The True Origins of the U.K.’s Political Mess
Mary Harris: So we are speaking on Tuesday morning and it sounds like you have a new prime minister. Rishi Sunak Felix Salmon reports for Axios. Yeah. How does it feel?
Felix Salmon: Probably the best prime minister we’ve had in a very long time, which isn’t saying very much. The bar is incredibly low.
Mary Harris: I called up Felix to be my guide to this very strange moment in the UK. Rishi Sunak is the third Prime Minister just this year. The last Prime Minister, Liz Truss, resigned after just a few weeks. Her decision to slash taxes caused financial markets to tank. That’s when she lost the support of her party. As an American, I can’t help but focus on the absurdity of how Rishi Sunak was appointed. Like after Liz Truss announced her resignation sooner was simply agreed upon by the Conservative Party. Right.
Felix Salmon: Correct. This is this is basically a coronation. That was I mean, it was a quasi election.
Mary Harris: One election among like a few people.
Felix Salmon: An election among 349 people who are the members of the parliamentary Conservative Party or all all of the conservative members of parliament. They they basically got together and reached a consensus that it should be Rishi.
Mary Harris: And then Rishi went to Buckingham Palace and he went through this ceremony called Kissing hands with the king.
Felix Salmon: Like you just I mean, it’s so is so anachronistic and so dumb. Yeah.
Mary Harris: This is not what the people in England won necessarily, but it’s what they’ve got.
Felix Salmon: Oh, if there was a general election tomorrow, like the Conservatives would end up with ten seats. It would be it would be a complete annihilation.
Mary Harris: So my main question for Felix was how did the U.K. get here? The last four leaders have all been from the conservative Tory Party, and they’ve all resigned or been kicked out of office. Exactly. How is this still happening? I heard one member of the Labour Party put it like this. I mean, in Britain, granted, they have a stake in this. They want a general election because they just see blood in the water right now. But the way that this lawmaker put it was that Rishi Sunak is covered in the mess of the last 12 years, which I don’t know if that’s true, but if you had to explain what that mess is exactly, what would you say?
Felix Salmon: Oh, I can I can explain that mess with one word. Which is just Brexit and Rishi Sunak is covered in the mess of Brexit almost more than anyone else. I mean, if you look at that list of prime ministers, if you look at David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa may, Liz Truss, none of them would die hard Brexiteers, none of them were always on that wing of the Conservative Party that they really wanted to leave the EU. The only one who was is Rishi Sunak. So he is deep in the the deep cause of everything that is wrong with Britain and everything that is wrong with the Conservative Party. He’s on the wrong side of that.
Mary Harris: It’s so interesting because you also say he’s like the best prime minister in tackling.
Felix Salmon: The least worst.
Mary Harris: Today on the show, why the mess in Britain seems to keep getting more intractable and why so many, including Felix, say Brexit is to blame. I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next? Stick around. Naming Brexit as the cause of the current crisis and leadership in the UK is slightly flip. Brexit’s obviously made it harder for England to recover from the pandemic and the inflation that’s dogged the global economy over the last year. But Felix Salmon blames Brexit for the UK’s current situation, mostly because it shifted the vibes for conservative politicians a little bit at first and then a whole lot.
Felix Salmon: It meant that anyone who wanted to get elected to be a member of Parliament for the Conservative Party had to pretend to believe that Brexit would be good for the country, even though it patently wasn’t and could never be. It was going to massively decrease the kind of immigration that every country needed. It was going to massively decrease trade, it was going to massively decrease GDP, it was going to increase inflation. It was always going to do all of these things. And the Conservative MPs cannot ever admit that because it is now an article of faith for them that Brexit was a great thing and it’s going to turn Britain into some wonderful country.
Mary Harris: You said Brexit turned the Tory Party into a faith based institution, which I thought was just a really great way to put it.
Felix Salmon: Yeah. And so now, even if you are an urbane technocrat like Rishi Sunak, you have to still. Hold the tenets of that faith close to your heart and have it at the center of your government policy. And that just creates a deep internal incoherence. You have to believe three impossible things before breakfast just to think that Brexit is workable. It’s not workable even today, it’s not workable. The you know, you can’t get the imports you need. You can’t get the food you need, you can’t get the labour you need, you can’t get the trade you need. Like nothing is working in Britain and a huge proportion of why nothing is working is because of Brexit.
Mary Harris: Brexit was complicated from the very beginning. Remember back in 2016, then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who was not in favour of leaving the EU, called a referendum on Brexit. He basically assumed the voters would set their leaders straight.
Felix Salmon: So David Cameron was the leader of the Tory party. In the Tory party back then was roughly evenly split between proud Europeans verses, for lack of a better word, anti-Europeans, some of whom were so extreme that they actually wanted to leave the EU entirely. And that split within the Tory party made the Tory party almost ungovernable. And so what David Cameron decided to do is call a referendum and basically say, Listen, I’m just going to answer this question once and for all. We’re going to have a referendum. We’re going to vote to stay in the EU. And then everyone has been talking about leaving the EU. It’s just going to have to shut up because we had this referendum and we’re staying in.
