For Britain’s political instability, lessons from the worst phase of the French Revolution

When a party and its government find themselves in a corner, they try to spend their way out of unpopularity. However, the UK’s existing debt burden makes it nearly impossible for them to facilitate a fiscal expansion

When a country’s politics begins, at least figuratively, to mimic the worst phase of the French Revolution, there is a problem. As the United Kingdom (UK) prepares to move to its seventh prime minister in about a decade, British political culture is beginning to look like the radical politics at play during the Reign of Terror (1793-94). With PM Keir Starmer’s recent resignation, party politics finds itself at its lowest point since the upheaval brought about by the 1832 Great Reform Act, which heralded the gradual transition from aristocratic dominance to mass democracy. As Britain “celebrates” its 10th Brexit anniversary, it is a good time to ask what explains the parallels with the radical phase of the French Revolution.

After having thrown out Louis XVI and the ancien regime, a major radical faction emerged in both the National Convention (post-monarchy revolutionary assembly) and on the streets. Broadly referred to as the Jacobins, these radical forces would embark on a killing spree, where over the next couple of years, they ended up taking out one political faction after the other. Beginning with the monarchy, then the moderate republicans (Girondins), followed by the ultra-radicals (Hébertists), then the moderates (Dantonists), and finally the original set of key Jacobin leaders, such as Robespierre.

Over the past decade, the mind-boggling turnover of British prime ministers has been like this radical phase, though fortunately no actual violence has been involved. More worryingly, after the Conservative Party moved from David Cameron to Theresa May to Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak, this obsession with changing prime ministers appears to have also spread to the Labour Party. But the malaise runs much deeper.

As parties purged one PM and replaced them with another, the common feature has been exceptionally large electoral mandates. One of the characteristic features of Westminster-style parliamentary systems is the absence of legislative veto power (as in presidential systems), which provides the executive, given a majority, significant leeway to implement its agenda. This pattern seems to have been completely reversed in the British case, where the power resides with the legislature, which then uses it to not just veto legislation, but the very person heading the executive itself.

Much like the US and Germany (now), the UK was a poster child of the post-Cold War neoliberal experiment. The economy was dominated by a handful of geographically concentrated sectors (such as financial services and life sciences around London), and a steady decline in investment in key public services such as transport and healthcare. The bulk of manufacturing – originally centred in the Midlands and northern England – had largely been outsourced to Asia. The global macro environment was so buoyant through the 1990s to the 2008 crash that the New Labour government under Tony Blair could maintain a neoliberal economic orientation and indulge in meaningful welfare expansion. This welfare push just temporarily concealed how the working class was fundamentally being left out of the British economic story.

As the global financial crisis struck in 2008, it was followed by an immediate recession and years of painful austerity under the David Cameron government. A section of the British political class always maintained a healthy amount of Euroscepticism, and soon enough, during Brexit, this angst against Brussels became the focal point – mistakenly – for all the public anger that should have been directed at the neoliberal managers of the British economic project.
There have been two lasting impacts of Brexit, one on its politics and the other on the economy.

In the political sphere, as Chris Smyth of the Financial Times argues, Brexit broke the UK’s stable party system by destroying the intra-party coalitions that held the two parties together. “The referendum loosened the instinctive backing for Labour in the post-industrial areas in the north and Midlands of England. At the same time, affluent southern areas reacted against the Conservative embrace of Brexit. The populist politics of Nigel Farage rushed in to fill the gap,” writes Smyth. It is amidst this breakdown of the old party system that the Reform Party under Farage has seen a significant rise in polling numbers and electoral success in local elections.

However, in large part, this political chaos has been significantly exacerbated because of the underlying state of the British economy. “By 2025, we estimate that UK GDP per capita was 6 to 8 per cent lower than it would have been without Brexit. Investment was 12 to 18 per cent lower, employment 3 to 4 per cent lower, and productivity 3 to 4 per cent lower,” according to a report by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

However, the real pain has come from the sharp rise in the UK’s debt over the past quarter-century. Over the past two decades, the government’s spending has had to rise sharply owing to a series of crises – the 2008 Great Recession, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine-induced energy supply crunch. From around 30 per cent of GDP around the turn of the century, British debt is expected to peak at 96 per cent in 2028, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The average for other advanced economies is 83 per cent.

Government borrowing by itself is not a major problem, if the money is being spent to make the economy more productive. However, for the UK, the bulk of it has been spent on welfare expenditure during the pandemic and to offset the rise in energy costs for households. Consequently, today the cost of borrowing for the British government is even higher than that of traditionally sluggish economies like Italy and France. Today, the 10-year yields for British bonds stand at 4.74 per cent, as compared to around just 1 per cent on the eve of Brexit.

Under ordinary circumstances, when a political party and its government find themselves in a corner, they try to spend their way out of unpopularity. However, the UK’s existing debt burden, coupled with high taxes and the threat of a further rise in borrowing costs, makes it nearly impossible for any government to meaningfully facilitate a fiscal expansion. This is precisely the situation that has resulted in the rise of the British legislature as a veto player. Unable to force their government to raise expenditure, they instead resort to firing the executive.

Going ahead, there are two distinct pathways for the country. On the one hand, a leader like Andy Burnham can effectively break out of this conundrum by expanding public investment in productive areas, while at the same time convincing the bond markets that these are not frivolous and will make the country more competitive in the long run. On the other hand, if the electoral trend over the past decade reverses, and the next election results in a fragmented parliament and a hung assembly, it might deepen the political crisis and even snatch away the symbolic power the legislature currently enjoys. A third outcome — in which this slow march to irreversible irrelevance simply continues — remains the most likely.

The writer is associate fellow, Observer Research Foundation (ORF)