Liz Truss and our popular vote

Early on Labor Day morning, I was flipping around between Sky News and the BBC to watch the election of the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister. I’m only an occasional follower of British politics and was more interested to see if the cost of the British Pound against the U.S. dollar would be affected by the announcement. What the FOREX community refers to as GBP/USD (nicknamed “sterling”) was trading at about $2.65 back in the 1970s, but has now dropped to under $1.50.

The jump in price Monday morning was relatively minor and short-lived, but I learned a thing or two about British party politics. As I watched the result of the vote, I wasn’t particularly surprised by the outcome (Truss had been favored in the polls), but the ticker on the bottom of the screen grabbed my interest and wouldn’t let go. The final vote, as Sky News reported, was 60,399 for Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and 81,326 for the victorious MP, Liz Truss.

That didn’t initially make any sense to me. The numbers were too low to be a popular vote but far too high to be the result of a caucus vote or even a representative body like our Electoral College. Where did those numbers come from?

If you have had much of any contact with the news media in the past few months, you will know that the wild-haired Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, ran afoul of public sentiment enough that he was forced to resign. Since he resigned his post without a call for a general election, and the Conservative Party has remained in power, it became incumbent upon his Conservative party to name a new leader, who would in turn be the functional head of state or Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

OK. The process is somewhat similar to how we choose a Speaker of the House or a Senate Majority leader. Right? The vote is closed to members of Congress and the outcomes are determined by the party that holds a majority in each of the houses. Simple enough, but again, how do we reach those numbers?

The answer, I learned, is that there was a nationwide vote among members of the party. Not just the elected officials, but the card-carrying party members. In our country, that would include party bosses, current and former elected officials, and the occasional major donor, but the vast majority are just voters who belong to the Conservative Party. Those are mostly the people who are activists, dialing phones, walking precincts and hanging door knockers. And what must one do to be a party member? They have to pony up £25, which at the current rate of exchange is about 29 bucks.

So who elected the Prime Minister? 80,000 people out of an electorate of 140,000, mostly average folks in a country of 67 million people, who could swing $29. I understand the basic precepts of the parliamentary system and why, short of a general election, the governing party replaces its head without relinquishing power. I get that, but I also have to smile a bit as I recall the folks in the US who have fits of the vapors when our Electoral College is even slightly out of sync with the popular vote. It would do those folks good to view things from an outside perspective.

As for the Prime Minister, I think most of us wish her well. In the UK (and throughout the Commonwealth), conservatives who loved Margaret Thatcher and support the new Prime Minister will understandably compare her to Margaret Thatcher. Liberals who hated Margaret Thatcher and opposed the choice of Liz Truss, also compare her to Margaret Thatcher. It seems to be an inescapable fate for the third female Prime Minister in UK history. Whether she is anything like Margaret Thatcher or if this is even a time that calls for a transformative figure like Margaret Thatcher has yet to be seen. It’s more likely that she will be viewed as an extension of Boris Johnson’s government.

What’s clear is that she has a tough road ahead. Her country faces most of the same issues that we do. Immigration is substantially less of a problem in the UK, but her energy challenges are considerably worse than ours. Initial indications are that she will enact solid deregulation of gas and oil for long-term improvement of the situation, but will most likely have to resort to a public stimulus program to help people stay warm through the winter.

Like Ministers before her, she will do all of this without the benefit of a popular vote. The environmentalists will fight her on deregulation (which will include “fracking”) and her own Conservative party will oppose a stimulus that lines the pockets of the heating oil vendors and feeds inflation (In the meantime, the weight is off Boris’ shoulders for now and he can go on the road touring with Flock of Seagulls). The takeaway here is simple: politics can be really fun when it’s someone else’s, but it should also help us appreciate the wisdom of our electoral college and the advantages of our system, over the one we left behind.