The UK election reflects our flawed political institutions
A basic task of any political system is dealing with change. As new ideas and new realities spring up, politics must deal with them. The UK’s system is unusually bad at this.
In most of Europe, proportional representation means that people with new ideas can form new political parties. PR makes parliamentary seats proportional to votes, so even a small minority of voters can get legislators elected. Then, the legislators have a chance to take part in government formation – but as most governments are coalitions, they will have to do some bargaining first. Under PR, people with new ideas can gain power and have incentives to compromise.
The US, like Britain, has first past the post elections (FPTP). But before the main elections the parties hold primaries. A person with new ideas can enter the party primary and win against an incumbent. That’s not easy, but if they achieve it, then afterwards they will have the whole party apparatus on their side for the main election. This is how Trump won in 2016, and since then MAGA has taken over the Republican party. And if you win, you don’t need to form a coalition. Presidents and State governors have power on their own. Even in the Senate, a minority can block change, so there’s not much need to compromise with the other party. In this bottom-up FPTP system, people with new ideas can gain power but have no incentive to compromise.
The UK has first past the post, but parties have much more control over who becomes a parliamentary candidate. Think of Starmer’s ability to control party lists. The Tories introduced party primaries, but they have not so far broken truly free from toeing the party line (with the exception of the Truss-Sunak election in 2022, and even then their decision was swiftly reversed by events). You can only really get to be an MP by appealing to the party great and good, i.e., to old farts. It is a top-down FPTP system. As a result, people with new ideas can’t gain power and therefore have no incentive to compromise.
The Reform Party is in this situation right now. Reform has broken through in the polls and is now the third party. But because it isn’t focused on a single area, it may not even win a single seat. Instead, it will eat into the Tory vote, and in many areas this will predictably let the Labour candidate win. The strength of this right-wing party is likely to make the election outcome more left-wing, which is typical of how FPTP makes politics stupid.
Of course, the mainstream parties want to win votes too. But although their candidates have incentives to win over Reform voters, they were selected by the old farts, who have not had any new ideas since the 2000s at best, and who have chosen people in their image. The result is that they try hard to sound like Reform, but they don’t actually want to do anything for those voters. They talk the talk but they don’t walk the walk. This is exactly the situation Rishi Sunak is in. Calls to bring back National Service are the sort of thing he imagines those voters want to hear: “how do you do, fellow kids?” but for pensioners. If only it were 2005 again, and he could get on with reasonable politics!
This old-wine-in-new-bottles setup is not just a matter of style. It is reflected in how the party went about Brexit. After Leave won, Conservative politicians had to decide what the voters wanted instead of the status quo. From Boris Johnson down, they persuaded themselves of a mirage called Global Britain. Global Britain, you see, wasn’t insular or Little Englander or, in The Economist’s phrase, “closed”. Instead, it would embrace the wider horizons beyond Old Europe! We could draw immigration from a global talent pool, not just a European one, and have trade deals with partners round the world. It was an interpretation of Brexit that someone living in London could feel good about supporting. Well, the trade deals have mostly not materialized, but we certainly got the global immigration, and it turns out that most Brexit voters did not want immigration to triple.
How you think about this aspect of political systems will depend on how you think about the contemporary wave of nationalism, populism, concern about immigration, or whatever you call it, because today those are the relevant new political ideas.
If you think that they are just a temporary blip and the voters will return to sanity, then the UK approach is fine and we just need to hang tough. But that is delusional: these changes have already been going on for a generation. The Rassemblement Nationale in France, Reform in the UK, and even the AFD in Germany are not going to go the way of the Pirate Party.
If these changes in voter opinion are here for the long run, then you need to decide whether they should be reflected in policy. If not, then fair enough, but you are probably not a democrat and should listen to Bryan Caplan, who will tell you how crazy voters are. If they should, then you need to think about how far you are prepared to go, and perhaps about red lines.
My view is that even within Europe, the evidence is that indeed power helps to moderate the far right.
Giorgia Meloni is Prime Minister in Italy.
In France, Le Pen is a serious presidential candidate.
In Germany, the AFD has some regional mayors but is kept out of power by a “firewall” among the other parties.
In the UK, Reform only had success in European elections, and has just ten local councillors.
Those four are also roughly in decreasing order of acceptability. In particular, on the Ukraine issue, which for me is the reddest of lines and the hardest of limits (I have refugees staying with me):
Meloni has been a stalwart supporter of Ukraine since coming into power.
Le Pen has distanced herself from Putin, condemning “war crimes” in Bucha.
The AFD is Russian-influenced and is against sanctions on Russia.
Nigel Farage, although probably not as penetrated as the AFD, is also not sound on Ukraine.
It is not hard to see how the correspondence between power and moderation might come about. Parties which can win power need votes, and no matter how irrational voters may be, bloodsoaked foreign tyrants remain unpopular with them. Parties which can’t win power need money more — the FSB has that — and can survive on the support of cranks.
In short, what power small, shut-out parties do have, they exercise without responsibility. It is the prerogative of the sex worker throughout the ages.
The political system of the UK is resistant to change. It may also be brittle. The Tory party is drifting towards the waterfall of a historic defeat. The scale of that prospective defeat is partly due to its own failings, but also to its new rival on the right. If it shoots the waterfall, pressure for a merger or takeover by Reform, or Reform-aligned individuals, will be hard to avoid. One of our two major parties might then be in the hands of people who have had a long schooling in being excluded, and a long period of exile, during which our country’s enemies have surely been keen to become their friends.
If you liked this, you might enjoy my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.
I also write Lapwing, a more intimate newsletter about my family history.
We're likely to have the most ideologically homogeneous parliament in British political history after the next election. Keir Starmer, who has been ruthless in pulling the rug out from under his party's left flank, now presides over an extremely on-message battalion of Blairish milquetoasts. He will be elected Prime Minister with an unprecedented majority, and little dissent from his own overpacked backbenches. It is even possible that the leader of the opposition will be one Ed Davey, a man cut from similar cloth, leading to the farcical scenario of five years' of furious agreement across the dispatch boxes. Whichever Conservative MPs limp back in by tiny margins in hitherto bombproof Home Counties seats will be demoralised and directionless; it is clear that the party some time ago forgot what it stood for. This would leave a smattering of anti-establishment loudmouths - possibly even the unholy alliance of Corbyn, Galloway and Farage - as essentially the only credible (and I use that word loosely!) critics of the status quo.
Now, this is a weird position for me, because I myself am a limp floppy centrist who thinks Keir Starmer is a pretty good egg, really. But it is clear that my country is far from unanimously with me on this; Keir has a roughly net-zero approval rating, which is pretty good for a politician (they're unpopular by default) but still leaves plenty of space for criticism to his left and right (and many of those criticisms are well-founded). And those critics deserve far better representation than they're going to have.
I disagree with your assessment of UK's political system. Given that the UK doesn't have a formal constitution, the PM is basically an elected dictator. Also I don't see how the American primary system is desirable. A very small segment of the population (also the most ideological section) vote in the these elections. This drives the parties to be captured by the base and away from the median voter.
I would prefer a system like ranked choice in Australia. It enables new parties to come in. The electoral system should encourage competition between parties instead of trying to micromanage the internal dynamics of a party. I personally prefer a more corporatist parties with career politicians. But if you want to vote for a more "bottom up" party, that's your personal business.