On 20 October, Liz Truss announced her resignation as leader of the British Conservative Party and prime minister. The day before, the latest cover image of the veteran political and economic magazine "The Economist" was Truss dressed in an ancient Roman robe, holding the British flag "Pizza Shield" in one hand and "Spaghetti Fork" in the other, with the headline "Welcome to Britaly". A pun satirizes the convergence of the two countries' political instability and policy change, and the feature article "Britain is about to complete its transformation to a "new Italy" even more makes this analogy and confession.
This sense of humor is certainly not accepted by many Italians. Italy's ambassador to Britain, Inigo Lambertini, angrily wrote to The Economist, denouncing the magazine for "the oldest stereotype". Unfortunately, if this media idea had taken place three months ago, Italy's stereotype victims might have been more adequate; But when Draghi's government was overthrown, right-wing coalitions replaced him, and a new far-right prime minister took office, the analogy became more persuasive.
On October 20, 2022 local time, British Prime Minister Truss delivered a speech at 10 Downing Street in central London, announcing his resignation.
Since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, the British political situation has been unstable, and 10 Downing Street has entered the "short-term rental" mode, and has gone through five prime ministers in six years: Cameron, Theresa May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, of which Truss's 45-day short term is the most dramatic. This makes people wonder: Why did the British parliamentary system, once the "mother of parliament" and contribute superb political wisdom to the world, reach the point of sympathy with Italy? Six years and five prime ministers, is it the onset of the lesion, or the embodiment of the error correction mechanism? Some of these lessons may be worth learning from bystanders.
Fanaticism alone is overwhelmed
Looking back at the succession of prime ministers from Johnson to Sunak, especially the turmoil surrounding Truss, perhaps the first lesson to be drawn is that in the face of the current complex situation in the world, the ideological fanaticism that has not been transformed is not an antidote and is doomed to be overwhelmed.
When Johnson was embattled, the competition for succession didn't have much suspense. Although as many as eight people initially competed, it eventually narrowed to a "two-line struggle", one is the moderates represented by Sunak, who advocate appropriate expansion of social spending while observing fiscal discipline, and the other is the hardliners, represented by Truss, who advocate a return to the small-government model of deep tax cuts and spending cuts favored by the Conservative Party, with Thatcher as a guide. In the lengthy race, while Sunak led the other candidates most of the time, many observers had predicted that once the final party vote was reached, Terass, the "grassroots darling" who was more favored by the Conservative Party's grassroots die-hards, had a better chance of winning, and the final result confirmed this prediction.
After Truss came to power, she couldn't wait to put her campaign platform into practice, which later became the infamous "mini-budget", which tried to drive economic growth with tax cuts during the downturn, undoubtedly reflecting the typical idea of "trickle-down economics". Whether the latter can be effectively established in economics is still a matter of contention. But the more realistic problem is that the "mini-budget" tax cut package "careless", the 45 billion pound "largest tax cut in half a century" (especially for the wealthy) exacerbated the fiscal hole, but failed to come up with a convincing financing plan, the market did not buy it, resulting in a disastrous situation of "three kills of stocks and foreign exchange debts", and also confirmed Sunak's previous statement in the campaign debate that "borrowing money to get rid of inflation is a fairy tale". It can be said that Truss's short 45 days in power now seem more like an episode, using a perfect negative example to verify Sunak's election platform and pave the way for the latter's eventual rise to power.
But it is worth noting that before the final defeat is certain, Truss tried to use a set of "political polarization" discourse to mobilize, artificially dividing the two camps of "growth" and "anti-growth", and dismissing all opposition voices as "anti-growth coalition", which in her view includes the Labour Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Scottish National Party, trade unions, interest groups, political commentators, anti-Brexit activists, radical environmental groups, etc. Even those within the Conservative Party who disagree with her are included, which can be said to be "anti" and self-only. This polarized thinking of "good and evil" in a sense continues the populist model of Europe and the United States in recent years (especially since Brexit), but it turns "good people vs. corrupt elites" upside down and turns them into "pro-growth conservative elites vs anti-growth hodgepodge".
