alt Hacker NewsCan someone in the UK explained how the country has fared with multiple PMs since Borris Johnson? My read as an outsider is it would take another brexit exit (a singular, definable political question that can cleanly classified in a binary label) to create a unifier but I also have no idea what that could be (ai, immigration, climate change, etc are too load bearing and multifaceted to see such a clean binary moment).
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Brexit divided and continues to cause paralysis. Soft, hard, or no-deal? Simplistic binary vote specified no mechanism, destination, or future relationship. Leave and remain have completely incompatible visions for post-Brexit Britain.
Along with (IMHO) a polycrisis of far-right immigration agitation, post-COVID stagnation, high energy costs, NHS/social care strain, housing/planning hell, lack of infrastructure investment.
We're not in a great place and, to your point, there is no clear way out.
It’s very difficult for anyone person to say because we all see our slice.
If you got an education in an area that’s in demand and you are a good communicator, made sensible choices and were lucky to not have any major misfortune hit you directly then more than likely you have a pretty nice life that has been getting better and unaffected but the political circus.
If you were unlucky with your starting point in life, didn’t get an education in an in demand area, or did but really struggle to communicate, or got hit by some bad luck then life could feel very stalled at the moment and frustrating.
There’s a lot of negative news around the UK at the moment and I think a lot of it is taking real aspects of life here and massively blowing it up or extrapolating across the whole country. I suspect by a certain political party funding negative news on a mass scale.
Crime is up in some places, but still generally not very high. Pot holes are up in many areas, but roads are still good in the main. Some industries are declining but even within things like manufacturing there is a lot of growth and jobs.
It’s the fifth largest economy in the world and most things works pretty well. So swings and roundabouts.
The UK has no constitutional method to remove a PM.
The USA does have a constitutional method to remove a President.
Nevertheless, in living memory all Presidents have survived their impeachments. Whereas (with the exceptions of Major, Brown, and Sunak) all UK Primes Minister have been removed while in office.
It makes an interesting study in the effectiveness of a written and inflexible constitution.
It's the natural state of the UK political system. The PM has a (figurative) gun on his head constantly, and has to fight and defend his actions in parliament almost every day of the week. Keeps him on his toes and ensures that he gets replaced if things go down.
The stability of the US presidency comes at a cost. It allowed a senile president to stay in office when it was clear to everyone that he was incapable of assuming his function. Or with the current presidency, it enables a president to renege on pretty much all of his electoral program with impunity. Both would have been replaced 6 months into their term in the UK.
Not optimistic.
Boris actually seemed to be a charismatic leader in the same class as Blair and Thatcher but seems to have been rather morally flawed which ended up bringing about his downfall.
The other leaders have been uninspriring second raters - Andy Burnham himself is a Gordon Brown B-side fully compromised by PFI but perhaps he's grown via his mayorship.
Seems now to have some of the common touch of Boris which is positive.
Britain itself is quite a grey and timid place, challenged by both fear and awe of it's great history and the complex consequences of its impact on the world.
It's neither the diverse heaven the left would tell you, staggering unfairly under the weight of brexit foisted on an unwitting populace by the big bad press barons, or the front line of the fight against Islam and a liberal-triggered decline into a violent dystopia that our more swivel-eyed compatriots on the right would have you believe.
However there are some insights to be gained by listening to all those voices about it's current state and potential - but the ensuing noise represents the confusion and disagreement that is holding us back from moving into the light with purpose.
Brexit has been massively divisive, and was the beginning of the train of short-term PMs we've had over the last 10 years. I don't see how another issue like that would (or could) serve as a unifier.
There are various factors at play, some of which are by no means unique to the UK like the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. But IMO one aspect which is somewhat UK-specific is the first past the post system, which doesn't really work that well in situations where there are more than two parties seriously challenging for power. Starmer won in a "landslide" when you look at seats gained, but actually a lot of that was due to the right wing vote being split between the Tories and Reform. And on the other side you have left or centre-left parties like the Greens and Lib Dems which are now threatening to split the left wing vote. It's a pretty nonsensical and undemocratic system and I do think it plays a large part in the fact that no government ever seems very safe, even when they get a large surplus of seats in Parliament.
(I am not a UK citizen but I have lived here for years.)
Why do you think changing PM's is a bad thing?
The PM is selected from the party that has the majority in Parliament (typically the party leader), so if the PM changes without a national vote, it's still a MP from the majority party.
Multiple PMs since Cameron. In fact the last PM to win a GE and see out a whole term was Tony Blair. (Cameron's first term was a coalition - even in the midst of a deeply unpopular PM and a financial crises he failed to win a parliamentary majority).
The instability means paralysis. No-one believes any policy will last the 5 years+ it needs to be implemented, so very little happens.
Brexit hardly caused unity. It split the country almost exactly down the middle. And nobody on either side seems happy with the result.
