Liz Truss has gone. The polls show that, if a general election were held today, the Conservative Party would be wiped out. Hundreds of Tories would lose their seats, including Jeremy Hunt, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Labour would win a huge majority.
It is clear that the country does not want this government. Public opinion has turned sharply against the Conservatives. So why will they provide the country with its next prime minister?
Democracy, a complicated idea, tends to mean different things to different people. The proper name of communist East Germany was “the German Democratic Republic”, but it is clear to us now there was little about it that was democratic. The argument back then was that the people should be represented by a single “people’s party”, a far more democratic construct than any Western equivalent. In this view, democracy does not emerge from a system of competing political parties, but is carried within a single governing party. Democracy is an internal party matter.
We saw something of that during the Jeremy Corbyn era, when the Labour Party descended into vicious feuding and committee warfare. Just as a figure skater pulls in their arms to spin faster, so Labour’s internal arguments intensified as the party drew further into itself. Corbyn’s Labour became so caught up in this fight over party democracy that it stopped paying attention to the much more important external democratic contest — the one against the Tories. The result was electoral catastrophe.
It is an irony that, having beaten Corbyn’s Labour Party, the Conservatives went on to repeat Corbyn’s mistake — they turned in on themselves. Johnson started it when he levered Theresa May out of office and then threw out the entire moderate wing of his party. By doing this, he shut down dissent within Conservative MPs, cramming the party into a tight, ideological consensus around the question of Brexit.
With that new, ideological rigidity came other narrow beliefs, on immigration, welfare, on spending and on the perceived left-wing dominance of Britain’s cultural institutions, particularly the BBC. With this, Johnson’s neo-Tory Party had turned away from the idea of simply running the country, and the idea of stable, moderate government was replaced by a new strain of combative populism. Johnson fought the Supreme Court, the EU, the National Trust and the Irish government.
Eventually the party could no longer ignore the flaws in his character, and Johnson was thrown out of office. But despite his removal, the political character of the Conservatives, and of the government, did not change. Truss was the direct inheritor of Johnson’s combative, populist style. She was rude about the French, employed a home secretary who dreamed of sending immigrants to Rwanda, and when she was warned by Rishi Sunak that her economic plans would send interest rates through the roof, Truss dismissed this as “project fear”. She offered Britain a mix of coarse, culture war posturing and hard-right libertarian free-market economics.
But where did these ideas come from? They did not appear in the Conservative’s 2019 manifesto. In fact, they came from the darkest recesses of the Tory hard right wish list. That no one had actually voted for these ideas seemed not to matter to Truss, or to Kwarteng, her momentary chancellor. The logic of their position seemed to be that the country had voted Conservative at the last election, and therefore anything the Conservative Party decided to do was OK. When asked during a BBC interview why she had any right to govern Britain at all, Truss simply replied, “I’m sticking around because I was elected to deliver for this country”. In her mind, democracy had become little more than an internal matter for the Tory Party.
Now she has gone, and this is the point to which our political system has come: we have got rid of a prime minister who was installed by less than half of the Tory Party membership and we will shortly be getting a new prime minister elected by only Tory MPs. The continuity chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is introducing economic plans for which nobody voted, representing a party that the electorate does not want in power and which, if there were a general election tomorrow, would be thrown out of office for a generation.
Britain’s constitution offers no solution to this. The only possible way out would be a motion of no confidence in Parliament, but this would require two-thirds of all MPs to vote in favour of a motion that would immediately trigger a general election. Tory MPs will not willingly vote themselves out.
And so the country watches on, helpless. Democracy has meant different things at different moments in history. But here, now in our supposedly liberal democratic age, reasonable, moderate people tend to recognise a functioning democratic system when they see one. It is no longer clear that Britain’s political system qualifies. Only a general election can restore it to health.
Does the UK need to go straight to a general election? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Perhaps the King should follow the precedent set by Sir John Kerr and appoint Keir Starmer as caretaker PM to be followed by a General Election.
Fortifying himself with a few whiskies first, a la Kerr?
I think a cup of weak chamomile tea and some elderflower champagne would be more Chuck’s style, having sworn off cherry brandy at 14 after being busted at Gordonstoun.
Won’t happen. One rule for the Brits and another for the Colonies don’t you know!
Come to think of it, what even is the point of that monarchist structure if it’s not gonna chuck out this conflagration of ravening depravities?
Surely it’s obvious this is a constitutional crisis demanding intervention. Or, what IS the threshold?
That would be Sir Keir Starmer, thanks. But that anyone should follow Kerr’s precedent or example in anything is disturbing, but I take your point.
Well the UK is just going to have to wait. The Tories were elected (not Bojo or Truss) and the Tories get to decide who is PM for the remainder of the term, not polls, the media or social media. What Party would call an early election in the knowledge that doing so would, most likely, result in their being in Opposition?