Mary Harris: Well, it sounds kind of logical when you think about it, like, okay, let’s let the people decide.
Felix Salmon: Well, yes, but the problem is that the people made the wrong decision.
Mary Harris: The official results are in. The people of Britain have spoken. Voting for a British exit dubbed Brexit with almost 52%.
Felix Salmon: And it was never a binding referendum. But Cameron and the Tory Party took it as a binding referendum.
Mary Harris: I mean, it sounds like the referendum kind of called the Brexiteers bluff.
Felix Salmon: Yeah, exactly. It included the view that you really want to leave. Okay, great. We’re going to leave then see how you like it. And now the inevitable and entirely foreseen consequences are happening.
Mary Harris: David Cameron ended up resigning in the fallout of the referendum vote. Theresa may then took over, but she too resigned in 2019 after failing to follow through on Brexit. So British voters elected Boris Johnson.
Speaker 3: Energise the country. We’re going to get Brexit done on October 31st. Got to take advantage of all the opportunities that it will bring and a new spirit of can do. And we are once.
Mary Harris: Again he campaigned on like get Brexit done, which is just like, let’s do it. But it doesn’t talk a lot about what Brexit actually will mean in practice.
Felix Salmon: Well, remember Theresa may’s slogan, which was even more banal because Brexit means Brexit. Thanks, Theresa. That’s, that’s really helpful. So remember that Boris Johnson is a very sort of cynical opportunist who the day before he announced that he was going to campaign for leave, he wrote two columns for the Telegraph, one saying, I’m going to campaign for leave, and the other one saying I’m going to campaign for Remain. And he basically tossed a coin and decided that he was going to become pro Brexit rather than anti-Brexit, just on the grounds that that way he would be more likely to become prime minister. And yeah, it worked. You know, like he’s not going to be remembered as a good Prime minister, but he is going to be remembered.
Mary Harris: And Boris Johnson left an indelible mark on the Conservative Party because getting Brexit done meant eliminating anyone who disagreed with him.
Felix Salmon: There was this big purge, right? Boris Johnson had a terrible time when he had a very small majority that he inherited from Theresa may. He had a very difficult time getting legislation through Parliament because a bunch of his Tory backbenchers who were Remainers kept on asking very sensible questions about how is this going to work? And no, we can’t vote for this. And eventually what he did is he basically expelled them all from the Conservative Party, called a new election, got a massive majority of hard core Johnson Lite Brexiteers and then went off to the races. And that actually worked in terms of delivering Brexit. But that wasn’t a good thing.
Mary Harris: So Boris Johnson was, of course, replaced by Liz Truss. And I’ve heard that Truss’s approach to leading the UK, especially during this current financial crisis, it had all the hallmarks of Brexit thinking.
Felix Salmon: Yeah, it’s basically magical thinking, right? And again, we can, we there’s lots of echoes of Trump in there that Brexit is the underpants gnome theory of the economy.
Mary Harris: So what.
Felix Salmon: Is that? You know, the famous underpants gnomes from South Park, where they are, where they’re like, step one, collect underpants. Step two, question mark. Step three profit.
Mary Harris: Files when we collect underpants. But what about first term? Well, for the thrill of profit. I get it. I don’t get it, you know.
Felix Salmon: And and this is basically the theory of Brexit, which is step one. Leave the EU. Step to the question mark. Step three, glorious sunlit uplands. And this was exactly the same as Liz Truss. His economic policy, which is step one, cut taxes on the rich step to the question mark. Step three everything becomes great again, and it’s entirely faith based. There’s no coherent sort of stitched together economic model that would support it.
Mary Harris: What Liz Truss proposed was a kind of modified Reaganomics giving unfunded tax cuts to spur economic growth. But most economists thought this kind of spending was going to make inflation worse. And the markets responded.
Felix Salmon: And so what she wound up causing was a massive implosion in the bond market because everyone say you’re going to have to borrow how much money? You’re borrowing a lot already. You’re going to have to borrow even more because you’re increasing the deficit so much because of these tax cuts. And it just. Arithmetically. He didn’t add up. But, you know, as far as Truss was concerned, we were in this kind of post arithmetic world where all you need is. Hope and conviction. And she had that and then she resigned.
Mary Harris: I therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party. I was struck by how Liz Truss herself talked about her exit from leadership. She seemed a little wistful when she spoke, almost saying like, I wish we could have Brexit had more. And we set out a vision for a low tax, high growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit. I recognise, though, given this situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party. Like when she says something like that. What do you make of it?
Felix Salmon: She she was surprisingly unapologetic. There was one brief moment where she she kind of apologized for the for the mini-Budget that caused all of the chaos and said, oh, what if we made a mistake? But no, she she came out with her final speech and basically said I was right and. You know, the markets were wrong and we can’t let the markets dictate what’s happening in the country. And if you just, you know, as I say, like to be a Tory is to believe impossible things. And she genuinely believes that if she’d been able to enact those economic policies, that that would have been awesomely wonderful for Britain.
