“My son has known four Chancellors of the Exchequer, three Home Ministers, two Prime Ministers and two monarchs. He is four months old.” The joke signed by a young dad, and “liked” in a few hours by half a million people on Twitter, offers only one example among many of the humor deployed by the British to try to digest the serious political crisis that their country is going through.
Their fourth Prime Minister in six years, Liz Truss, will therefore only have been in power for forty-four days. She smashes the record for the shortest term, held for two hundred years by George Canning, Prime Minister for one hundred and twenty days in 1827 but “he, at least, had a good reason, he died of tuberculosis!”, comments the historian Dominic Sandbrook. His colleague Tom Holland dares to compare it with the year 238 of the Roman era, known as “the year of the six emperors”, to evoke the governmental instability which is shaking the country. “Truss reminds me of Gordian I who was Emperor for twenty-two days. After defeat on the battlefield, he hanged himself. That should console Truss’ followers. At least she’s still alive.”
Small comfort, so deep is the malaise that reigns in Great Britain. Here is the country plunged into a crisis unprecedented since the Second World War and, “unlike 1940, this one is self-inflicted”, stings Dominic Sandbrook. The culprit is identified: Brexit, which started the infernal spiral. “It is the lack of vision and strategy on what we were going to do with it that is in question, more than Brexit itself, nuances the intellectual. From the day after the referendum, we sailed on sight, without plan, in total uncertainty. We tried the red conservatism of Boris Johnson. Disaster. We tried the crazy ultra-liberalism of Liz Truss. Disaster.”
The calamitous experiment of “Trussonomics”
Some economists make a more direct link between Brexit and the current crisis. If they have long considered that the exit from Europe was only an “aggravating factor” in the poor economic results of the United Kingdom (sharp decline in foreign investment, drop in trade with the EU, higher inflation to that of the other G7 countries…), many believe today that the hazardous economic experiments of recent weeks have brought to light the true – hazy – face of Brexit. Liz Truss’ budget presented on September 23 is, in their eyes, the most striking illustration of this.
By announcing drastic tax cuts of 45 billion pounds, coupled with an increase in expenditure estimated at the ladle between 100 and 150 billion, Liz Truss and her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng thought they were finally realizing the prophecy of Brexit and offering in the country the famous “Singapore on the Thames”, this tax haven, Brexiters’ fantasy and actively promoted by conservative think tanks. The immediate and dramatic reaction of the markets, which caused the sudden rise in the rate of government bonds and forced the Bank of England to intervene to the tune of 65 billion pounds to save pension funds, suddenly reinjected a dose of reality in British political life. And inevitably leads to the end of the calamitous “Trussonomics” experiment.
This political chaos, unprecedented since the 19th century, brings to light the state of decomposition of one of the oldest political parties in the world, the Conservative Party. The irony is cruel: it was precisely to put an end to the internal quarrels of this venerable institution that David Cameron had launched the idea of a referendum on EU membership. He was counting on a massive victory for the yes to staying in Europe to silence a good for all the hard wing of his party. We know the rest, the result of June 23, 2016… Instead of settling the disagreements, Brexit only amplified the civil war between the Tories. So much so that an implosion seems imminent and a split may be looming.
The purge in 2019 of around 20 rebel Tory MPs refusing a hard Brexit, including legal figures such as former minister Kenneth Clarke, or Churchill’s grandson and former attorney general Dominic Grieve, has nothing resolved. Quite the contrary. The party’s ever more right-wing headlong rush has been accompanied by its fragmentation. Rory Stewart, a former Tory cabinet minister who left the party in July 2019 so as not to have to serve under Boris Johnson, believes there are now a dozen Tory factions: “There are those who want a Singapore on the Thames; others, the return to the Victorian era; those who wish to get rid of the remains of the welfare state; those who fight to preserve the countryside and nature, as opposed to those who have no problem destroy it with their fracking [une technique controversée d’extraction de gaz naturel] ; those who intend to stop all immigration and finally those for whom Brexit has become a quasi-religious concept…”
“Ideological fanaticism”
One of the founding principles of the Conservative Party, that of representing several currents of conservative thought and having them govern together in order to ensure unity and loyalty, has had its day. “It was a tradition respected by all the leaders of the party, until the arrival of Boris Johnson, explains Dominic Sandbrook. When Churchill came to power, he kept 90% of the members of the previous Conservative government. did the same. In 2017, Theresa May continued this tradition by keeping at least 70% of the members of the Cameron government. Boris Johnson, for his part, gathered around him only a majority of faithful, for the most part inexperienced. And Liz Truss pushed the exercise to the extreme by dismissing all dissenting voices from her government. Brexit has released “an ideological fanaticism: the Tory party has become revolutionary, just like Labor was under Jeremy Corbyn”, summarizes ex-minister Rory Stewart,
To understand how extremist and hitherto marginal factions were able to take power within major British political parties, we have to go back to the 1980s and the change in the rules in the designation of leaders and therefore of potential Prime Ministers. It is first of all within the Labor Party that two conceptions of democracy clash: the most left wing led by Tony Benn succeeds in imposing the vote of the militants included in the election of the leader. This is how a Jeremy Corbyn, until then a marginal figure of Labor, took over the leadership in 2015. In the name of this “people’s” democracy, the Conservative Party will adopt the same principle in the 1990s. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, against the advice of a majority of deputies from their camp, were thus elected to lead the party in 2019 and 2022 by conservative activists, in other words by 0.2% of the country’s electorate. With, each time, the catastrophic results that we know, on both sides. And we can say today that the result of the referendum of June 23, 2016 is the fruit of the discourse of extreme factions. Corbyn, inclined to believe that the EU is an ultra-liberal union, did not campaign against Brexit, while the Brexiteers, occupying the whole stage, explained to the people, with a lot of lies, that the EU was suffocating the British by its regulations and other methods worthy of the Soviet Union.
Today, and despite strident calls from the Labor opposition for a snap general election, the Tory party is legally entitled to provide the country with its fifth prime minister in six years. The Conservatives doubtless believe they have nothing more to lose and are playing for time: all the polls indicate that Labor is sure to win hands down in the event of an election. In the meantime, bookmakers are now betting on the Conservative Party splitting. The last time the party split was in 1846 when Prime Minister Robert Peel imposed the principle of free trade on the protectionist and traditionalist fringe of the Tories, after having established authoritarianly, a few years earlier, the emancipation of Catholics and income tax. After the departure of Peel, considered too liberal by his peers, the Tories spent many years in opposition…