“Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe,” said Winston Churchill in a speech to the House of Commons in 1947. “No-one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Democracy is being sorely tested in the UK. The Labour Party government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer has a huge parliamentary majority, comparable only with the landslides achieved by Tony Blair in 1997 and before that in the elections of 1924 and 1931. The paradox is that Labour’s parliamentary omnipotence has emboldened many of its MPs to agitate for a shift to the left on the economy and the role of the state. Some commentators expect this to happen quickly if Starmer is replaced — and his position is shaky.
The valuable reforms driven through by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s might be undone. The spectre rises of reversion to a socialist Britain, in hock to lenders and unable to defend itself militarily. Many in Labour agree with Nigel Farage, the leader of the rising opposition force Reform UK, who has openly argued that the Bank of England’s (BoE’s) independence should be reviewed. Such pressures could open the way for the BoE to become a direct instrument of politicians, with likely disastrous effects on the economy and inflation.
Was that what the electorate voted for?
In the US, President Donald Trump has overturned centuries of bipartisan consensus on the relationship between the presidency, Congress and the judiciary. He has tested and gone beyond the traditional limits on the power of the president, openly taking revenge on his perceived enemies and refusing to accept the principle of a politically neutral state bureaucracy.
He came close to using the justice system on spurious grounds to oust Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, and probably desisted only because Powell’s term is due to expire in May. Trump wants a chair who will do his bidding and make the Fed subservient to his political and economic whims (Trump has no policies), again with disastrous effects on the economy.
The Democrats are outraged. So are some Republicans and many more are uneasy — yet mostly they are prepared to sustain Trump. The reason is not hard to find. Trump was voted in by 77-million Americans, which confers a weighty legitimacy on him. Republicans fear to challenge him in case it alienates their own constituencies at the next election for them. There is no question that Trump was democratically elected.
In South Africa, it is one of the curiosities of our democracy that, at least since the start of the state capture era, the voters supported until 2024 a governing party whose policies and behaviour were demonstrably not in the national interest. A contradictory curiosity is that the ANC has somehow managed to ensure that both the National Treasury and the Reserve Bank have been armoured throughout against the tempting cries of the populists.
In that strange sense, along with the dawn of the age of coalitions, our democracy appears more resilient right now than those of the US and UK.
