Wrestling With Westminster Leadership
Australian parties may overuse their ease of changing leaders, but the UK and Canada have abandoned a core ideal of Westminster systems
Early September will see two political parties working within a Westminster parliamentary system elect new leaders. Once elected, the new leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom will become the prime minister, while in Canada the new leader of the Tories’ namesake will become the leader of the official opposition. Both leaders will be elected through mechanisms that are in deep conflict with the political systems they operate in. What seems like a democratic process will instead continue to decay these countries’ respective democracies.
The politics of another Westminster system, Australia, rarely excites a foreign audience. When it is observed at all it may be due to a fascination with its compulsory voting, or nerdier types may be interested in the way preferential voting works. If the country does happen to make international headlines it will mostly be due to the hostile replacement of prime ministers, a local sport known as “knifing”. Unlike its cousins in the UK and Canada, prime ministers can be dispensed with and replaced within a matter of hours.
This has earned Australia the misleading title of “the coup capital of the democratic world”, as until May’s federal election, no Australian prime minister had served a full three year term since 2007. Yet unlike actual coups, this has had little effect on Australia’s social stability. Australians understand that in their political system the leader of a political party is simply the person who has the confidence of their party’s MPs. No-one votes directly for a prime minister, the government is instead the party – or combination of parties – with the most seats in the House of Representatives. Therefore, should a prime minister be “knifed” no-one feels that democracy has been subverted.
Australia has mostly maintained the Westminster ideal that the prime minister should merely be the first among equals within the cabinet, and that their position is tenuous by design. A party’s leader should simply be an MP with greater responsibilities, but not someone who had a constituency outside their own electoral district. When the British parliament was originally seeking to restrain the role of the monarchy it was also trying to prevent the rise of presidents.
This is an ideal that has been abandoned by the UK and Canada, and one that has serious implications for how their democracies are run. Both countries have seen a concentration of power within the prime minister’s office that is antithetical to how the Westminster system was designed to operate. Prime ministers in Canada and the UK feel they do not have to be responsive to other elected MPs because they have a parallel source of power.
In Canada, the two most recent prime ministers – Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper – have both used the power given to them by their party’s membership to transform their party’s elected MPs from representatives of the people into a herd of empty shirts who are simply told when and how to vote on legislation. This has created a dictatorship by party membership, with those whose political identity is strong enough to feel the need to join a political party effectively being those who can set the entire agenda and behaviour of a government.
This has incentivised joining political parties. The Conservative Party of Canada now claims to have 675,000 members, an extraordinary figure that most Western political parties would be jealous of. Yet this may not improve the party’s fortunes, in fact it may make it more difficult for the party to win government. This large cohort of heavily invested members still only account for a small fraction of the wider electorate, and they hold ideas that the median voter is generally suspicious of.
The previous leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Erin O’Toole, tried to square this circle by selling himself initially as the torch-bearer of the resentment-based reactionary conservatism that excites the party’s members. Yet once he won the leadership, he changed his style, presenting himself as a moderate and restrained leader to appeal to voters in suburban Toronto, where Canadian elections are won. It didn’t work at last year’s election, the party remained in opposition. But importantly it compounded a serious problem for all Western politicians – a lack of authenticity.
The Conservative Party in the UK is currently engaged with a similar problem, although one that is actually more absurd. Because most Conservative Party members are the dogs that caught the Brexit bus, they still require the emotional thrill of chasing it. This means that to win the party’s leadership seeking more conflict with Europe is essential to gaining membership support.
Despite campaigning heavily to remain in the European Union during the 2016 referendum, Liz Truss has successfully sold herself as the candidate with the strongest “Brexit vibe”. If, as seems likely, she wins the contest, Truss will begin her prime ministership with the stench of duplicity that brought down her predecessor. Due to the party’s membership’s current desires, this now seems a perpetual trap for all future party leaders.
Of course, Australia’s system of leaders being elected solely by their party’s MPs doesn’t produce better prime ministers – recent titled holders like Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison are testament to this – but it does, critically, produce weaker leaders. It means government decisions are more of a collective process, with leaders requiring the input of both cabinet and backbench colleagues to govern and maintain their position. This makes radical ideas more difficult to implement. Although it has recently been revealed that Morrison had made an attempt at a serious power grab, undermining his ministers by secretly swearing himself into their portfolios (plans to knife him prior to the election were abandoned due to fears that too much political blood had been spilled of late).
Yet usually the weakness of Australian prime ministers works in tandem with Australia’s compulsory voting to make sure that the incentives of political parties are always tied to the broader public’s ideas and expectations, not pulled away by niche or zealous forces. These expectations are what the writer Richard Glover has called “the wisdom of the mildly uninterested” – an observation about compulsory voting that rather than being susceptible to manipulation, those who don’t live and breathe politics are simply seeking competence, and have a good radar for politicians who stray too far from kitchen table issues.
In Canada’s current Conservative Party leadership contest, Pierre Poilievre has not just strayed from the kitchen table, he’s flipped it over and set it on fire. Mired in an array of online grievances and wild conspiracies he has sensed an opportunity to harness the most radical forces in the country and concentrate them within the party’s membership base. Given the political fervour that is seeping across Canada’s border with the United States, it’s a strategy that looks likely to be successful in making him leader of the official opposition.
A stale Liberal Party with an unpopular leader will have been in power for a decade come the next Canadian election, meaning that although the broader public may be appalled by Poilievre, given that people vote for local candidates, not party leaders, there is the potential that the Conservative Party could win the next election. Securing the votes of the Conservatives’ now massive membership will give Poilievre overwhelming power within the party, and the precedents set by Trudeau and Harper to concentrate power in the PM’s office means he could become an incredibly dangerous leader of the country. One who would be more difficult to dislodge than Boris Johnson has been in the UK.
The UK’s Conservative MPs have proved that they are capable of getting rid of a leader who is unsuited to the role, yet the process to replace Johnson is laborious and drawn out. This has compounded the country’s vacuum of leadership. It will be two months between Johnson resigning as party leader and a replacement being elected. With no investment in the job, Johnson has simply abandoned it, and with the Tories distracted by the contest, the work of governing is being overlooked.
The Westminster system was designed for the dispersal of power. Executive authority is administered by the cabinet as a whole, not solely the prime minister, and the cabinet requires the support of the backbench – with all of these MPs beholden to their individual electoral districts. Yet the advent of modern forms of communication like television and the internet has shifted the focus away from parties as collective political vehicles towards being dominated by single figures. This is as true in Australia as it is in the UK and Canada.
While party leaders may dominate headlines in Australia, it is generally far more difficult for them to dominate their parties. The knives that stalk them may be excessive, but they protect the system from greater threats of democratic degradation. In contrast, by allowing party members to vote for party leaders, UK and Canadian political parties have ironically made themselves less like democratic parties, and more like personality cults.