UK turmoil proves Parliamentary system no panacea

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On this side of the pond in certain quarters there is wishing for our system to be scrapped in favor of a Parliamentary one. What UK events prove is that if your country has fundamental problems changing the system might be just a band aid.

Maybe I am just biased towards my own country. But the British system always seemed whacked to me because...essentially...they only have one branch of government. That being the legislative branch. They dont have the equivalent of an executive branch.

AND on top of that they (essentially) only have one house. Its as if the US only had the House of Reps, and no Senate, and no president. lol! How do you guys function?

The prime minister is not really the same thing as an American President because he rises up from the legislature, and remains a working member of Parlaiment while serving as prime minister. Imagine if, instead of us voters electing Obama, we had had a Parlaimentary system in which we only vote for our local reps to Congress, and then the party that won the most seats in Congress gets to pick (from among its own members) who is head of the nation (both parties pick 'the head of their party, but the party that wins gets their person to head the country). So if the Dems had won the most seats in Congress they wouldve made Obama prime minister, BUT Obama would have continued to also serve as the rep. from his local district in Illinois while at the same time serving as prime minister. As I understand it thats how it would work if we Americans had the British Parlaimentary system.

I realize that in theory (and in past centuries in fact) the British 'executive' branch was the monarchy. But today the British monarchy is just a bs figurehead institution. And I realize that the British Parlaiment is 'bicameral' - has two houses-which in theory- is just like our bicameral system of the House, and the Senate (in fact our founding fathers copied their system). There is a house of Lords (the 'higher' house), and the House of Commons (the 'lower house'). But nowadays the 'lower' house has all of the power, and the House of Lords (like the monarchy) is basically a figurehead institution with almost the same lack of power of the king/queen. So Britain is basically run entirely from just one half of the legislative branch: the House of Commons. And even the Prime Minister is just part of the House of Commons.

Of course the UK parliamentary system isn't a panacea. There is no perfect system and as far as I can see there never will be.

And yet here we are. Looked at from some angles it looks wacky, but the result is about the same as it is in the USA - people vote, politicians get elected, they mess with the laws for a while, if they piss people off too much then they eventually get booted out and the other lot gets a chance, and round and round it goes. It's bloody awful but it kind of works. The UK and the US still exist, no major holocausts yet but there are fears that there might be one just round the next bend. What profound difference does it make whether you have the American or the British recipe? I suppose there's the NHS (what's left of it) and less wealth inequality in the UK, but whether that's good or bad depends on the individual's view of these things.

Some say that with the British system you could never get a Trump as prime minister. And at first glance that would seem to be true. A British Prime minister has to work his/her way up the ranks, and become elected as a local rep before hoping to be the head of the party, and then head of state. So a person with no political experience just vaulting to the top, like Trump ( who didnt even know 8th grade level civics, and never heard of the concept of the rule of law), would be hard to imagine. In Britain Trump would have to accumulated SOME political experience.

But the first nation to have a "Trump type " become head of state was not the US, but Italy. Italy's Silvio Burlesconi was Trump like in that he was a real estate mogul, and a media mogul, before he ran for office the first time in his life, and vaulted to the head of country. He was like Trump in other ways - right wing, and scandal ridden once in office.

Italy, like Britain, has a parliamentary system. But Italy, unlike either the UK, or the USA, has zillions of splinter parties (like every other country on mainland Europe), and not just two big parties like the US and UK. Burlesconi managed to get elected his first time with only like fifteen percent of the popular vote because of the complicated way that his party had formed coalitions with other splinter parties....against the other opposing coalitions of splinter parties.

You don’t have to work your way up in the UK. You get born into a rich and privileged family and you go to Eton. At Eton you are instilled with your absolute right to rule. Then you go to Oxbridge. Then you join the tory party who can’t wait to parachute you into a safe seat.

We got Boris Johnson, or "Little Trump" as he's sometimes called, not without some justification. I don't see much political education or expertise in his history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Joh ... %80%931987
Seems more like a story of "it's not what you know, it's who you know." As for working his way up, well yes the UK system seems to insist that you have to be a member of parliament to be considered for the job of prime minister, but I don't see much evidence of work, it looks more like he just cultivated his "lovable eccentric" image. He clearly knows a bit about cheap rhetoric, but he seems to know nothing about what's known as statesmanship. Like Trump, he seems to make his tactics up as he goes along, and makes unconventional homespun moves which tend to succeed because nobody expects them. The term "unqualified" is written all over him. It was often said during his time as prime minister that Dominic Cummings was running the country for him.

We do have an executive branch, consisting of ministers and civil servants. But you know that and address it later in your post. What we don't have is a directly elected executive independent of the legislative branch.

I think what parliamentary systems prove is that you don't actually need a separate executive. And unicameral systems prove you don't need to be bicameral.

The UK isn't perfect. A better system would have much more turmoil. A good government should be paralysed and only able to act on the rare occasions there is broad support. Give me the Netherlands or Belgium! (But I'lll settle for Germany, which is remarkably stable)

A lot of our issues, and I assume the US issues too, are rooted in our adherence to the simple majority voting system and the 2-party systems that inevitably result. I agree that simply changing to a parliamentary system isn't going to fix anything.

That said, I've read some commentary that concludes that the turmoil we've seen in UK politics over the past few years is evidence of the system working.

Our right-wing party, Conservatives or Tories, not so long ago was a far more moderate thing than it is today. Ultra-right wingers, egged on by the UK press have essentially taken it over. Much like MAGA zealots have done with the US Republicans. Initially, they were contained in much smaller third parties - like the BNP and UKIP - that never had any chance of getting near power. Many of their candidates are now in the parliamentary conservative party. Once they got influence, they purged all the moderate voices from the party. Brexit was the mechanism for this. If you spoke out against Brexit, you were out of the party. Since that included most of the older, more experienced Conservative MPs you ended up with a radical party of inexperienced idealogues who thought they could impose their ideology on the rest of the country.

This is why, after a 52% to 48% vote in the Brexit referendum, the response to such a narrow win was "You lost, get over it", where experienced politicians would have seen the need to bring the 48% along with them, perhaps by negotiating a softer Brexit, the Scandinavian model for example, which might have satisfied more people.

The turmoil in UK politics is a direct result of all this. It's the result of a deeply unrepresentative government behaving like it has a mandate. The fight is ongoing.

But ultimately, and unlike the US where you were stuck with Trump for 4 years despite his being impeached, when we get a real stinker like Boris Johnson, or Liz Truss, the system can reject them before they do too much damage.