Don’t Blame the Parliamentary System for Britain’s Woes - WSJ

This year’s political chaos in the U.K. has more to do with the drawn-out battle over Brexit than with the country’s uncodified constitution.

For Britain, 2022 will be remembered as the year of three prime ministers. Rishi Sunak has just entered No. 10, following the resignation of Liz Truss, prime minister for just 45 days. She herself succeeded Boris Johnson, who was brought down by scandals in July, less than three years after leading the Conservative Party to victory in the 2019 general election. Mr. Sunak was chosen by the 357 Conservative members of Parliament. Neither the 172,000 members of the party nor the wider electorate of 48 million had a say in the outcome.

The…

For Britain, 2022 will be remembered as the year of three prime ministers. Rishi Sunak has just entered No. 10, following the resignation of Liz Truss, prime minister for just 45 days. She herself succeeded Boris Johnson , who was brought down by scandals in July, less than three years after leading the Conservative Party to victory in the 2019 general election. Mr. Sunak was chosen by the 357 Conservative members of Parliament. Neither the 172,000 members of the party nor the wider electorate of 48 million had a say in the outcome.

The Scottish National Party, which has 45 of the 59 Scottish MPs at Westminster and controls the devolved Scottish parliament, contemplates an early dissolution of that parliament. The ensuing election would then be used as a referendum on independence. Only independence, the SNP argues, would enable Scotland to escape the chaos at Westminster, and with independence, Scotland could re-enter the EU. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain, but they were outvoted by England and Wales.

Can the uncodified British constitution cope with these problems?

Only once before has Britain seen two changes of leadership in the same parliamentary term. That was under the exceptional circumstances of the Parliament elected in 1935: Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin in 1937, and then in 1940, with Britain at war, Winston Churchill succeeded Chamberlain. An election could hardly be held in wartime, and in any case, Churchill enjoyed the support of all parties.

Unsurprisingly, there is now huge popular and opposition pressure for a general election. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, says that the new prime minister lacks democratic legitimacy. But in a Westminster-type parliamentary system, constitutional legitimacy depends upon enjoying a majority in the House of Commons. The Conservatives currently have a majority of 71. They cannot be forced to dissolve unless there are large-scale defections, and that is unlikely. A general election is not legally required until January 2025, just over five years after the last one.

Presidential systems such as the U.S. and France have similar difficulties in removing unpopular leaders. Where the head of government does not depend on the legislature’s political support, impeachment is the only constitutional recourse. It has been frequently used in Latin America. In Brazil, for example, the first female president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached in 2016 on grounds of budgetary mismanagement and then convicted and removed from office.

Impeachment is a clumsy weapon, however, since it confuses the juridical with the political. An American president can be impeached and removed from office for “misdemeanors” as well as “high crimes,” but the U.S. Constitution does not define what counts as a “misdemeanor,” and a partisan Congress is hardly in a position to supply an impartial definition. Richard Nixon is the only president to have been forced to resign before the end of his term, in 1974, pre-empting full impeachment proceedings.

In France, too, there is no way, short of impeachment, to remove a president elected for a fixed term. The only president who left in mid-term was Charles de Gaulle in 1969, after calling a referendum on constitutional reform and declaring he would resign if he lost, which he did—a self-inflicted wound.

In contrast to Britain, parliamentary systems based on proportional representation, in which members are selected from party lists according to a party’s share of the national vote, are more prone to frequent dissolutions. Italy is famously subject to such upheavals, and Israel is currently undergoing its fifth election campaign in four years. Most regard such cases as a warning, not a model. Dissolution sometimes may be the only way to break a parliamentary deadlock, but a democracy cannot easily survive a diet of dissolutions.

It probably does no harm to allow governments time to overcome what may be temporary bouts of unpopularity. Otherwise populism, in the sense of short-term crowd-pleasing policies, would be even more prevalent than it is. Before the Falklands war in 1982, Margaret Thatcher was the most unpopular prime minister in Britain since records began. But she then went on to win two further elections and restructure the British economy.

Why has Britain succumbed to Continental-style instability, leading some to compare it to Italy? The answer can be given in one word: Europe.

If Britain left Europe, declared the pro-European Labour MP Roy Jenkins during the first European referendum campaign in 1975, it would enter “an old people’s home for fading nations.” He added, “I do not think it would be a very comfortable old people’s home. I do not like the look of some of the prospective wardens.”

There have been three such wardens since the Brexit referendum of 2016, which destabilized British politics. Voters rejected the advice of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to remain in the EU. He immediately resigned. His successor, Theresa May, negotiated a deal keeping Britain within the EU customs union. That proved unacceptable to Conservative MPs who wanted to remove Britain from the EU’s orbit entirely. A harder Brexit was provided by Boris Johnson, Ms. May’s successor, who won the 2019 general election promising to “get Brexit done.”

Liz Truss began to put the hard Brexit program into practice, with the aim of turning Britain into a global entrepôt in mid-Atlantic, a kind of Singapore-on-Thames. The first step was to be a radical reduction in personal and corporate taxation, to encourage enterprise and raise Britain’s sclerotic growth rate.

But the tax reductions were unfunded, financed by borrowing. The markets took fright, and interest rates and mortgages soared. Ms. Truss was forced to backtrack, sacking her chancellor and then withdrawing the tax reductions. It was hardly possible to survive such humiliation, and her premiership rapidly fell apart amidst cries that she had created not Singapore-on-Thames but Caracas-on-Thames.

It is just possible, however, that Mr. Sunak’s premiership could end the years of political and economic instability and that the failure of the hard Brexit program could bring to a close the Conservative Party’s civil war, which has raged for 30 years, ever since Britain left the European Monetary System in 1992. There now seems to be no alternative to a more constructive relationship with the EU. And Britain has shown its commitment to Europe in a wider sense by the aid it has given to Ukraine, since Conservatives regard Russian aggression as a threat to the whole continent.

In any case, British instability should not be exaggerated. Outside Northern Ireland, political divisions do not run as deep as they do in the U.S.

When Britain lost the American colonies, a young aristocrat told Adam Smith, “This will be the ruin of the nation.” “Young man,” Smith replied, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” They are wise words to recall amidst the turmoil.

—Mr. Bogdanor is professor of government at King’s College London. His books include “Britain and Europe in a Troubled World,” published by Yale University Press.