The Tories now have a chance to appoint a PM that has the opportunity to turn the country around (unlikely but they have the opportunity). Anyone that thinks that you can resolve the economic mess underway in the UK, (largely of the UK’s own making as well) in a short period of time needs to wake up to reality. You reap what you sow.
What party would vote themselves into opposition?
Well, perhaps one that had been roundly shamed into a modicum of self-awareness; I doubt it takes a genius to see how shamelessly hanging on for grim death while utterly misgoverning the place into the ground during multiple significant crises is going to sit in voters’ memories.
Even your average Tory fwit could barely fail to recognise the obvious need for the other mob to take over, and concede the party has lost its way and needs to regroup. Such a gesture is probably the only thing they can do to preserve the merest shred of credibility with the electorate.
On another note, I sadly await the inevitable failure of the left to capitalise on this once in a generation opportunity to educate the populace about who really has the economic management credentials: the mob who invest in productivity, as opposed to the extractionist profiteering rentiers.
“A modicum of self-awareness” Really? You have no real understanding of how politics work do you? With years to go to the next required election the Tories have a chance to restore their tattered reputation. Again, no political party will willingly call an early election that they are pretty certain they will lose.
Voters memories? A fleeting, fickle thing generally centered on “what’s in it for me”.
You get what you vote for. It took Australians several elections to give up their Coalition Stockholm Syndrome.
“You get what you vote for”?
Not in the UK you don’t.
Political parties take power in the UK despite 60% to 70% of eligible voters having not voted for them.
Even if voting was mandatory, the first-past-the-post system would ensure minority rule.
The house of ‘review’ (House of Lords) is unelected and representative only of which political parties held power in the past.
Further, decades of Tory deregulation and selling off of sovereignty to the highest bidder means that the Fourth Pillar of democracy (the press) is largely owned by their natural allies: non-domiciled, tax-dodging $billionaires.
While it is true that it “…would require two-thirds of all MPs to vote in favour of a motion that would immediately trigger a general election.” to force the issue that is NOT the only way to decide who sits on the Treasury benches.
The protocol is the same as here.
Any group, not necessarily a ‘party’ – which, as the High Court here ruled when the Libs failed to choose candidates until the last moment, is merely a private club with no constitutional standing – that has the assent of a majority in the legislative chamber (Commons or HoR) may choose whom it wishes to be primus inter pares.
That person need not, in principle, even be a member of that party.
It wasn’t Corbyns mistake. It was Starmer and his mates who actually worked against Corbyn. They preferred a Tori victory because they wanted Blair style Labour rather than the real Social Democratic version of Corbyn. Read the Al Jazeera investigation into this sorry mess. Starmer is faux Labour and will do the bidding of the City.
That the non-mad tories, a shrunken group, are so welcoming of Labour-harmer Starmer, as Thatcher was of Blair, is an indication of his value to them in crushing the last of the working class.
I read an interview with a… I believe he was a Labour staffer or intern or something of that sort, I forget, it’s been a while… anyway, he was talking about watching other staffers and Labour advisers doing their best to get rid of Corbin. As he told it, it was basically his own party that destroyed him.
Corbyn was hugely popular with the party members, the public (even the Glastonbury crowd!) and reduced the Maybot from a 17 seat majority to minority government in 2017.
This horrified the PLP, which was then and still is, stuffed with undead Blairites who actually worked against Corbyn, the party and the country from the moment he was elected in 2015.
The only reason the Red Wall collapsed in 2019 to Bozo was because those vermin undermined it.
May they rot in Hell, assumed that they are allowed in.
Corbyn is the Tories best electoral weapon, while that Al Jazeera* English doco of Peter Oborne round accusations of anti-semitism, was thin on evidence but more ‘he said, she said’ etc. to present Labor moderates in a bad light.
*Al Jazeera had done something similar several years ago while Al Jazeera Arabic is known as being very anti-semitic.
On related social media there are suggestions of course that Starmer should go in favour of Corbyn when Labor has a record poll lead over the Tories, interesting timing?
Who would Putin prefer as the UK PM if Labour, let me guess Corbyn? Corbyn would not help arm UKraine to defend itself vs. a convoluted negotiation process presuming Putin and Russia to be good faith negotiators.
Worse and good for Putin, would be Johnson, while Londongrad still unresolved and parties hosted by KGB types. UK’s ByLine Times has article this week ‘Strange Allies Hungary, Russia & the UK’ (Szabolcs Panyi, 18 October 2022) on links between Johnson, Putin and Orban, also citing an Anglo led but Hungarian funded Budapest think tank popular with Australian conservatives; someone being manipulated here?
For example ‘a taxpayer-backed Hungarian think-tank called the Danube Institute….Douglas Murray – who once met Orbán alongside former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon – is a regular guest at Government-sponsored events, and one of Orbán’s most influential British fans.’