The moorings that tie the rulers to the ruled are breaking in the UK. You can hear them snapping during the Prime Minister’s silences.
On Sunday morning, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked Liz Truss a question any democratic leader should be able to answer. Truss and her Chancellor’s folly had sent yields on ten-year guilts up to 4.3 per cent. It had forced the Bank of England to announce an emergency £65 billion bond-buying programme. It had threatened pensions and the finances of mortgage holders.
‘How many people voted for your plan?’ asked Kuenssberg.
Silence. A silence long enough for viewers to believe that concerns of democratic legitimacy had not bothered the Prime Minister in the slightest until that moment.
And then a baffled answer that justified their worst suspicions.
‘What do you mean by that?’
No government can succeed if it is built solely on the approval of a party’s membership
Kuenssberg meant that Truss had ordered a ‘significant change of direction’ in economic policy without receiving a mandate from the electorate. She might have added that this was only the start of Truss’s assault on parliamentary democracy.
Who authorised the switch in policy? Not the cabinet, Truss confirmed. She did not give her colleagues a say. They could not warn that borrowing money (whose interest we must all pay) to cut the taxes of the wealthiest, while hammering public services and benefits to the poorest, was an outrageous idea.
So not only does Truss have no mandate from the electorate: she had no mandate from the cabinet either.
A prime minister rules because she or he commands a majority in the Commons. Michael Gove and many other Conservative MPs have indicated that they intend to use their votes to reverse the cut to the top rate in tax and maybe more besides.
Truss thinks she can bully them into compliance. The Conservative party chairman Jake Berry told Sky News that ‘as far as I’m concerned’ MPs who rebel should lose the party whip, and thus risk losing their seats a the next election if it is not restored. (As things stand, a vengeful electorate will ensure most of them lose their seats in any event, but I will let that pass.)
If MPs voted against their government’s Budget, you could just about see the justification for withdrawing the whip. Our dangerously vague and unwritten constitution does not say they must be punished, however. During the finance bill the 1994 Budget produced, a backbench rebellion forced the then Conservative government to abandon a proposed increase in the rate of VAT on fuel. But we have no need to cite this precedent. In a neat dodge, Kwarteng insisted last week that he was not delivering a Budget. If he had done, the Office of Budget Responsibility would have assessed his plans to giveaway £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts – a checking process that might have punctured his over-confidence and limited the mayhem in the money markets.
As this isn’t a Budget, MPs ought to be free to put the interests of their country first, as indeed should peers in the House of Lords when this special financial operation reaches them.
By threatening to destroy MPs’ careers, the Truss administration is continuing the tactics of Boris Johnson, who withdrew the whip from opponents of a no-deal Brexit in 2019.
In doing so Truss, like Johnson before her, is undermining the foundations of the first-past-the-post electoral system. On paper, proportional representation is fairer because it grants representation to a wider range of views. But supporters of the status quo could once argue that the main parties were broad churches that included multiple viewpoints. Economic opinions within the Conservative party included big-spending centrists in the Johnson mould, classic fiscal Conservatives who worried about debt, such as Rishi Sunak, and wannabe Reaganites, such as Truss and Kwarteng, who believed you can slash taxes and not worry about the bill (or at least believed it until last week).
Now Truss’s opponents face expulsion from the party. The broad church is turning into a cranky sect.
Truss told the BBC that her mandate derives from Johnson’s 2019 election victory. The Tories ‘are levelling up all parts of the country and we are driving up growth and opportunity,’ just as they promised to do in their 2019 manifesto
I could go through all the differences between Johnson and Truss but let one example suffice. Her supply-side tax cuts abandon his levelling-up agenda. Londoners are seven-times more likely than northerners to benefit, the Institute of Public Policy Research found.
Rachel Wolf, one of the co-authors of the 2019 manifesto, told a fringe meeting at the Tory party conference on Sunday, that Truss won the leadership in part because of her perceived loyalty to Boris Johnson. But this government has now ‘junked everything he stood for,’ leaving it with neither a democratic or parliamentary mandate.
Say what you like about Johnson, but at least he was the choice of a majority of Conservative MPs and members in 2019. Go back to the leadership election of 2022 and you will remember that more MPs supported Sunak than Truss. She is in Downing Street because she won the party member vote.That is all.
Allowing members to choose leaders always carries with it the potential for disaster. If the members choose a politician who does not have the support of a majority or plurality of MPs, their party cracks up. As Labour cracked up under Jeremy Corbyn.
You can call them every name under the sun, but MPs are still accountable to the voters. Party members have no place in the constitution. They are accountable to no one. As the historian Robert Saunders said in a 2019 piece for the New Statesman:
Unlike MPs, party members are not answerable to voters for the choices they make. We do not know who they are and we cannot hold them to account. It is not necessary to think ill of party members — to accuse them of ‘extremism’, ‘fanaticism’ or other malign characteristics — to see the democratic deficit.
No government can succeed if it is built solely on the approval of a party’s membership. To put it in the cruder terms of power politics, a prime minister can survive without the support of party members but not without the support of a party’s MPs.
Truss has no mandate for the disaster she has inflicted on us from the electorate. She has no mandate from the cabinet. She has no mandate from the parliamentary Conservative party. She has no mandate from a winning election manifesto.
She has the votes of the 81,326 Conservative members (0.18 per cent of the electorate) who supported her in the leadership contest. I suspect she is about to learn the hard way that that is no mandate at all.
For a full list of Spectator Tory conference fringe events, click here
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