There are lessons to be learned from the collapse of Prime Minister Liz Truss’s government in Britain. But the folly of cutting taxes and regulation is not one of them.
The case for freeing people from excessive government expropriation and interference is even stronger than when Truss moved into Downing Street on Sept. 6. She was clumsy and detached from market realities, but acknowledging that doesn’t suggest Britain will be better off with more big government, which is what it’s going to get.
Perhaps the greatest calamity of Truss’s seven-week ministry is that it’ll be harder for the next decade to make the necessary case for freedom, personal responsibility, and fiscal prudence. This portends British decline stretching to the political horizon, which will be falsely attributed by the Left and establishment critics to conservatism generally and democratic sovereignty under Brexit in particular.
The real lessons are first that the Conservatives ceased to be conservative in the three decades since Margaret Thatcher left office. Tory prime ministers, most recently Boris Johnson, made the party’s mission election success rather than good government. But although the chances of the former can occasionally be improved by sacrificing the latter, it eventually hollows out the party’s raison d’etre and the roof caves in. Johnson’s higher taxes and pandering to pie-in-the-sky environmentalism delivered the coup de grace.
Another lesson is that politics become dysfunctional when they are uprooted from their constitution — something we see inflicting damage here in the United States.
Britain’s constitution embeds the executive in the legislature rather than separating them as in Washington. That means the prime minister must retain the support of a majority of members of Parliament or she cannot go on.
Truss was backed by only 1-in-5 Conservative Party MPs when she began the leadership race. So, when she was picked, by party members around the country and not MPs, she was immediately on thin ice. That’s even before Britain’s lamentable economy and disgruntled public mood are taken into account. Truss probably never had a chance.
British leaders used to be chosen by their parliamentary colleagues, the men and women without whose votes the government couldn’t survive. It is time, as former Conservative leader William Hague observed recently, to return the responsibility for choosing leaders to those whose backing they will rely on.
The opposition Labour Party learned this the hard way, too, when militant party members chose an unreformed Stalinist, Jeremy Corbyn, in a landslide, even though he had a record lack of support from his own MPs.
The parties reformed their leadership contests because the old constitutional ways seemed redolent of smoke-filled rooms. When Truss became prime minister, it was shallowly lamented that the country’s leader had not been chosen by the country. But the collapse of her premiership and the years of bad government that seem sure to follow, perhaps under the revived but vacuous socialist Labour Party, demonstrate the merits of organic constitutional arrangements and their superiority over quick-fix “reforms.”
Americans should remember this the next time Democrats suggest a little constitutional tinkering such as by ending the Senate filibuster or by packing the Supreme Court.