This polarized thinking is not a personal specialty of Truss, and in fact it is a pattern shared by a significant number of hardline Conservatives. Home Secretary Suella Braverman, one of the party's representatives of Euroscepticism, also accused Labour, the Liberal Democratic Party and those "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati" (meaning leftists, vegetarians and environmentalists more broadly) of complicity in a "chaotic alliance" and "chaotic alliance" and "chaotic alliance" and "tofu-eating wokerati" (meaning leftists, vegetarians and environmentalists more broadly) in a speech to parliament on October 18. Anti-Growth Alliance". Although her resignation became the last straw that broke the Truss government, it is not difficult to see that despite the power struggle, Truss is not alone in this process of political polarization.
What is clear is that Truss's ambition to imitate former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in all aspects from cabinet member to prime minister, large-scale tax cuts are the culmination. But it was also clear that she was facing a completely different era than Thatcher. The latter took over the mess left by the previous Labour Party, opposed Keynesianism and started a neoliberal turn marked by massive privatization and spending contraction; But forty years later, the UK economy is facing a triple blow of the coronavirus pandemic, war and inflation, and the massive measures to support employment and credit during the epidemic are also being developed by the Conservative government, and Truss does not reject the involvement of national capital in many sectors (especially energy), and even an important part of the "mini-budget" is to spend £130 billion over two years to subsidize the energy costs of people and businesses suffering from high inflation and protect them from market volatility. It can be said that although the shadow of Thatcher can be vaguely seen in the tax cuts, on the deeper structural issues, Truss is completely unable to follow suit.
Although the inner level is powerless to follow suit, the external appearance is just as aggressive. Like Thatcher, Truss was deeply hostile to the trade union movement. Her 2012 pamphlet, Britannia Unchained, which she co-authored, called the British "among the worst idlers in the world" (after sparking controversy, she absolved herself of responsibility and said that it came from other co-authors and had nothing to do with herself); Before becoming prime minister, she was also exposed in private conversations that disdainfully said that British workers lacked the "skills and diligence" of foreign workers and should "work more", which was interpreted as mocking British workers for being "lazy"; In the campaign debate against the backdrop of high inflation, she indifferently said that people should not rely on the government for everything. Thatcher was not afraid to use force to suppress the trade union movement, and history has not given Truss the same opportunity to show similar boldness.
Intriguingly, when Truss first came to power, public opinion turned up a passionate speech she gave at the Liberal Democrats (a member of what she later called the "Anti-Growth Alliance"). The 19-year-old future prime minister, who at the time appeared to be a member of the radical left, called for the abolition of the monarchy because "we don't believe that people are born to rule". After 30 years, Truss turned around and became the most popular figure in the Conservative Party at the grassroots level. She certainly has the right to "feel that today is what was wrong" (an experience she later called a mistake that could be compared to young people's drug use), but it seems that she has gone to the other extreme on this path of right and wrong, confronting today's "anti-growth coalition" with the same hardness as the call for the abolition of the monarchy.
On October 14, 2022 local time, British Prime Minister Truss answered questions at a press conference at 10 Downing Street after firing former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwassey Kwarten.
There is a "famous saying" in the market: "If a person is not a leftist at the age of 20, he has no conscience; At the age of 30, if you are still leftist, you have no brain" (this quote has been derived in various variants, plus the mouths of famous people such as Burke, Winkill, Russell, Quizot, Clemenceau and other famous people, but the real source is unknown, and the closest version currently available is that the French literati Jules Claretie claimed to be Burke in The History of the Revolution 1870-1871, but the latter does not contain this sentence in his writings). It is meant to say that as people grow older and more experienced, they should become "deradicalized" and return to pragmatic and conservative middle rationality, but the simple "left/non-left" distinction does not cover the situation where some people not only change their minds, but also become "reverse radicalized" and go further and further in the opposite direction. He/she has a very different proposition on the surface, but the inner thinking pattern is still the same, even more stubborn.
Symbolized by the lack of back-ended tax cuts, Truss's "New Deal" became a crazy move in pursuit of extreme liberalization in the eyes of the outside world. Robert Halfon, chairman of the House of Commons Education Committee, accused the Truss government of being a "libertarian jihadist" who treated the country as a guinea pig in a laboratory for what he loved as a "super-free market experiment." This sneer points to the fundamental character behind this chaos that lacks pragmatic rationality and is driven entirely by ideological fanaticism—although incompatible with fundamentalist religious "jihad," the Truss government's fanaticism mirrors its own enemies.
Columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote in the New York Times that from Moscow to Tehran, liberal challengers are in danger. In his view, in contrast to Fukuyama's optimistic assertion of the "end of history" in 1989, the liberal order is showing clear signs of internal decline. But the thirst for alternatives is not enough to make these alternatives a reality, and on the contrary, other passable roads are fast leading to darkness. But one dimension he fails to mention is that the turmoil in British politics, epitomized by Truss, shows that fundamentalist liberalism is also a dead end under the pressure of a historic crisis, and even leads to darkness at a faster speed.
Conservative self-correcting and stop-loss operations
The successive prime ministers' marquee changes have made the "1922 Committee" within the Conservative Party, an otherwise unpopular knowledge point, now known to everyone. As a self-correcting power check and balance mechanism within the Conservative Party, it also highlights its reference significance.
The institutional significance represented by the 1922 Committee is the separation of governing power and supervisory power. The committee is composed entirely of so-called "backbenchers" (ordinary members who are not members of the cabinet) and is responsible for the vote of confidence and the election of party leaders. According to the procedure, a vote of confidence within the party can be initiated when 15% of incumbent Conservative MPs (54 according to the current number of seats) submit a letter of no confidence against the party leader to the 1922 committee. This means that the internal institutional design of the top figures representing the Conservative Party is determined by ordinary MPs and ordinary party members, not by party leaders and their small circles – although in practice they are not immune to the influence of the party leadership, especially the party whip.
In principle, the 1922 Commission should not initiate a vote of confidence within the year of the new Prime Minister's term in office. Therefore, if Truss does not go, theoretically she can still resist for another ten and a half months in the prime ministership. However, the rules are not set in stone, and the 1922 Commission can amend the rules to break the one-year limit if it deems it necessary, which means that a public defection by more than half of the Conservative MPs (at least 179) may be required. And according to the rate of hearts and minds lost by Truss after the announcement of the "mini-budget", it may take some time to reach this threshold, but it is not far off. It was precisely because of this that Truss claimed to persevere like a "fighter" the day before, and dramatically announced his resignation the next day to avoid a more embarrassing and destructive situation.
After Truss's resignation, there was a high degree of consensus within the Conservative Party that the current chaos must end as soon as possible, and the party could not afford the lengthy process of multiple rounds of voting by MPs and finally leaving the vote to the grassroots members as in the last party leadership election. As a result, the rules have been temporarily changed again: candidates must have at least 100 nominations from their party by 2pm on October 24 to be eligible to run, and the Conservatives currently have 357 MPs, which means that only a maximum of three candidates can be nominated, and the campaign space has been greatly reduced.
There are no substantive rules as to why it is 100 MPs, not 80 and not 120, and it is largely the result of temporary trade-offs, but in this case, it seems to be a temporary reform measure aimed at former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and House Majority Leader Penny Mordaunt. In particular, the latter was originally in a good position in Johnson's succession battle, a strong contender second only to Sunak, until the fifth round of voting was overtaken by Truss, and after Truss announced his resignation, Mordaunt was not optimistic, initially only more than thirty members of his party publicly supported, but his team tried their best to win support, just because of the difference of less than 10 votes, forced to announce their withdrawal from the election before the window closed, so that Sunak won without a fight, and he himself became the biggest victim of this "rush" reform.
On December 11, 2019 local time, Benvolit, United Kingdom, British Prime Minister Johnson stood next to the sign "Finish Brexit" with a hammer.
The Conservative Party's self-correction and stop-loss operation this time is undoubtedly successful, but it is undeniable that it is also mixed with many self-interested considerations: at the party level, since Johnson's victory in the parliamentary elections, the Conservative Party has experienced a serious decline in the public opinion index after the "partygate" turmoil. Truss's backtracking shattered voters' original perception that the Conservative Party is good at economics. According to a survey released by YouGov at the end of September, if a general election were held immediately, Labour would have won 54 per cent of the vote and the Conservatives would have won only 21 per cent, a gap of 33 percentage points, the largest lead not seen in British politics since the late 1990s. Therefore, it is of self-evident importance for the Conservatives to maintain their position as soon as possible and to support the new government to get on the right track.
