A year-end tour of the political horizon starts with the United States, which is in a state of almost complete political immobilization, after its voters have tried to reject both parties in the mid-term election. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has recently been elected to a third term and takes his place next to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping as one of the most important figures in the history of the People’s Republic. 

He has had an apparently successful visit to Saudi Arabia but much of China has been wracked by riots for months which have finally forced the regime in Beijing to make significant concessions to those who found Covid restrictions intolerable. Concessions of any kind to internal dissent are unprecedented in Communist China. This has also made a mockery of China’s claim to have mastered Covid by authoritarianism. 

And the now strong likelihood of its escape from experiments, as a United States Senate Committee has concluded, at the famous laboratory at Wuhan is embarrassing the Chinese government both for its incompetence in likely allowing the virus to escape and for its duplicity in conniving with the World Health Organization to give the world as little warning as possible of the dangers of Covid. This was compounded by doing absolutely nothing to prevent the virus’s exportation from China to the world. 

China remains, as it has these 3,000 years, one of the world’s most important nationalities, but it retains the unseemly disadvantages of a totalitarian power. No one can believe a word the Chinese government says on any subject or a number that it publishes. Hundreds of millions of Chinese essentially still live as they did a thousand years ago, the whole country is debt-ridden, prominent citizens not infrequently just disappear, and the government is thoroughly corrupt by Western standards. In the same measure that China should not be underestimated, nor should it be blindly cited as giving any indication of the way forward in policy terms, for other states.

Japan and the principal Western European countries are muddling along and there is much hopeful curiosity about the new and refreshing Italian premier, Giorgia Meloni. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has got the world’s attention with his reversal of his country’s oppressive green policies and his promises to raise Germany to the status of a military power equal to its position as the world’s fourth greatest economic power and by a considerable margin the strongest economy in Europe. 

Justin Trudeau’s dismissal of the German leader and his Green Party coalition partners four months ago when they sought to collaborate in natural gas development was a shamefully short-sighted and self-inflicted economic blunder. Canada patters on as the butt of late night humorists’ barbs on American television for the endless incidences of our notorious political correctness. 

Yet the principal Western country with the most unpromising short-term political future is the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Sunak is the fifth British premier in six years, (a turnover rate they have not had in 190 years), and his three predecessors (Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss), are all sitting on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons and so are most of the Members of Parliament who voted to install those prime ministers and then largely deserted them.

In the British system, even more directly than in Canada, the Members of Parliament of the governing party ultimately determine whether the prime minister retains that job from day to day. And much more than in Canada, this is not a milieu where loyalty abounds. As I mentioned here at the time of the disembarkation as prime minister of Boris Johnson, the last British Conservative party leader to depart that position in good physical and political health and altogether voluntarily, was Stanley Baldwin in 1937. 

That party has had 15 leaders since then, and all but three of them became prime minister. Five resigned after defeat at the polls, two, including Mr. Churchill, were more or less politely eased out, and the rest were sacked by their parliamentary colleagues. This is the mess of eels which Mr. Sunak now has the task of trying to calm down and to lead. He resigned as Mr. Johnson’s chancellor because he insisted on a tax increase, in order to throw more money at the National Health Service, which is rivaled only by the public broadcaster, the BBC, as the greatest white elephant in the United Kingdom. Between this cavalcade of successive Conservative prime ministers and the corresponding activities at the opposition Labour party, the effect has been to overturn and undo much of what Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had achieved.

Under Thatcher, the old red Tory, “social market,” leftist Conservative party was replaced by a low-tax, privatized public sector, “homeowner’s democracy,” and under Mr. Blair the old ultra-socialist Labour party dominated by the corrupt and irresponsible unions who notoriously almost strangled Britain, was replaced by a moderate center-left liberal party. Most of this has now been overturned as the country and its political leadership have slumped back to stupid politics from both major parties. 

It may be that what will be required to bring the British electorate back to its senses is to end this quite unsatisfactory Conservative period of government and bring back the old fire-breathing socialist Labour party to make a mess of the United Kingdom on the scale that was exploited by Thatcher when she was elected in 1979 with a mandate for radical change. In such circumstances, the likeliest leader would be Mr. Johnson, who has great political talents and was an outstanding mayor of London, resolved the greatest constitutional crisis Britain has had since the American Revolution by “getting Brexit done” and leaving Europe; he did well with Covid, and has been very strong with Ukraine.

Any such resurrection is six years off and in the meantime it looks like a very difficult sleigh ride for the British, unless Mr. Sunak can take hold of the government, shake down its costs, privatize more of the health service, and introduce tax reductions in time to reinvigorate the economy. Mr. Sunak is a capable man and, except for Benjamin Disraeli, the first British prime minister of non-British ancestry, and his elevation is a symmetrical upshot to Britain’s more than 200 years of government in India. 

Great Britain has completely failed to exploit the advantages of Brexit, and in particular, the offers that the United States and Canada have made of closer trade relations. The Cameron, May, and Johnson governments were incoherent in policy terms and completely distracted by Europe. Ms. Truss produced a brilliant budget but without proper supporting material and she was quickly overcome and thrown out by the shovel-hatted deadbeats on the Conservative back benches who think a sophisticated national economy is a Malthusian zero-sum game.

The next several years will make the British and the Conservative party in particular, profoundly nostalgic for Margaret Thatcher. Her strength ultimately frightened her party, although she was the first person to win three consecutive full majority terms since before the First Reform Act (1832), which broadened the franchise; she is the greatest vote-getter in her party’s history. 

They pushed her out for advocating a policy toward Europe much more positive and cooperative than the one that the country ultimately adopted when it seceded from the European Union. The British polity is intelligent and it is miraculous what that small island country has done in and for the whole world. But like all of us, it has its spasms of public ineffectuality when it is led by placemen and posturers. This may be such a time, but like most vacuums, they don’t usually last long.

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From the National Post