In local elections yesterday, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party suffered another in a long series of reverses. Final votes are still being counted, but the Tories are expected to lose several hundred local council seats as well as key mayoralties. Labour also flipped one seat in a House of Commons by-election in Blackpool South. Many of these losses are deep in traditionally Conservative territory.
Nationally, according to the latest YouGov poll the opposition Labour Party has a 26-point lead among voters, going into a general election expected this fall or sooner. The Tories could get fewer than 100 seats in the next House of Commons compared to their current 345, a record wipeout.
In a charming detail, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose government altered the election law to require voters to produce photo ID, forgot his and was turned away from a polling place. After 14 years of Conservative rule, their current leader, Rishi Sunak, is even less popular than his hapless predecessor, Liz Truss, whose tenure only lasted 49 days, after she rammed through unfunded tax cuts that spooked financial markets. Sunak now faces a serious push for his ouster.
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From sex scandals, episodes of corruption, and nasty factional fighting, to bungling the adjustment to Britain’s Tory-sponsored exit from the European Union and a widely ridiculed plan to ship off refugees to Rwanda, the Tories seem unable to do anything right.
And they are paying the political price. That’s how a democracy is supposed to work.
Meanwhile, on our side of the Atlantic, the Republicans are giving Britain’s Tories a run for their money in terms of incompetence and fragmentation. Trump gets more floridly crazy by the day. The Republican House is now effectively in receivership to the Democrats. Like the Tories, the Republicans are on the wrong side of public opinion on issue after issue, most notably reproductive rights, and have had a series of scandals.
But unlike in the U.K., the 2024 election in the U.S. looks to be a dead heat. What gives?
For starters, both the Tories and the Democrats are paying the price of incumbency, at a time when there is broad dissatisfaction with the pocketbook situation of ordinary voters. This is unfair, since Britain’s economic mess is very much the fault of the governing Tories while Biden ought to be getting some credit for some real improvements.
The fact that Biden has not been able to do more is largely the result of Republican blockage, abetted by a Republican Supreme Court and Republican governors. In that sense, there are two incumbent parties in the U.S., but only one of them is bearing the political onus. We can thank the constitutional founders for that. There are also the complicating issues of Biden’s age and two foreign-policy crises that seem endless.
So for now, we can only look enviously across the Atlantic and watch the superior accountability of a parliamentary system do its job. If Biden can hang in and do a better job at crisis management and voter appeal, we and our Labour cousins can celebrate together this fall. If not, God Save this Republic.
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