On a personal level, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson hinted at one day returning to center stage before being forced out of office. Truss's resignation did provide such an opportunity, so he became the biggest obstacle Sunak faced before coming to power. But Johnson's dramatic exit from the race with claims to have won enough nominations may be the perfect time to see that now is not the best time for him to make a comeback: first, the intractable situation of inflation and war in the United Kingdom poses a high-risk challenge to any prime minister; Second, he still faces parliamentary investigation because of the "party door", and if he is forced to step down again in the future, the blow to his political career may be fatal; Third, his support among grassroots party members is higher than Sunak's, but he is questioned among parliamentarians, and if he is forced out of the election in order to win the election and drags the contest into the voting stage of party members, the "evil show" is bound to cause more divisions in the Conservative Party. Therefore, he was happy to play the "high style and brightness of the old comrades" and temporarily gave up the opportunity to Sunak, and at the same time completed the Conservative Party's wave of self-correction operations.
The trilemma faced by "changing generals halfway"
The Conservative Party's ability to correct itself is not naturally self-consistent, and the opposite shadow is the problem of underrepresentation in democratic institutions.
The frequent changes in the British government in recent years have led ideological competitors to take the opportunity to advocate the "theory of democratic weakness" and "democratic impotence", such as declaring that "Britain's leadership crisis is the epitome of the dysfunction of the entire Western democratic system", "British political turmoil has exposed ... The failure of government to govern the state and society. This has also made the British people increasingly disillusioned with their own democratic system. Of course, this argument has the need for ideological propaganda warfare, but it is not without emphasis. After all, obtaining resources from enemies that contribute to one's own strength is part of a truly open society.
The battle for the leadership of the Conservative Party after Johnson's ouster epitomizes this crisis of underrepresentation: contenders need to gain the support of at least 20 MPs from their own party, and then eliminate the bottom of the ranking in multiple rounds of MPs until finally submitting two candidates to the 170,000 party members to vote. According to the BBC, 82.6% of Conservative Party members voted in the end, with Truss receiving 81,326 votes and Sunak receiving 60,399 votes. In other words, it is the Conservative Party members, who make up only 0.3% of the country's population, who are qualified to decide who will lead the country, and it is a mere 20,000 of them who will decide the winner.
On October 26, 2022 local time, London, UK, British Prime Minister Sunak and Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt held his first cabinet meeting since taking office.
A presidential or parliamentary election in a pluralistic democracy is equivalent to a political pact: different parties put forward their own candidates and platforms, and compete with voters to promise them a chance to govern. The voter decides the winner by his vote, which also means signing a short-term contract with the winner to establish a rule-ruled relationship. Theoretically, in free and fair elections, voters as a whole have an obligation to obey the winning party during their statutory term, and the latter are equally obliged to do their utmost to deliver on their electoral promises. The problem, however, is that if a party wins votes with specific leaders and promises, but after coming to power, the leadership to the platform changes frequently, and there is a considerable distance or even a large difference from the promises made during the election campaign, then the validity of this political contract after depletion becomes a questionable question.
That is why, although according to the Dissolution and Convocation of Parliament Act 2022: the next general election in the UK will be held by January 2025 at the latest, the opposition camp strongly calls for an early general election, because according to the current polls, if the early election is held, the Conservative Party will definitely lose. But the Conservatives also see this and are reluctant to cede power anyway. When Sunak took office, he also made it clear that no early general election would be held. After all, the victory in the 2019 general election laid a strong legitimacy framework for the Conservative Party, and once the ruling position is established, no matter how many times the party leader changes and no matter how the polls change, from a legal point of view, the Conservative Party can still rely on only 0.3% of the total voters to determine the general policy and the direction of the country's progress, but the lack of representation under this democratic mechanism and the legitimate loss of legitimacy are ultimately an unavoidable problem.
As a result, the "mid-way change of generals" under the British-style parliamentary sovereignty system faces a trilemma: taking the "elite line" is based on the party's high-level planning, which is easy to degenerate into backroom politics; Taking the "party line" is based on the voting of grassroots party members, which is easy to amplify the voice of extreme factions; Taking the "democratic line" is based on the vote of the entire electorate, and risks destabilizing the conventional political framework. For now, this seems like an unsolvable question. However, like many political problems, this does not necessarily have a theoretical solution a priori, and it can only be solved step by step in practice.
