analysis released by the Electoral Commission in June found that at least 14,000 people (0.25 percent) were turned away when attempting to vote, and 4 percent of surveyed nonvoters reported that they did not show up to polls because of the ID requirement.

Parties do not face undue restrictions on registration or operation. The Conservative and Labour parties have dominated politics for decades, though other parties regularly win seats.

Opposition groups operate freely, and the two largest parties have alternated in government over the years. The last such rotation occurred in 2010, when the Conservatives replaced Labour as the main ruling party.

People’s political choices are generally free from domination by groups using extrapolitical means.

Women, LGBT+ people, and members of racial and ethnic minority groups are active in UK politics. Women held 34.7 percent of lower-house seats at the end of 2023. Representation for LGBT+ people and members of Black, Asian, and other racial and ethnic minority populations improved in the 2019 general elections. Rishi Sunak is the country’s first prime minister of color, and his predecessor, Liz Truss, was the third female prime minister.

Under a system of devolution, Parliament has granted different degrees of legislative authority to the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Welsh Senedd (Parliament), and the Scottish Parliament, augmenting the political power of the UK’s smaller, non-English constituent nations.

Freely elected officials can generally make and implement national policy without significant influence from actors who are not democratically accountable. However, more than a year after the Northern Ireland Assembly elections of 2022, regional lawmakers had yet to agree on a new power-sharing government at the end of 2023.

Score Change: The score declined from 4 to 3 because Northern Ireland remained without a functioning regional government throughout the year.

Large-scale official corruption is not historically pervasive, and anticorruption bodies are generally effective. However, in recent years, corruption analysts have alleged that political corruption and corruption risk are on the rise. For instance, law enforcement authorities and media outlets in 2023 continued to investigate the awarding of coronavirus-related government contracts to politically connected people during the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020.

Members of Parliament are required to disclose assets and sources of income, and this information is made available to the public. Freedom-of-information (FOI) legislation is reasonably well implemented, and journalists can generally access and publish relevant government data. However, in 2023 the Labour Party accused the government of a “culture of concealment” after a record number of FOI requests were denied in the first three months of Rishi Sunak’s premiership. Between July and September 2023, the percentage of FOI requests that were granted in full declined again, from 34 percent in the previous quarter to 32 percent.

Press freedom is legally protected. The media environment is lively and diverse, offering viewpoints that span the political spectrum. The publicly owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which relies on dedicated license fees for most of its funding, is largely viewed as editorially independent and competitive with its commercial counterparts.

Journalists face regular harassment in the course of their work, and a study published in May 2023 found that LGBT+ journalists are particularly subject to mistreatment. Paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland have sometimes issued threats against journalists in recent years. The government published its first-ever National Action Plan to enhance the safety of journalists in 2021.

In October 2023, Parliament adopted legislative amendments designed to allow judges to more swiftly dismiss strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), such as spurious defamation cases against journalists.

Freedom of religion is protected in law and practice. A 2006 law bans incitement to religious hatred, with a maximum penalty of seven years in prison. Nevertheless, members of minority groups, particularly Muslims, continue to report discrimination, harassment, and occasional assault. The Home Office recorded 8,241 religion-based hate crimes in England and Wales in the 2022–23 reporting period, a decrease of 4 percent, and the first annual decline since 2013.

Muslims have been reluctant to discuss religious subjects or their identity in some settings, especially in the classroom, due to Prevent, an official strategy designed to identify and divert individuals who may be vulnerable to terrorist or extremist recruitment. Prevent has been criticized for causing Muslims to self-censor for fear of referral. A February 2023 independent review of the strategy was criticized in turn for concluding that the government should focus more on Islamist extremism than on far-right, White-supremacist threats.

Academic freedom is generally respected, though the government has recently made political forays into the academic curriculum. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which received royal assent in May 2023, has been criticized by freedom of expression groups on the grounds that it may allow the government to define “acceptable speech” at universities. Separately, an investigation by the Observer found in October that the government had been monitoring the internet activity of teaching staff.

