Does Downing Street’s Revolving Door Prove Britain Is Ungovernable?

Oscar Wilde aficionados are sure to remember Lady Bracknell’s cutting remark: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” By such a standard, how are Britons to account for losing six prime ministers in ten years?Count them: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Sir Keir Starmer. With Andy Burnham “kissing hands” with Charles III this afternoon, the United Kingdom sees its seventh premier since 2016.It is more than coincidence that this remarkable revolving door at 10 Downing Street was inaugurated by the Brexit referendum victory in June 2016 to exit the European Union. We do not ascribe to Brexit the failure of British PMs to govern. Rather, we ascribe the succession of failed premierships to the failure to fulfil the Brexit promise of limiting the reach of government.To wit: The United Kingdom is to all intents and purposes a failed state, a state that is now become ungovernable. In its current condition, none of the great prime ministers of the past could govern the country. And now Mr. Burnham has determined that he too will inevitably fail.King Charles III, right, greets Britain’s prime minister, Andy Burnham, left, at Buckingham Palace, July 20, 2026. Aaron Chown/pool via APThe new prime minister began on a promising note. Circumstances demand “my generation of politicians to raise our game, and rise to the new challenge,” he said with Downing Street as a background. Then he tipped his hand.“Britain needs to show the world that we can regain our stability once again, and that is our challenge, to make politics work, to make it work better.” Mr. Burnham, like most Britons, can identify instability as the problem. His solution — “to make politics work” — shows his answer is simply more of the same Establishment nostrums.Take how Mr. Burnham frames the way forward: “We will help,” “we will build,” and “we will pay.” More government intervention into people’s lives, more bureaucrats deciding what ails the people and prescribing the cure.The prime minister calls this “a new political model and a new economic model.” Nothing of the sort. It is more of the statist planning that led to a schlerotic Britain of the 1970s, when the UK was the “sick man of Europe.” It was free market economics that led the way out, both in Britain and America, whether known as Thatcherism or Reaganomics.It is significant that Mr. Burnham dates the country’s woes from this very period, “in the 1980s,” when “Britain took some wrong turns.” He lists three causes for the decline: “political power was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country de-industrialised.”President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher outside the White House in 1981. Via Wikimedia CommonsEven defenders of Margaret Thatcher’s program will fault her centralization of power as a way of countering the left-wing ideology then at work in the Greater London Council and autonomous local councils throughout the land. Mr. Burnham, though, isn’t against centralization per se. He’s only against it when it doesn’t conform to his vision of “a new national sense of unity, of common purpose and positivity.”The new prime minister may criticize the centralized state, but only when it is not directed by Labour fellow travellers like himself. As for economics, we see that he’s against a free market that responds to consumer demand and realistic cost-benefit analysis. That’s why he speaks of a “10-year plan” of “re-industrialising Britain, using public procurement to back British industry.”Parsing Mr. Burnham’s speech, one can see where he shares Thatcher’s fault of focusing on economics at the expense of emphasizing the priority of organic social bonds. Yet in her Bruges speech, she demonstrated that she was not wholly unaware of the socio-cultural problem, if only from a national perspective.“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain,” Thatcher declared, “only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state.”Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesMr. Burnham has signalled already that he plans to continue the outgoing prime minister’s efforts to assuage the EU. Britons who placed their dreams in Brexit can take no solace from such assertions from the prime minister as “I know people at home are fed up with politics. I hear you.”When he says “We have not been good enough, and we need to be better,” Brexiteers suspect what Mr. Burnham has in store. They know, as the Framers of the American Constitution knew, that the fight for self-government, with ordinary people as the fount of power, was elusive but worth the struggle.The Framers, like George Clinton of New York, were fond of quoting the French political theorist, Montesquieu. “The course of government is attended with an insensible descent to evil, and there is no reascending to good without very great efforts.”Like Lady Bracknell’s bewildered observation on the multitude of misplaced parentage, how many prime ministers must cross the Downing Street threshold before the governed once more “reascend to good” and take precedence over their governors?BrexitDiarist@gmail.com

Does Downing Street’s Revolving Door Prove Britain Is Ungovernable?

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