A very British policy – Opinion

When left-wing Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labor Party in 2015, many commentators mentioned Mullins’ book as a viable account of what could happen. In fact, in 2019 the conspiracy against Corbyn intensified, causing him to resign and Keir Starmer to take over as leader of the opposition.

After years of turmoil under Conservative rule in Britain, Labor won the 2024 election and Starmer became prime minister. Since then, Labor has struggled with a series of poll defeats. This can partly be attributed to Keir Starmer’s failure to implement the changes he promised. With the rise of the far right, led by Nigel Farage, the Labor government adopted a “reactionary” stance, relying on populist slogans rather than focusing on the fundamental issues the British people elected them to address.

Unlike Mullins’ “fictional reality” book, the plot against Starmer comes from within his party. This is a repeat of what happened from 2017 to 2024.

When David Cameron resigned as Prime Minister in 2016, the Conservative Party elected Theresa May. Then, in 2019, she had to resign and the party elected Boris Johnson again. The majority of the British population were not very happy about being governed by Prime Ministers they had not chosen in a general election. May and Johnson came to power on the votes of a few thousand party members, not the public.

Realizing this, Johnson called a snap election, winning a big victory that gave him a public mandate. But again, as his government’s problems – mainly due to his behavior – intensified, Johnson resigned in 2022.

Following this chapter, members of the Conservative Party chose Liz Truss to replace him as leader and Prime Minister. It was a disaster and his “emergency budget” sent the British economy into a tailspin. She only stayed there for six weeks and had to withdraw. Party members voted to have Rishi Sunak as leader and prime minister until he lost the general election that brought Labor and Starmer to power.

If Labor pushes Starmer to resign, then he will be replaced by a new leader elected by party members and not the British people as a whole. A new prime minister will be the seventh leader in a decade, when there were only supposed to be two since elections are held every five years. Moreover, both would have been duly elected by the British people rather than a select number of party members.

Local elections in England and regional parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales have been disastrous for the UK’s two main traditional parties: the ruling Labor Party and the opposition Conservatives. They lost heavily to Farage’s Reform UK party on the far right and Zack Polansky’s Green party on the left.

Many commentators have focused on clichés such as “the end of two-party politics” and a “paradigm shift to the right” and so on. Yet the problem is much more than that and impacts people’s perceptions of ‘representative democracy’ across the Western world and not just in Britain.

Western democracy has been in decline since the end of the Cold War at the end of the last century. Citizens’ trust in the “system” as the best way to govern them is deteriorating. Traditional parties and the traditional political scene of right, left and center are disintegrating.

Half a century ago, as Mullins described in his novel, internal conspiracies and coups were based on the traditional fault lines between right and left. This is no longer the case today, because since the last decade of the 20th century, almost all political power has slowly drifted and concentrated in the center.

This led, by default, to a split towards the extremes and the center became increasingly empty. New generations are losing faith in democracy, and those of them who bother to vote in an election don’t care much about political programs or manifestos.

Even markets are adapting to this type of continued political instability, and some speculators are taking advantage of it.

Some might call this “populism” to differentiate itself from traditional politics. In fact, it’s not a “popular” choice; it is a negative byproduct of the disintegration of traditional politics. It’s reminiscent of the boring, slow-moving films produced in the 1980s. Some have called it “commercial cinema,” in which producers focus on profits by making pictures “to the public’s taste.”

We do not know that this “popular taste” is the product of what was once called the “formation of public opinion.” This formation depended on the media, and now on social networks, as well as on the behavior and statements of politicians. This political culture no longer exists, and therefore nothing is “populist” in contemporary politics.

Britain could experience a prolonged period of political turmoil, similar to that of the last decade of Conservative rule. There is a high probability that this will lead to far-right governance of the country, and it will not be a conspiracy of the “establishment” or the Americans. This could well result in what could be described as “a very British policy”. Because we cannot imagine that the establishment would be self-destructive to bring to power extremists whose goal is to get rid of what is “established”.

Although what is happening in the UK is peculiar in some ways – that is, different from the rise of Trumpism in the US and other far-right factions in Europe – its impact would be broader in scope. While the rest of the West viewed Britain as a “benchmark”, particularly in matters of democracy, the impact of the disintegration of democracy would spread like a contagion.

The current political instability in the UK is truly due to internal and local problems, but in a deeper sense it reflects that something is wrong with the ‘system’. The system that kept Western democracies viable for decades is in decline and has likely disintegrated beyond repair.

The emergence of a new system will likely require painful years, accompanied by frequent instability and abrupt changes in politics and government.

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