Can Anyone Govern Britain… Or America?

Authored by Daniel McCarthy via PJMedia.com,

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. 

Labour is now gambling its problems are personal, not political, and once Starmer has made way for a new PM — virtually certain to be Andy Burnham — its majority will be salvageable. 

Burnham is even more left-wing than Starmer: at least as far left on social issues and even more enthusiastic about nationalizing industry. 

Farage is wagering Starmer wasn’t the millstone around Labour’s neck — the party’s politics are. 

But even as traditional parties of the left and right elsewhere in Europe have decayed in ways much like those of Britain’s Tories and Labour, new populist parties have struggled to win and maintain power. 

Farage has to contend not only with Labour and what’s left of the Conservatives, but also with a small but vociferous insurgency to his right, the Restore party. 

All this suggests Burnham or Farage can’t count on enjoying a tenure longer than Starmer’s or Sunak’s. 

Parliamentary elections haven’t produced a stable British government by anyone in the last 16 years. 

What are the odds the next election, which has to be held by August 2029, will do so?

Congressional elections here also keep producing majorities that can’t govern, either because control of House and Senate is divided or the majority party in one or both chambers is itself divided and unable to legislate. 

The two parties have been rapidly alternating control as well. It’s been nearly 20 years since either was able to hold onto the House or Senate for more than a decade. 

Democrats have the upper hand when Congress is weak because federal bureaucrats, and judges capable of issuing nationwide injunctions, continue advancing Democratic designs on their own. 

Fed up with this, many conservatives have come around to the idea only a brash and strong president, like Trump, wielding unitary executive power, can rein in the administrative state and activist judges — Congress can’t.

Two-hundred and fifty years ago, Americans rejected the legitimacy of a British parliament that taxed us without giving us an effective say in government. 

It’s another revolutionary situation if voters in Britain or America today feel unrepresented — or misrepresented — by the legislators they put in office. 

On both sides of the Atlantic, members of parliament and of Congress are going to have to work harder and listen a lot more attentively to what voters are demanding if representative government is going to survive much longer: What we’re seeing now is how parliaments die.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.