Britain’s Unelected Government

By pursuing radical new policies, Liz Truss is adopting a manifesto for which she does not have an electoral mandate.

A strange thing about British democracy is how many prime ministers are not elected in, well, an election. The British electoral system gives power to whichever party receives the most seats in parliament, and whoever is leader of that party then becomes prime minister.

If, during an electoral term, the party decides to oust its leader or that leader resigns, then they can elect another leader. That member of parliament then becomes prime minister. We saw this when Tony Blair resigned and Gordon Brown became prime minister without having stood in a general election. When this happened, many Conservative politicians, in particular Boris Johnson, were very vocal arguing that Brown should call an election to receive a mandate from the people, not just from his party.

“The extraordinary thing is that it looks as though he will now be in 10 Downing Street for three years, and without a mandate from the British people. No one elected Gordon Brown as Prime Minister…” (Boris Johnson on Gordon Brown, 2007)

Since then, the Conservative party has given the country four prime ministers in six years. Theresa May became prime minister through an internal party vote, then called an election to win a (reduced) mandate from the people. Then Boris Johnson, he who was so critical of Brown becoming prime minister without winning an election, became prime minister without winning an election. Like May, he called an election, and won a significant majority. He used that majority to argue that he had a mandate to carry out some radical policies, and when it came time for his party to oust him, he suggested that it was ‘eccentric’ for the party to remove a leader with such a huge mandate.

He was, of course, mistaken about this. The mandate was for his party, not for him. He may have been leading that party in the election, but in the UK we do not elect prime ministers as Americans elect Presidents.

In a relatively recent change, the Conservative party decided the final leadership vote would be made by the party’s members. These are a self-selecting group of people who pay £25 to become a member. Anyone can become a member of the party, and in doing so they recently put themselves in the position of deciding who the next prime minister would be.

According to a university research project, “63% of Conservative Party members are male, 40% are over 65, 6% aged 18–24, 80% say they are in the three highest economic and social groups by wealth and education, and over 90% identify as white British.” They are in no way representative of the wider population.

In fact, by my own calculation, 0.12% of the population voted for Liz Truss to become prime minister; that is 57% of the votes cast by 82.6% of a self-appointed electorate representing 0.26% of the population; or 81,326 votes from a pool of 172,437 voters, out of a population of 67,440,000.

An argument used by previous Conservative leaders to justify their place in Downing Street despite not having been put there through an election was precisely that the country had voted for their party and for its manifesto, and who the party made leader was somewhat immaterial. This is technically correct.

Had Liz Truss taken over as leader and continued to execute the manifesto on which the party, under Johnson, was last elected, this would all be in keeping with the way this rather odd system is interpreted, and therefore reasonable, within its own context.

However, Liz Truss has made clear from the outset that she intends to pursue a very radical set of policies, and her Chancellor has kicked this off with vigour. In a matter of days they have turned the economy upside down, seeing the pound crash, interest rates shoot up, and implementing policies that are perceived as radically right wing. All of this would be ok, democratically speaking, if the country had just elected her on a manifesto to do just this. We’d only have ourselves to blame.

But in amongst all the noise being caused by her radical language and policies, nobody seems to be pointing out that she and Kwarteng have absolutely no mandate to do this. She is taking huge risks with the economy, borrowing vast amounts of money, and will no doubt cause a lot of people to lose their jobs, their homes, and their livelihoods. When Truss’s role-model, Margaret Thatcher did this, she was acting on a manifesto that had won a substantial mandate from the people in a general election. Truss has not even stood in a general election.

In openly reversing what Johnson’s government did and pursuing an economic and social policy that is radically different to his, she has relinquished her claim to a mandate. If she wanted to gain a mandate to undo much of Johnson’s policies and pursue a new policy agenda, she should have called an election first. Unless someone finds a way to stop her, she has found herself gifted two and a half years of almost unlimited power to play out a massive economic and social experiment that nobody has asked for.

The only people who can stop her are her own party. They face some uncomfortable truths. Firstly, that most of them were elected by voters wanting something else, not this. Secondly, that even if all of the economists, financiers, and experts turn out to be wrong and her policies do miraculously lead to a golden era of growth, that will not happen within two years, in time for the ensuing chaos to be justified in the next election.

Consequently, the Conservative party faces an election in which it is very likely the British economy will be in shreds and they will be unable to blame the unions or Russia. Had they sat tight and done nothing noticeable, these other forces could have been blamed for a failing economy, but now Truss has owned this, and Kwarteng has made clear where any blame will lie, they will be judged harshly by the electorate.

Truss wants to be Thatcherite but she forgets that Thatcher already did Thatcherism. All the major changes, and any benefits, have been made. What Truss is doing now risks being radicalism for the sake of being radical. She wanted to become prime minister just because she was ambitious, not because she has any deep belief driving her politics. She has flip-flopped from Liberal Democrat to Conservative, Remainer to Brexiteer, and is now trying to model herself on a former prime minister who was substantially more intelligent, capable, and genuinely ideological than she is.

When everyone says you’re wrong but you continue to believe in your vision and actions, you are either a genius or a narcissistic fool, and she has already shown many times in her career that she is not a genius.