\t\t\t\t\tOverview:<\/p>\n
Britain\u2019s revolving-door leadership era is fuelling fears the country is becoming increasingly difficult to govern<\/p>\n
\tRead: 3 min<\/p>\n
For years, under long-serving leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, the worst mid-term challenge a British prime minister might face was a rowdy jeering in parliament.<\/p>\n
Now, leaders in the country of the wartime slogan \u201ckeep calm and carry on\u201d regularly fear for their jobs, with the latest, Keir Starmer, facing intense pressure this week to quit too.<\/p>\n
Six people have held the post in a decade of turbulence driven by the wake of the global financial crisis, Brexit and COVID.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it because the PMs are no good, or because the office has become impossible, or because the situation\u2019s become impossible?\u201d mused historian Anthony Seldon, who has authored books on the last four prime ministers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe answer is: it\u2019s a mixture of all three of those,\u201d he said, judging the churn of leaders since 2016 \u201cwithout precedent\u201d.<\/p>\n
For voters, the situation borders on farce.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had so many prime ministers in the last few years, it\u2019s ridiculous,\u201d Londoner Claudio, who declined to give his surname, said Wednesday, calling Starmer\u2019s precarious hold on power \u201cunfortunate\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he\u2019s just not doing the right job anymore,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Seven-week term<\/p>\n
When David Cameron and his centre-right Conservatives ousted centre-left Labour in 2010, he became only the fifth prime minister in three decades.<\/p>\n
Cameron quit six years later, after calling and then losing the referendum on remaining in the European Union, heralding an era of rare political instability.<\/p>\n
There followed the ill-fated Downing Street tenures of Conservatives Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.<\/p>\n
Truss lasted just seven weeks \u2014 a term memorably compared in the media to the lifespan of a rotting lettuce.<\/p>\n
Starmer\u2019s 2024 victory, with a landslide number of parliamentary seats, was supposed to bookend that chaotic period.<\/p>\n
But the Labour leader \u2014 who won largely thanks to the splintering of votes on the right \u2014 now faces being forced out, less than two years on.<\/p>\n
Growing numbers of his own MPs and ministers have deserted him after a scandal over the appointment of an ambassador with links to the U.S. sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n
\u2018Ungovernable\u2019 Britain?<\/p>\n
Seldon argued that Starmer, Johnson and Truss \u201cnever learned how to do the job,\u201d while acknowledging that it \u201chas become more difficult\u201d in the age of social media, constant polling and modern \u201cinstant gratification\u201d culture.<\/p>\n
London School of Economics politics expert Tony Travers warned Britain now risks appearing \u201cungovernable,\u201d echoing a sentiment heard on political panel shows on TV.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt begins to look like countries that people in Britain used to make fun of in the past,\u201d he said, with Italy\u2019s recent decades of political dysfunction one example typically cited.<\/p>\n
Breaking the cycle, Travers said, would require working out \u201chow to stop senior MPs thinking that somehow changing their leader all the time is the solution to other problems\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose problems include not enough growth, high and rising prices, inflation, and the general sense that politics is now fragmenting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brexit impact<\/p>\n
Political analysts agree that meagre economic growth since the 2008 financial crisis has left successive governments with little to offer in the form of tax cuts or increased spending.<\/p>\n
\u201cVoters want politicians to make them richer. They cannot do that, but they pretend that they can,\u201d Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King\u2019s College London, said.<\/p>\n
Seldon said servicing the country\u2019s huge debt has also become \u201can enormous constraint\u201d as crises spook investors and make that more costly.<\/p>\n
With foreign wars fuelling global instability, plus COVID and persistent inflation, British leaders have also had to contend with the country\u2019s highly disruptive EU departure in 2020.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrexit had a big effect \u2026 on stability in U.K. politics in a number of ways,\u201d said another King\u2019s political scientist, Anand Menon.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt rearranged political affiliations,\u201d he said. \u201cIt undoubtedly played a role in encouraging populist thinking and populist political forces.\u201d<\/p>\n
Populist \u2018danger\u2019<\/p>\n
That in turn has strained Britain\u2019s traditional two-party political system, drawing scrutiny of the first-past-the-post voting system which does not reward smaller parties, reinforcing some voters\u2019 sense of being ignored.<\/p>\n
Far-right anti-immigration party Reform UK has emerged as a major challenger to Starmer\u2019s Labour and the leftist Green Party of England and Wales has also made electoral gains.<\/p>\n
In 2024 however, Labour won 63 per cent of the seats in the lower house of parliament despite winning just under 34 per cent of the national vote.<\/p>\n
For Menon, a government with such a huge majority being unable to govern is \u201cworrying\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a real danger that the longer this instability lasts, the more potential there is for us to end up with a populist government after the next election,\u201d due by 2029, he added.<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated Posts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Overview: Britain\u2019s revolving-door leadership era is fuelling fears the country is becoming increasingly difficult to govern Read: 3…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[3462,13,16772],"class_list":["post-36041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-afp","tag-britain","tag-politics-policy"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116572159001492352","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}