Britain and Europe "decoupled" and bet on the national fortunes of Great Britain
Many commentators (especially in continental media) have pointed out that while the recent chaos has largely revolved around Truss, the bane was already planted at the time of Brexit. Five prime ministers in six years are probably unexpected by Brexiteers who were obsessed with "taking back control".
Although it is not old and dead, Brexit is tantamount to a traumatic "divorce" or "decoupling" for both the UK and Europe. For different power entities, whether "decoupling" is a bargain depends largely on who occupies a more advantageous position in the dynamic mechanism: although different entities usually have mutual needs, linking together can better play their respective comparative advantages; But for the relatively strong side of the relationship, "decoupling" means getting rid of constraints, burdens and threats, while for the relatively weak party, "decoupling" means missing more free riding opportunities. In the current "decoupling" situation between China and the United States, which has attracted much attention (even if it has not taken shape), this pattern can also be seen.
How each party assesses their strength, role, and potential in the relationship is then the crux of the matter. Before Brexit, the UK saw the EU as a constraint and even a threat, ambitiously envisioning a "globalized Britain" or a "Britain free from bondage" (to borrow the title of a Conservative co-author), but the post-Brexit facts have proved that the UK needs the EU, at least in the economic sphere, much more than the EU needs Britain. In the inflation crisis, the UK's economic performance is the worst in the G7. In other words, in the balance of strong and weak forces around "decoupling", the United Kingdom (at least Brexiteer politicians) believes that it is in a strong position, and the re-emergence of great powers is in sight, but the subsequent chain reaction far exceeds the expected in advance, exposing the weaknesses in reality.
On October 28, 2022 local time, Northern Ireland, England, workers hang a painting by artist Ciaran Gallagher, depicting Rishi Sunak desperately surviving in shark-lined waters on a dinghy called the "Titanic", while Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt prepare to jump into the sea. The mural was unveiled after Sunak won the election to be the next prime minister of the Conservative Party.
Britain's historical experience in regulating the "continental balance of power" and playing the role of "offshore balancing hand" has been so successful that it still fantasizes about "yesterday's reappearance" in a completely different era and falls into the trap of path dependence. When the political elite was originally mostly inclined to remain in the EU, the call voters made decisions under asymmetrical and inaccurate information conditions (such as the famous agitation rhetoric that "Brexit can save £350 million a week for the country's health care system"), which reflects the internal pressure of the democratic era, but objectively also creates an uncertain prospect of gambling on the country in order to satisfy the obsession of "decoupling".
The biggest pain point beyond expectations is not the negative economic impact caused by the disruption of the movement of people and capital, the fact that the negotiations on bilateral free trade agreements with other countries are far less fruitful than expected, nor the inability to participate in coordinated actions on a Europe-wide scale against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic or high inflation, but the iconic "continental balance" pattern that historically reflects British political strategy, which has now been largely reversed: from then on, the UK has been unable to cooperate within the EU framework to maximize its own interests. The EU as a whole can only be faced as an outsider; What's more, not only is it difficult for Britain to divide and disintegrate continental European countries as it did in the 19th century, but in turn, Scotland and Northern Ireland are under the gravitational pull of the giant political entity of the European Union, showing a greater centrifugal force. Both regions, which by a significant margin in the 2016 referendum to leave the EU (55.78% in Northern Ireland and 62% in Scotland), were forcibly dragged away. The Scottish independence movement, which had been at a low ebb after the 2014 referendum, is now back in the limelight, with the Scottish National Party stepping up its push for a "second referendum". The Northern Ireland Protocol, which had ended the most difficult part of the Anglo-EU negotiations, became a wedge into the United Kingdom, followed by a historic victory of the separatist Sinn Féin in the local elections in Northern Ireland, and a boycott of the Northern Ireland Protocol by the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party, which caused a political shutdown, and Northern Ireland faced a new general election. Under such pressure, as the country that has made the greatest contribution to modern international law, the United Kingdom has not hesitated to publicly destroy international agreements and try to amend the Northern Ireland Protocol by means of unilateral legislation. Today, the EU has in turn become the active party in regulating the balance of power within the United Kingdom, and how much goodwill it is willing to release and how many concessions it is willing to make determines the stability of Britain's "national foundation" in the future.