As Britain gets ready for its seventh prime minister in just 10 years, it’s time to ask whether the parliamentary system itself is broken.
That might explain not only why landslide election victories don’t translate into stable leadership in Britain but also why America’s Congress is so feckless.
Is representative government an idea whose time has passed?
In Europe as well as America, leftists prefer that judges and bureaucrats wield permanent power, as supposedly impartial experts who know best how to stop the weather from changing and how many genders there are.
Britain’s Labour party started out as a vehicle for the working class, in theory.
It was closely connected to the country’s major industrial unions — but Britain in the 21st century has lost most of its hard industry, and Labour is now led by the same kind of socially left-wing, technocratic wonks that make up the “inner party” of the Democrats in this country.
Brexit, passed by the British people in a referendum 10 years ago this week, proved Labour had lost the working class — the party elite favored remaining in the European Union, but working-class voters themselves cast their ballots for “leave.”
Unfortunately, the Conservative party’s elite also favored “remain” — Prime Minister David Cameron himself did, and losing the Brexit referendum compelled him to resign.
Yet Cameron was followed by another Conservative PM, Theresa May, who had also been a remainer.
It took a third Tory PM, Boris Johnson, to follow through on the voters’ mandate, but Johnson proved to be Britain’s Joe Biden where immigration was concerned, unleashing the “Boriswave” of mass migration, which flooded Britain with some 4 million newcomers from places like India, China, Pakistan and Nigeria.
Personal scandals forced Johnson from office before the scale of the damage his policies did came to light — but bond markets didn’t tolerate Johnson’s successor, Liz Truss, for long.
That left Rishi Sunak to lead the Conservatives in 2024 to their first general election defeat in 14 years. In that time, Conservatives had given Britain same-sex marriage, bigger government, deeper debt, more green-energy regulation and record-high immigration.
Labour more than doubled its number of seats in Parliament with Keir Starmer leading the party into the election, yet the landslide didn’t translate into any mandate for him.
His popularity soon slid and polls indicated the Reform party would win the next election, making Nigel Farage prime minister.
Read Full Article: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/daniel-mccarthy/2026/06/24/can-anyone-govern-britain-or-america