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 requires schools and universities to help divert students from recruitment into terrorist groups, as part of the Prevent strategy. Educators are expected to report students suspected of terrorist or extremist sympathies to a local government body and vet the remarks of visiting speakers, among other obligations.

Concerns about the effects of mass surveillance on unfettered private discussion have persisted for several years. The Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016 required communications companies to store customer metadata for 12 months, and authorities could sometimes access the information without a warrant, though this was later limited to serious criminal investigations. In January 2023, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal found that the UK’s domestic security service had illegally stored private data that had been secretly gathered under the IPA.

The Online Safety Act received royal assent in October 2023. Among other provisions, the law requires online platforms to remove or restrict content deemed illegal and to protect children from harmful, age-inappropriate material. The law was criticized by rights groups for potentially undermining freedom of expression.

Freedom of assembly is generally respected, though a number of recent legislative changes have raised concerns about the right to protest in the UK. For example, the 2022 PCSCA gives police in England and Wales more power to determine whether a protest may cause “serious disorder.” Authorities may restrict individual protesters’ actions under the law.

The POA, which received royal assent in May 2023, reintroduced a number of rejected proposals from the drafting of the PCSCA and provided police with new powers to restrict protests that are considered overly disruptive. It included a new definition of “serious disruption” and codified a number of new criminal offenses, including the act of locking oneself to objects or other people as a means of protest.

Police actively enforced such laws during 2023, with more than 470 climate protesters arrested in November alone. At least 125 people were charged with offenses related to blocking key infrastructure. Two protesters were sentenced in April to almost three years in prison each for blocking traffic on a major bridge in October 2022. In what was reportedly the first jail term under the new POA, a climate activist was sentenced in December to six months for marching in a road.

Score Change: The score declined from 4 to 3 because restrictive new legislation and enforcement efforts have led to the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators and prison sentences for some nonviolent acts of protest.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) generally operate freely. However, in recent years, disclosures regarding police surveillance of NGOs and political organizations have drawn criticism. A public inquiry into the conduct of undercover officers who spied on—and in some cases had intimate relationships with—civil society activists released its first interim report in June 2023. It found that such operations were unjustified and should have been shut down.

Workers have the right to organize trade unions, which have traditionally played a central role in the Labour Party. The rights to bargain collectively and strike are also respected. However, the Strikes (Minimum Service Level) Act, which received royal assent in July 2023, empowers employers to instruct unions on which staff members would be required to work during industrial actions. Separately in July, the High Court struck down a 2022 regulatory change that would have allowed employers to hire temporary replacements for striking workers.

The judiciary is generally independent, and authorities comply with judicial decisions. A new Supreme Court began functioning in 2009, improving the separation of powers by moving the UK’s highest court out of the House of Lords.

Due process generally prevails in civil and criminal matters. However, cuts to legal aid have left many vulnerable people without access to counsel.

Police have been accused of using stop-and-search powers disproportionately: In 2022–23, Black people in England and Wales were 4.1 times more likely to be searched by police than White people. Separately, amid broader discussions about misconduct, it was revealed in January 2023 that London’s Metropolitan Police were reviewing over 1,600 allegations of sexual offenses or domestic violence involving its officers and staff.

Some counterterrorism measures have raised concerns about due process. Under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, authorities can seize the travel documents of individuals attempting to leave the country if they are suspected of planning to engage in terrorist-related activities abroad, and to forcibly relocate terrorism suspects within the country. The Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 makes viewing terrorist content online punishable by up to 15 years in prison, and allows law enforcement agencies to keep the fingerprints and DNA of terrorism suspects for up to five years, even if no charges are filed.

