Boris Johnson has just been defenestrated by his own MPs, and Liz Truss has rapidly followed him out of the window because she couldn’t command Parliament. Rishi Sunak has been elected more or less unopposed to form a new cabinet. What does that tell us about the British Constitution – in so far as there is one?
During the Civil War of the 1640s Parliament roundly defeated the Royalists and executed the king Charles the First. Oliver Cromwell, head of the Parliamentary forces, ruled the country through Parliament but died unexpectedly of malaria in 1658 leaving no arrangements for his succession. In the chaos which followed the monarchy was restored in 1660 in the person of Charles the Second basically because no one could agree on anything better. It was generally understood that the new king’s powers would be vastly curtailed compared to his father’s, and certainly that no more papists would rule the land.
Charles II was a dissolute creature raised in France in the Court of Louis the 14th in whose pay he probably remained throughout his life. He had no discernible morals and very few interests beyond seducing other mens’ wives for whose favours he gave away the titles and lands of his father’s most faithful supporters. Fortunately he left no legal heirs and the succession(1685) passed to his younger brother James II who was openly Catholic and therefore unacceptable to the majority of Brits. In 1688 we had the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in which the Dutchman William of Orange ruled jointly with his wife Mary, protestant daughter of James’ first wife, who had died young. That in future all successions would be settled by Parliament was enshrined in The Bill of Rights (1689), the founding document of our ‘Constitutional Monarchy’. William, a belligerent Protestant was more interested in liberating Holland from the talons of the Pope than governing England, leaving Parliament to do that job, which it has done ever since. It was a messy start for a form of government which was to make up its own rules as it went along. It was empirical , full of compromises, adaptable to the times, but in the long run remarkably successful. It saw off four Continental tyrants : Louis XIV (1715), Napoleon (1815), the Kaiser (1918) and Hitler(1945). It built up a huge trading empire; fostered The Industrial Revolution; abolished transatlantic slave trading (1809); greatly extended suffrage at home; brought enlightenment to most of its colonies and invented most of the modern word in which we all live now. Of course it made many serious mistakes the worst of which were: the invention of Economics, snobbery, Free Trade, snobbery; tolerance of parasites, snobbery, Baducation, snobbery, over-centralised government, inequality, snobbery, mass immigration and failure to recognise the United States as its principal treacherous adversary.
It’s not easy to compare governmental systems if only because different nations have very different natural advantages and disadvantages. With its island status just off the coast of Europe, it’s geology, its tides, its seismic stability; its climate and its fertility this is undoubtedly the best location on Earth for humans to thrive, and that has to be taken into account when making comparisons. For instance escaping the poisonous talons of the Roman Church so early wouldn’t have been possible without them.
But to really compare governmental systems one first has to be define PROGRESS on the basis of truly fundamental principles. Starting from “Fitness to survive” on the one hand, and. “Common-sense thinking” on the other I have devised six independent but indispensable measures of Progress, which are:
Curiosity
Honesty
Adaptability
Numeracy
Tolerance
Literacy
Democracy
Sustainability. [ CHANTLiDS for short]-
Judging by those measures one can then compare nation-states, both yesterday and today, and assign them to different classes. Table 1 shows a small selection as judged by their progress over the past century. There is a mark of 1 to 5 for each measure, the marks are all multiplied together and divided into 6 classes with each class a factor 5 lower in total mark. Britain certainly gets into the first-class whereas the so-called ‘Superpowers appear much lower down[US near bottom of 2nd. class, Russia in the 4th. and China in the 5th.] If you don’t like my list, you can devise another – but first define and defend the philosophical principles on which it is based
TABLE (1)
13 NATIONS RANKED BY THEIR PROGRESSIVENESS
Nation | Curio. | Lity. | Demo. | Tol | Hon. | Adapt | Total | Rank |
China | 1 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 5 |
Congo | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
Denmark | 2 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 5000 | 1 |
France | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 1080 | 2 |
Germany | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 640 | 2 |
India | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 32 | 4 |
Italy | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 432 | 3 |
Japan | 3 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 360 | 3 |
Russia | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 5 |
Spain | 1 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 96 | 4 |
Switz. | 3 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1215 | 2 |
UK | 5 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 10000 | 1 |
USA | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 720 | 2 |
Smoothly changing a nation’s government to better reflect the desires of its people appears to be a challenge quite beyond most states: look at much of the FSU, at Asia and, above all at Africa. Only a few Western European nations can do something which appears to be beyond the United States even when it is lumbered with the rogues like Nixon or fools like Trump. So we should congratulate ourselves on our recent defenestrations as a sign of progress, not decadence. `By defintion any progressive government must stir up a lot of opposition.
The other parties are naturally calling for a general election in the name of’ “Democracy” hoping to sneak in when the elected party is in some disarray. But it is not the composition of Parliament which is in question just now, but the leadership of the existing majority, a much lesser matter which can be quickly fixed. In 1827 we changed it 4 times, not 3, to no ill effect. And who is to say that the Opposition would be any more unified than the existing majority of MPs?
There is much more on these matters in my book HISTORY OF THE BRITS: see under “My Books” Category
Tags: common sense, my books, philosophy
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