Opinion: Rishi Sunak epitomizes Britain’s flawed democracy

First published in The Bachelor, October 28, 2022.

It has been a farcical few months in British politics. The resignation of Boris Johnson, the subsequent appointment of Liz Truss and her rapid downfall have been enough to leave even the most politically savvy Brits scratching their heads. And now, the UK yet again has a new Prime Minister.

Rishi Sunak delivers his first speech as British Prime Minister. Courtesy of Reuters.

This week, Rishi Sunak, the former Goldman Sachs analyst and cabinet member under Boris Johnson, took office, another twist in a grisly political tragedy that is still in its first act. Sunak becomes Britain’s fifth Prime Minister in six years, meaning that almost 30% of the country’s post-WWII leaders have come since 2016, all from the same party. To make matters worse, two of them, Truss and Sunak, weren’t even elected by the public. It has been something akin to jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, and then jumping out of the fire into the core of a nuclear reactor, each new iteration bringing about unimaginable levels of Tory (i.e., Conservative party) insanity.

This chronic turnover has left Britain’s democracy in a shameful, embarrassing state. But the problem runs much deeper than elitist, feckless Tories. Britain’s democracy is sick to the core, and the Conservatives are happy to do nothing about it.

When Liz Truss resigned on October 18, she became the shortest serving Prime Minister in British history, lasting just 45 days in office. But what a tumultuous tenure it was. In one fell swoop, she and her cabinet almost single-handedly destroyed the British economy. At the helm of this economic massacre was Kwasi Kwarteng, Truss’ chancellor of the exchequer (i.e., treasury secretary.) Kwarteng’s plan to cut taxes on the rich and scrap the limit on bankers’ bonuses threw the government’s bond prices into turmoil, leading the British pound sterling to crash to its lowest ever level against the US dollar. Truss fired Kwarteng, but the damage to her premiership was already done.

Governmental chaos of this sort is nothing new to the British public at this point. In the past six years, the UK has bounced from one failure of a Prime Minister to another with an alarming regularity. A new governmental leader used to be a big deal; Margaret Thatcher’s tenure lasted 11 years, and Tony Blair’s 10. But now, with Truss gone, the most that Birtons can hope for is that Sunak can limbo below the incredibly low bar set for him by his short-lived predecessor.

And let’s not forget where this mess all began. In 2016, under the leadership of David Cameron, Britain voted to leave the European Union. Cameron resigned, and in came the ABBA-loving, fields-of-wheat-frolicking Theresa May to clean up the mess. “Brexit means Brexit,” she touted, promising to withdraw Britain from the EU by March 2019. Spoiler alert: she didn’t live up to her word, and on March 27, 2019, she too resigned. May was replaced by Boris Johnson who did indeed get Brexit done, but he too was forced out of office early in 2022.

The UK has been in a state of permachaos ever since the 2016 referendum. From Cameron to May to Johnson to Truss and, now, to Sunak, Britain has struggled to break out of a vicious cycle of low growth and austerity. According to analysis by the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008–and that study was conducted before the Truss and Kwarteng fiasco.

Sunak has a monumental task ahead, and I don’t think it’s a storm he can weather. According to voting intention data from Politico, the Labour party is at its most popular since 2001, when Tony Blair was in office. The Conservatives, on the other hand, enjoy the support of just 22% of the British public, down from 51% two short years ago.

And that’s not to mention Sunak’s own personal branding problems. In April 2022, it was revealed that his wife, Akshata Murty, potentially avoided paying up to £20 million ($23 million) in UK tax by declaring non-domiciled status. Murty, the daughter of an Indian billionaire, has since revealed that she will pay tax on her overseas income, but the controversy was enough to create a sharp decline in Sunak’s popularity ratings.

Many members of the public also see Sunak as being out of touch with the average Briton. Need I recall the time he didn’t know how to use a contactless credit card, or the time he claimed to be a “massive coke addict” in front of two elementary school children (he was, of course, referring to the drink.)

Sunak’s attempts to fix his image haven’t exactly helped him, either. In a publicity stunt that backfired spectacularly, he once partook in a photoshoot where he was seen filling up a small Kia car. The car, however, turned out not to be his; instead, it was the car of a random gas station worker. Social media, as one can well imagine, had a field day mocking Sunak’s vain attempt to seem like a normal person.

It goes without saying, then, that Sunak’s premiership rests on very thin ice. But the fact that he got there in the first place stands testament to one unavoidable truth: that Britain’s democracy is seriously unhealthy.

Sunak was not elected to office, nor was he chosen by the 200,000 members of the Conservative party, as Truss had been. Instead, Sunak became Prime Minister simply by garnering enough support among Parliamentary Conservatives. In other words, he ascended to the highest office in the land simply because he was chosen by 0.000007% of the British population. The rest of the British public had no say whatsoever in his appointment.

As I see it, there are two fundamental problems at the heart of Britain’s chaos. The first is the country’s archaic insistence on first-past-the-post elections and disproportionately representative democratic systems. In the last general election in 2019, the Conservatives took 54.9% of the seats in Parliament despite having only 42.4% of the popular vote. If those votes had been distributed according to the mandate of the people, then the Green party, who currently only have one member of parliament, would have ended up with 17 seats. But as it stands, the Conservatives have an untouchable Parliamentary super majority. The current system allows the Tories to board themselves up in their ivory Oxbridge tower, free from any public criticism or democratic ramifications until the next general election in November 2024.

The other problem is Britain’s total lack of checks and balances on legislative power. While the monarchy technically has the right to veto anything it likes, the reality is that King Charles III will probably never interfere with Parliament’s decisions. What’s more, the House of Lords, Parliament’s unelected upper house, also has virtually no power and hasn’t since the 1911 Parliament Act. Therefore, when a new Prime Minister comes in, they have near total free reign to do with whatever they please. And with no checks on power, any incompetent fool like Liz Truss can come in and, within days, bring the country to its knees.

The long-term solution must be serious constitutional change. I am not calling for a written constitution, nor do I think that would solve Britain’s problems. But for the UK to move past the mess of the last six years, Parliament needs to reform into the rigorous multi party platform it has always wrongly claimed to be.

Rishi Sunak, for all of his flaws, is not the root of the problem; he is merely the symptom of a flawed democracy.

Benjamin Bullock