The UK justice system still grapples with cases stemming from the Troubles, the 1968–98 period of violence involving republican and unionist paramilitary groups as well as state security forces in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act, which received royal assent in September 2023, would close down ongoing criminal investigations and inquests into Troubles-era cases by May 2024. All new investigations would be carried out by an independent commission with powers to offer conditional immunity for those who cooperate with “truth recovery” efforts.

Individuals living in the UK are largely free from violence, but acts of terrorism have occurred in recent years. Low-level paramilitary activity continues in Northern Ireland. The Police Service of Northern Ireland reported one security-related death, six bombing incidents, and 121 security-related arrests in its 2022–23 reporting period, which ended in March.

Prisons generally adhere to international guidelines but are overcrowded. Violence, self-harm, and the presence of drugs have also been reported. In a July 2023 annual review, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMI Prisons) raised concerns about violence, overcrowding, and inadequate living conditions, among other problems.

Women receive equal treatment under the law, but gender discrimination persists in the workplace and elsewhere in society. The authorities actively enforce a 2010 law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The UK has recorded a rise in hate crimes against LGBT+ residents over the past decade, though the figures for England and Wales declined in the year ending in March 2023.

Members of Black, Asian, and other racial and ethnic minority groups experience continued discrimination, including by the authorities. In the March 2023 final report of an independent review commissioned by the Metropolitan Police, the service was found to be undermined by institutional racism as well as sexism and homophobia. Members of the Romany, Traveller, and related communities also encounter de facto discrimination in the UK.

Foreign residents face considerable scrutiny. Under the ongoing “hostile environment” policy, which aims to persuade undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the UK or refrain from entering, individuals seeking public and private services must undergo stringent immigration checks. Asylum seekers and migrants can be detained indefinitely, and there have been persistent reports of poor conditions and abuse in immigration detention centers.

In 2022, then prime minister Boris Johnson announced a plan under which people whose asylum applications were deemed “inadmissible” in the UK would be sent to Rwanda; they would then either be invited to settle in Rwanda or be sent elsewhere depending on further determinations. The first flight to Rwanda was halted following a ruling that year by the European Court of Human Rights. The Illegal Migration Act 2023, which received royal assent in July 2023, was designed specifically to deter people from entering the UK irregularly via small boats, allowing authorities to reject asylum claims from such individuals and to detain and remove them to their home country or a designated third country, such as Rwanda. However, the UK Supreme Court ruled in November that Rwanda was not a “safe” third country, and that the deportation plan was consequently unlawful. In December, the government introduced the controversial Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, which would effectively override the court’s finding if adopted.

Separately in July, the High Court ruled that the government was illegally housing unaccompanied child asylum seekers in hotels without adequate care, leaving them at risk of harm and exploitation. More than 150 children had reportedly gone missing from such hotels since 2021.

Citizens are generally free to travel, within the UK and abroad, and to relocate for the purposes of residence, employment, and education.

The UK’s legal and regulatory framework protects property rights and broadly supports free and competitive business activity.

The government generally does not place explicit restrictions on personal social freedoms.

While domestic violence remains a problem, the law imposes serious penalties and provides for protection orders as well as government support for survivors. The Office for National Statistics estimated that 4.4 percent of England and Wales residents over the age of 16 experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2023.

Abortion in Northern Ireland was legalized by Parliament in 2019, though practical access to the procedure remains severely limited there. Abortion is broadly available elsewhere in the UK at up to 24 weeks of gestation, and at-home medical abortions are permitted at up to 10 weeks of gestation. A woman in England was sentenced in June 2023 to 28 months in prison after ordering medication by mail to induce abortion beyond the 10-week limit; the penalty was halved and suspended on appeal in July, but the case prompted widespread calls to reform the country’s abortion laws.

Most workers are protected in law and in practice from exploitative or dangerous conditions of employment. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 increased punishments for human traffickers and provides greater protections for victims, but implementation has been criticized as inadequate. Children and migrant workers are among those most vulnerable to forced labor and sex trafficking.