Mary Harris: After the break.
Speaker 3: It is only right to explain why I’m standing here as your new prime minister.
Mary Harris: What does all this mean for Rishi Sunak, the UK’s new prime minister? Earlier this week, the UK’s brand new prime minister gave his first press conference from that iconic podium in front of ten Downing Street.
Speaker 3: Right now, our country is facing a profound economic crisis. The aftermath of COVID still lingers. Putin’s war in Ukraine has destabilized.
Mary Harris: He sounded earnest enough. But my question for Felix Salmon was what exactly can Rishi Sunak do here?
Felix Salmon: So right now the Tory party is in that wily coyote moment where it’s already run off the top of the cliff, but it hasn’t fallen. They have this large majority in parliament for another couple of years before they need to call an election so they get to rule the country, even though there’s very little popular support for them. And if there was a general election tomorrow, they would lose most of their seats. So to lead the Tory party is to lead the party that basically is staring death and disaster in the face. It knows that at the next election it’s going to get wiped out. There’s going to be like this huge swing from Conservative to Labour and they’re just sort of trying to work out what can we do over the next two years to try and minimize the damage of that election. And frankly, the answer is not very much. The damage has been done.
Mary Harris: Is there really no way the Rishi Sunak could reckon with Brexit?
Felix Salmon: I mean, I suppose he could come out and say, Woops, this was a terrible idea and it’s made everything worse and we should try and roll back some of it and start re-entering the EU and be much more constructive and start signing on to some of the basic trade agreements stuff. But no, there’s no way he could do that. He would face an immediate revolt in the Tory party. He would last 5 seconds.
Mary Harris: There’s a certain I don’t know if I’d call it poetry, but there’s like a you break it you bought it kind of element to this.
Felix Salmon: Exactly. The Tories broke it, the Tories bought it. The Tories are going to win that. Imploding. And as a result of this fateful decision that David Cameron made to call that referendum, it’s a very deserving end to a pretty shambolic party. But the sad thing is that it’s not just the Tories who’ve been devastated, it’s the whole country.
Mary Harris: You know, I think as an American there’s a temptation to look at the UK and basically say like, Wow, crazy things are happening over there. But I wonder if you think there are lessons in what’s going on in the UK for the rest of us, and if so, what those lessons are.
Felix Salmon: I feel that far too many people have been very quick to draw sort of fiscal lessons and the like. You know, especially on the right, I’m hearing a lot of commentary saying like, well, the lesson of Britain is that we need more fiscal responsibility. No, the lesson of Britain is that you can’t have a faith based government which just starts with an ideology rather than with reality.
Felix Salmon: And I do worry that there are an increasing number of ideologues running for elected office in the United States. And, you know, if the big lie in Britain is, you know, Brexit is going to be good for the country, and that was a lie that is very attractive to a certain amount of the population that they wound up voting for. Then the equivalent lie in the United States is. Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and now a huge number of people are desperate to vote for anyone who will parrot that lie with a straight face.
Mary Harris: Yeah, I’m glad you talked about the fiscal lessons and how they tie in here, because I agree with you. And I looked at what happened before Liz Truss resigned with the the tanking pound. You know, I think there were a lot of people who are saying, well, could this happen here? Could this happen in the United States? Like what? What’s the lesson here? And the more I read about it, the more I thought that the lesson was metaphorical versus like 1 to 1, because there are lots of reasons why what happened in the UK won’t happen in the United States. You know, from how our mortgage markets work to how our dollar is like the reserve currency for the world, it’s just different. But it’s also what happened shows how fragile we are just generally like post-pandemic and how unexpected and unexpectedly bad things can happen in this fragile period, I guess.
Felix Salmon: And more broadly, I think Brexit shows how when you have a deeply divided country where there’s just two halves of the country that don’t speak the same language and just they’re completely irreconcilable, that’s a recipe in any democracy for. Disaster at the government level. Don’t vote for things that don’t make sense. Don’t vote for what you want to be true rather than what is true. Don’t vote for, you know, faith based policies. Don’t. Vote for politicians who promise things that are unrealistic because they will wind up delivering chaos.
Mary Harris: Felix Salmon. I’m super grateful for your time. Thanks for joining the show.
Felix Salmon: I’m sorry I couldn’t be happier. Next time I’ll be happier.
Mary Harris: Felix Salmon is the chief financial correspondent over at Axios. He also hosts the Great Slate Money podcast. And that’s the show. If you are a fan of what we’re doing here at what next, the best way to support our work is to join Slate Plus. So head on over to slate.com. What next? Plus. And sign up like right now. What next is produced by Elena Schwartz Mary Wilson, Carmel Delshad and Madeline Ducharme. We are getting a ton of support right now from Anna Phillips and Jared Downing. We are led by Alisha Montgomery and Joanne Levine. And I’m Mary Harris. I will be back in this feed bright and early tomorrow. Catch you then.
