Could the government fall? Precedent says no – but we are well past that

Is the government about to fall? It has to be said that the British parliamentary system makes that less likely than it might feel. For all the instability around, financial and political, the government has a large majority in the Commons and, as Liz Truss has confirmed, no wish for an early election – “the last thing we need”.

Fairly obviously, voting for a general election would mean a number of Conservative MPs and ministers out of a job. It cannot be an appetising prospect, though richly ironic given their role in creating the UK’s near-permanent state of stagflation. Even the most implacable enemy of Truss would not willingly end their political career as an act of spite.

Clearly, governments can lose by-elections, vital votes in the Commons on budgets, and even change leaders without ever being in much danger of losing a formal vote of confidence. Minority governments can, and have, soldiered on for years. Truss still has a working, albeit dysfunctional, majority of more than 70.

Early general elections usually meet with a hostile response from the voters, as Ted Heath found in 1974 and Theresa May in 2017. Only Boris Johnson, in the strange circumstances of 2019, managed to get the mandate he yearned for. The closest parallel to now would be 1931 when a (minority) Labour government fell apart during an existential financial crisis, and the party actually split.

The Labour prime minister fell in with the Tories, formed a National Government, called a general election and won a landslide. Seems unlikely now. Even if Truss went to the country and won a mandate, the markets would be under no obligation to be impressed and buy gilts. So an early election really is futile as well as fanciful.

Besides, the British seem to regard uncertainty as normal nowadays – four prime ministers in a little more than six years, and six chancellors. After all, the UK somehow managed to get through the period after the EU referendum more or less in one piece, even when, after May lost her majority in 2017, neither she nor Johnson could get a Brexit deal through the Commons. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act, since repealed, was a complicating and exacerbating factor, and at times the government lost control over business in the Commons.

In the end, it was Johnson who wanted to dissolve parliament, and the SNP and Liberal Democrats who granted him his wish at the December 2019 election. He may or may not have gotten Brexit done, but it didn’t settle the civil war in the Tory party for very long. After the pandemic, battles were rejoined, as we see now.

However, perhaps something has to give? At the moment the same stasis that gripped parliament in 2017-2019 seems to be gripping it again. In the May-Johnson era it was because there was no majority in the Commons for any given Brexit deal. Cakeism ruled – everyone wanted their cake and to eat it, and few wished to compromise. Everything got voted down, but the government carried on.

Now it is the failure of the Commons, and principally the Conservatives, to agree on how to get the public finances in order. Tory MPs want tax cuts but they also refuse to cut public spending, hence the proposed massive new borrowing. But the markets won’t lend the money at an acceptable interest rate because they don’t believe tax cuts will pay for themselves. So, the books cannot be balanced by using borrowing. We have the prospect, yet again, of a government in office but not in power, unable to actually form and implement an economic policy. Yet they are understandably unwilling to relinquish their power (and jobs), possibly for very many years in the wilderness.

The alternative is a move – a coup if you will – to replace the prime minister and/or the chancellor. Logically, the easiest thing would be for Truss to jettison Kwasi Kwarteng, but that would be a considerable humiliation, confirming her misjudgement in appointing her old friend and ally.

Yet the choice may be made for her if that is the price of keeping her own job, and of preventing such market disorder and such a scale of financial chaos that the government has to turn to the IMF for an emergency loan.

Even with a new chancellor, without a dose of realism among MPs, the incipient UK sovereign debt crisis will not abate, and even more radical changes will be needed, under this or another PM. The question may arise: are they ready for Rishi? Are they ready for the return of Boris?