Farage Calls For An Election

The current crisis in the UK is turning out to be a sort of backhand civics lesson for those of us in the US. The UK parliamentary system basically provides for a single set of elections to the House of Commons every five years, unless the prime minister asks the king to call an election, which the king must then do. The prime minister can nevertheless call for an election at any time if he thinks it might strengthen his position, or if he loses a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons.

As of now, the five-year term until the next mandatory election doesn't expire until August 2029, but there are clearly issues in the UK that ought to be resolved by a general election before then, especially migration, even-handed prosecution of migrant crime, and accountability for the decades-long grooming gang scandal. In the US, regular two-year elections for the House of Representatives, along with four-year presidential elections and staggered six-year Senate terms, serve as regular safety valves, as well as do primary contests for all those seats, along with regular and special state and local elections.

But national issues seem to have had little to do with Prime Minister Keir Starmer's resignation:

Thomas Corbett-Dillon, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and a U.K. political commentator, told The National News Desk he did not believe immigration had been a major driver of Starmer’s decision. “I don't actually think it's been a huge part of it,” Corbett-Dillon said, adding that Starmer “has taken hits on this for a while” but that “it seems to be more internal issues.”

Corbett-Dillon described the political instability surrounding the prime minister’s office as severe.

. . . “I think a lot of Americans watching this have heard the news that he's resigned, and they think that means there'll be an election,” he said. “It doesn't mean that.”

In the wake of Starmer’s resignation, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called for a national vote, saying, “I demand we at Reform demand a general election.”

. . . Corbett-Dillon criticized the process of replacing a prime minister without a public vote, saying, “The UK is really struggling right now because we have these unelected leaders,” and adding, “They're about to appoint a guy who no one's ever voted for to be the new prime minister who gets to do whatever he wants to do.”

In the UK, there are far fewer opportunities, mostly elections to local offices and special elections when a House of Commons seat falls open, but the meaning of these seems to be harder to tease out. The results from last week's Makerfield election appear to have been counterintuitive:

The figures are stunning. Like others, I wrote during the campaign that a really good result for Andy Burnham would be that he gathered more votes than Reform’s Robert Kenyon and Restore’s Rebecca Shepherd together. He did not just do that; he had more than 6,000 votes to spare. Nobody saw that coming; and the element of surprise when the returning officer announced the figures has added force to Burnham’s victory.

. . . The figures are even more startling if we compare the result with the votes cast last month in the council wards that make up the constituency. Reform’s 50 per cent trounced Labour’s 27 per cent. For Burnham to double that is stunning, even after we have discounted the differences between voting for councils and the House of Commons, and the far lower turnout in local elections.

But this still isn't good news for Labour, compared to earlier years:

All that said, Burnham has not lifted Labour back to the heights it once enjoyed. When Tony Blair led the party to its landslide victory in 1997, 74 per cent voted for Ian McCartney to be Makerfield’s Labour MP. As in so many of Labour’s industrial heartland seats, the party has lost much of its support in recent decades. A one-off triumph by an exceptional candidate does not in itself stem, let alone reverse, the tide of history. Assuming he becomes prime minister, Burnham will find that a far harder task than winning a by-election.

In other words, simply swapping out prime ministers is unlikely to fix anything -- it's a move comparable to swapping Kamala for Joe in 2024, but without a subsequent general election to validate or repudiate the choice. Lately I've discovered the YouTube commentary of Thatcherite toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, who outlines his own call for an election in the clip embedded above. He says,

Andy Burnham wasn't elected at the last election as leader of his party, he wasn't the person that people went to the polls to vote for, and we do live in a presidential system, whether we like it or not.

This has me scratching my head. In the US, we do have a presidential system, in which a national electorate votes directly for a president. In the UK, the prime minister's name never appears on a national ballot, only the voters in the prime minister's home district vote for that candidate, who becnmes prime minister only via party machinery. In fact, Rees-Mogg's whole argument relies on the fact that the UK doesn't have a presidential system, notwithstanding he says they do. He goes on,

He didn't stand with other Labour candidates committed to deliver certain things, including not increasing income tax or VAT. He therefore isn't bound by those commitments, because he didn't offer those to voters. And this seems to me to be a major democratic deficit, to the point of being a coup.

But US presidents routinely run on one set of promises, only to break them -- In 1916, Wilson was re-elected on a slogan of "he kept us out of war", only to declare war on Germany a little over a month after his re-inauguration. Bush pere ran in 1988 on "read my lips, no new taxes!" only to raise taxes once he was in office. Was either case a deficit or a coup? He goes on,

[W]ithout a mandate, what authority does he have to say to Labour MPs, "I want you to go through this division lobby rather than that division lobby." It was a problem that Rishi Sunak faced as a conservative that MPs said, "Well, I don't want to do that. You weren't the one who was elected. I don't accept yhour authority."

This strikes me, though, as just a special case of the bigger problem:

Starmer’s exit means Britain is on track to have seven prime ministers in the ten years since the Brexit referendum of June 2016. It also means the country could see its fifth premier in roughly four years, a rate of leadership turnover never seen before in British politics.

For much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Britain was associated with durable governments and leaders who often remained in office for many years. Margaret Thatcher governed from 1979 until 1990, while Tony Blair led the country from 1997 until 2007.

Explanations are tepid and non-specific, Brexit, "economic stagnation", "overpromising and underdelivering". But it seems fairly plain that if elections aren't frequent enough, and they hinge on purely local issues when they occur, nobody is going to have a national mandate, and party leadership will be determined by the party machine. That works only as long as there's a national consensus that permits a uniparty, and that's going away in the UK.

General elections on a five-yeaer schedule are too far apart; the US two-year schedule for House elections, held at the same time as alternating presidential and senate elections, as well as state and local elections, appear to work much better. Right now, for any Labour prime minister to call an election, when the alternative is just to stay in power another three years, is a non-starter.

But if the UK were to call a constitutional convention now, a la the French republics, it would likely mean the introduction of things like Sharia law and heaven knows what else. I'm not sure if the UK has good options. It would be better off becoming the 52nd state.