than most other countries have. The English language has fewer sayings and proverbs that are in common everyday use than many other languages ​​do. No wonder the most popular well-attend festival in the whole Britain is the annual Notting Hill Carnival in London at the end of August which is of Caribbean origin.
Even when a British habit conforms to the stereotype, the wrong conclusions can sometimes be drawn from it. Let us take queuing, for example. The authors of the "How to be British "collection Martyn Ford and Peter Legon write," It is not true that queuing in Britain has died out. Only the bus queue seems to have dissolved more or less into continental free-for-all. For to a post office, or bank, or supermarket check-out and you will find the custom is thriving, with special rails and tapes to keep the line straight.
Queue jumping is a low and mean offence. Not fame nor wealth, not merit nor urgency will get you to the front of the queue "All this, however, does not mean that British people enjoy queuing. Many of them refer to it as a problem. Some banks promise to reduce the time they serve their customers from 2 minutes and 3 seconds to only 2 minutes. In fact the British hate having to wait and are less patient than people in many other countries,
Like many other stereotyped images and false assumptions (for example those of Russian people drinking vodka from samovars and eating caviar with wooden spoons) the British ones derive from books, songs or plays which were written a long time ago and which are no longer representative of modern life.
Many of them are preserved in order to draw more tourists to the country. The British themselves think that people from other countries should be cautious about generalizations as what is often regarded as typically British may in fact be only typically English or typically Welsh. Another reason for caution relates to the large-scale immigration to Britain from the countries-members of the Commonwealth. The new British have made their own contribution to British life and attitudes.
They have probably helped to make people more informal, they have changed the nature of the "corner shop". The annual Notting Hill Carnival, mentioned above, is another convincing argument.
All the above mentioned does not mean the British are not what they have always been. They are. They may not behave in traditional ways, but still they appreciate symbols of tradition and stability. They value continuity over modernity and can be particularly and stubbornly conservative about anything which is perceived as a token of Britishness. In these matters their conservatism can combine with their individualism and result in great pride of being different.
Since the main objective of our research is to prove that many stereotyped images of Britain are not true to life any longer we are going to focus on a few out of date assumptions and generalization including the political system, food and clothing.
2. Parliament and the Royal Family
What most school students know about the political system of the United Kingdom is that the monarch is the official head of state and an integral part of Parliament in her constitutional role, who, in fact, has no real power but plays a ceremonial role and represents the country abroad. British Parliament, the lawmaking body, consists of two chambers-the House of Commons, the members of which are elected, and the House of Lords, the members of which are permanent. However British Parliament is no longer what it used to be even 30 years ago. p> In 1988 a group of distinguished politicians, lawyers, academics, writers and journalists began to campaign under the title Charter 88 for wide ranging reforms. They called for Bill of Rights, to protect individual liberties, and for a written constitution to define and limit the powers of Parliament. This call could be explained by numerous facts of violations of human rights and personal liberties during the1980ies.As a result of this campaign in 1990 the European Court of Justice made a historic decision that British courts must suspend any act of Parliament which breaches the rights of citizens guaranteed by European Community Law. Parliamentary sovereignty is, therefore, already limited by European Union membership.
The House of Lords has also undergone dramatic changes. Although it consists of more than one thousand peers, average daily attendance is only about 300 and most of these are life peers who retain a strong interest in the affairs of state. The idea of ​​life peerage was introduced in 1958 to elevate to the peerage certain people who have rendered political or public service to the nation in order to enhance the quality of business done in the Lords.
Among the numerous changes introduced to the activities of the House of Commons is "Selected committee" ...
