From a Google Image Search - Conservative PMs - Byline Times
Have you been curious about what's going on in Great Britain since Brexit, COVID, Liz Truss, and the loss of a multigenerational Queen? While America has been dealing with the fallout from "the big lie." the UK has seemed like "the big silence." The lives of the royals have dominated the news, with good reason, while the economy and politics of the UK have not been treated with similar drama. Of course, AI has captured everyone's imagination, and the technology seems as if it will dwarf/transform all aspects of the world as we know it.
This week New Yorker magazine had an article entitled, Time's Up: The Conservatives have ruled Britain for almost fourteen years. What have they done to the Country by Sam Knight. Sam explains that in 2023 "I started interviewing Conservatives to try to make sense of those years."... "I spoke to M.P.s and former Cabinet ministers; political advisors who helped make major decisions, and civil servants, local-government officials, and frontline workers hundreds of miles from London who had to deal with the consequences" (p. 26)
"Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to elite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life--the cursus honorum, as Johnson once called it--ever after. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology." (p. 24)
The author begins - "My life divides, evenly enough, into three political eras. I was born in 1980, a year after Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street with a prayer of St. Francis on her lips: 'Where there is no doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.' The Conservative-run Britain of the 80s was not harmonious. ...I was nearly 17 when the Tories finally lost power, to Tony Blair and 'New Labour.' an updated, market-friendly version of the Party. (Boris Johnson, an amusing right-wing columnist, who was getting his start on television, also lived nearby.)" (p. 24)
"New Labour believed in the responsibility of the state to look after its citizens, and in capitalism to make them prosper. Blair was convincing, even when he was wrong. He won 3 general elections in 10 years and walked out of the House of Commons to a standing ovation, undefeated in his eyes. 'I was turning thirty,' says Sam Knight, 'when Labour eventually ran out of road, undone by the Iraq War, the global financial crisis, and the grim temper of Gordon Brown, Blair's successor." (p. 24)
"Since then, it's been the Conservatives again. In 2010, the Party returned to government in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Since 2015, the Tories surpassed the thirteen years and nine days that New Labour had held office. But the third political era of my lifetime has been nothing like the previous two. There has been no dominant figure or overt political project...Instead, there had been a quickening, lowering churn: five Prime Ministers, three general elections, two financial emergencies, a once-in-a-century constitutional crisis, and an atmosphere of tired, almost constant drama."
"This period is bisected by the United Kingdom's decision, in 2016, to leave the European Union, a Conservative fantasy or nightmare, depending on who you talk to." (p. 24)
"The UK has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates...
High levels of unemployment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism in London, mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic underinvestment. The trains are late. The traffic is bad. The housing market is a joke...It's just not that productive an economy anymore."
Conservatives in Britain have pursued a policy of austerity - "In many ways, the two momentous decisions of this period--what came to be known as austerity and Brexit--are now widely accepted as events that happened, rather than as choices that were made." (p. 26)
We need to keep an eye on what is happening in the UK because American conservatives want to employ austerity and isolationism here in America. What has happened in Great Britain, the lost ground, and the drumbeat against investing in the social welfare of Brits, should offer a cautionary tale to Americans before the 2024 election in November. Just as few can rise above their exhaustion to perk up the British situation as divisions persist, few here are likely to listen to the lessons of the UK.
There is a lot more in this article that you might want to check out. Here's the link. Too bad remembering the order of PMs of Britain isn't preserved in a folk saying like the one that summarizes the marriages of Henry VIII and the demise of each wife.
The article is probably behind a paywall.
Henry VIII's wives -
A mnemonic device to remember the names of Henry's consorts is "Arrogant Boys Seem Clever, Howard Particularly," indicating their "last names," as known to popular culture: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. (Wikipedia)
“Divorced, beheaded, died; Divorced, beheaded, survived.” This ditty has been memorized by generations of British schoolchildren.