The UK just got its third prime minister this year.
But there hasn't been a general election since 2019.
You know what?
Over the past century, only around 1 in 3 of the UK's
prime ministers have come to power in a general election.
How does this keep happening?
An American viewer would probably
be forgiven for thinking,
"Well, this is why we had a war of independence."
It's an 18th century system, and there's a lot
we need to do to make our democracy
look like modern-day Britain.
This person was the prime minister
from September to October 2022.
You'd be forgiven for barely knowing who Liz Truss is because she was
the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.
From day one, which wasn't that long ago,
she was unpopular in Parliament and deeply disliked by the public.
Four out of five British adults had an unfavorable view of Truss,
making her the least popular PM in UK history.
So how did she get to become prime minister?
I think having a membership, you know, short of 200,000,
being able to select the prime minister is a dangerous road.
Yeah, you heard that right.
Less than 200,000 members
of the Conservative Party got to elect Liz Truss as prime minister.
That's just 0.3% of the 46.5 million
people registered to vote in parliamentary elections.
And who makes up that lucky minority of people who get to choose
the direction of the country?
Well, the Conservative Party doesn't release data on its membership,
but researchers have found that they are whiter, richer
and older than the rest of the population.
The Conservative Party could have made better choices earlier on
and instead, they went for populism.
They went for short-termism. And they went for easy straplines
in campaigning. There wasn't enough substance.
So if a tiny and unrepresentative group of people made a choice that hardly
anyone in the wider public agreed with, then what's the point of elections
in the UK?
Well this is how it's supposed to go down:
Voters don't actually get to choose a prime minister.
Instead, they pick a local MP. And the leader of the party
that gets the most MPs usually becomes the prime minister.
And when those MPs get tired of their prime minister, well,
they can force the leader to resign in a vote of no confidence.
But that doesn't automatically mean that the UK gets to have a general election.
Instead, the governing party
can just make up its own rules on how to choose their new prime minister.
Sometimes it's MPs who decide, sometimes a combination of MPs and party members.
Both the Conservative and Labour parties give a huge amount of power
to their members, often allowing them to decide the new leader.
And that puts the UK in a weird position where four prime ministers in a row
will have initially come to power without needing a general election.
In fact, the last time voters forced a prime minister out of office
was way back in 2010.
And this isn't just a problem of the Conservative Party.
The last time Labour was in power, Gordon Brown became prime minister after Tony Blair
quit because there were no other candidates.
So is the UK's electoral system broken?
Clearly, the system that we have now isn't working, in that
it doesn't maximize participation.
It's not reflective of modern-day Britain.
And it's a narrow system
that delivers narrow outcomes.
OK, I want to show you two more ways
the governing party has more power than you'd expect.
Did you know the prime minister can call a general election whenever they want?
There was a law that ensured that elections could only be held
every five years.
But Boris Johnson trashed those rules in 2019.
And even when there are elections in the UK, a party can win the most seats
in Parliament
without winning the popular vote due to its “first-past-the-post” system.
That gives a huge advantage to the two major parties.
It's gotten so bad that since 1935,
90% of governments have not actually won a majority of the public's votes.
So to many people, voting just feels unfair.
And since the 1950s, voter turnout has been falling.
So 0.3% of voters get to choose a prime minister.
The PM can call a general election whenever they feel like it.
The electoral system makes it hard for smaller parties to get anywhere
near Parliament.
And more and more people are choosing not to vote.
And that is something that simply changing
the prime minister is not going to fix.