The chaos arguably starts with the Coalition and Cameron, and the Brexit vote and tuition fees reversal.
IMHO it comes down to the Housing Theory of Everything [1].
The UK doesn't produce anything anymore. The best returns on investment aren't in productive output. They're in hoarding land. This is exacerbated by an anachronistic system whereby artistocrats are still significant landowners (eg the Duke of Westminster). The UK badly needs land reform but the system is designed to protect landowners through the House of Lords. Up until only fairly recently, the House of Lords still had hereditary peers.
This relaly started in Thatcher's time but was made significantly worse in the aftermath of 2008. The UK government chose to bail out the banks at the expensive of taxpayers and then pay for it by crippling the economy with 15+ years of austerity measures.
So there's been a revolving door of British PMs because literally none of them have been interested in addressing these core issues. What we really need is another Oliver Cromwell.
[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6571818
The UK is fine, honestly.
The Tory saga was mostly caused by Brexit and poor handling of Covid. Theresa May was ousted by Boris Johnson over Brexit, Johnson was ousted for hosting parties at number 10, whilst Covid lockdowns were in-place, and poor party management (ironically). Liz Truss tanked the UK bond market by thinking she could present an unfunded budget full of tax cuts for the rich, she didn't last as long as a lettuce. Rishi Sunak only had a short time before the next election, so didn't really get a chance to bed in, but he was seen to be grossly out-of-touch.
Now we're into the Labour saga: Kier Starmer seemed to actually be doing OK, but he didn't tell anybody about it. Then had a number of U-turns that made him look weak to the country and especially his back-benchers. He was a decent technocrat, but it's clear someone like that can't exist in this modern fast-comms world. The online vitriol against him was unbelievably disproportionate to his performance.
Now we have Andy Burnham, who seems to know how to flood-the-zone (Trump style) without being a bigoted, corrupt, criminal, paedophile. So his communications seem to be carrying a honeymoon period, for now. But the press in the Uk is mostly right-wing biased, so you can expect the attacks to start soon.
In many ways you could argue all of those prime ministers deserved to go and it actually shows 'The UK' will get rid of you if it's not working. They weren't good enough and our main parties have mechanisms to get rid of you if it's not working out.
Outside of that, the UK's biggest problem is its debt and the fact we left the EU. Which is tightening the budget and making it difficult for any government to put money into things that are visible to the average voter. This makes governing especially hard right now.
Oh, and the clear targeted propaganda from hard right-wing organisations, Elon Musk, Russia, and Iran are clearly trying to destabalise the UK on the beloved free-speech platforms of America. It's absolute poison day-in, day-out. And unfortunately, some people fall for it, and end up voting for assets like Nigel Farage. But that isn't real life. Or, at least, the beloved free-speech platforms of America don't represent the the UK in any true form.
Brexit was not a unifier. Just the opposite.
The UK's real issue is that it is a corrupt hollowed-out plutocracy run for the benefit of corporations and privileged opportunists, many of whom live abroad. They control the media, they buy politicians, they own much of the land and property market, and key companies and resources, and they set the narrative.
They have no ethics beyond power and money, and their signature attitude is contempt for voters.
The result is PR politics where major issues are ignored - climate catastrophe, the dire state of many utilities, lack of investment, lack of national strategy - and the media concentrate on fear-mongering and distractions, including racism (esp. Brexit and Islamophobia), punching down at the weak, and aggressively disproportionate punishment of very mild public dissent.
A series of comically incompetent and personally grotesque figurehead prime ministers - who can be talked up on installation and trashed when minor release is needed - is just another of the distractions. It simultaneously enrages the population, forces them into apathy (because nothing fundamental can ever change), and reassures the country's owners that money and resources can keep being extracted while the government "can't afford" more spending on healthcare, education, and critical infrastructure.
If you're thinking "That sounds like the US" - yes, it does, and that's not a coincidence.
I'm not an UK citizen but as someone who lived in the UK for a while, my assessment would be that the issues that we're seeing in the UK (low trust in the politicians, ineffective of the government to address real issues, economic stagnation, etc) are actually not unique to the UK. We're seeing similar trends in The Netherlands, Germany and the Nordic countries.
If I had to take a guess, I would say that the western European political systems seems to work well in a homogenous population where you mostly need "alignment" (e.g between companies and labour unions) but seems seems to struggle with major reforms. Too many stakeholders, too many vetos and too many processes.
To give an concrete example. The Netherlands has a severe housing crisis. Despite being a relatively rich country it's not uncommon for people (sometimes even couples) to live with their parents untill they're well in their 30ies.
Yet a single guy was able to block the building of almost a hundred houses on the chance that there might be some rare(?) frogs living at the building site. While I'm all for nature conservation, surely the needs of a hundred families should go above the concerns of some hypothetical frogs.
Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.