Explain to an american how lizz truss resigning can happen

[craner]

I’d love to be Penny’s Spad. She seems very malleable.

 

[version]

She looks a bit like Christopher Hitchens had a glamorous sister.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The opposite. Knowing now, all I wanted someone to say was that in the UK, individual politicians are less 'essential' to the political culture there.

The real difference - from the U.S. - is in the mechanisms of election and governance. Political culture follows on from those mechanisms, i.e. you elect a party, not an individual. American elections allow for split ticket voting. British elections, to my understanding, do not (at least at the national level). The Prime Minister is "just" an MP who's been internally elected leader of the party that controls Parliament.

Granted the recent/post-Brexit greatly increased fragility of PMs and their inability to survive policy defeats that their predecessors would've been probably able to ride out is a more complicated question. Both the PM and Tory leadership seem so toxic that you wonder why people even want the job. Ambition and power, obviously, but it seems like if you're young enough you'd be better off waiting a few years and hoping for a better situation.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

But procedurally this is just how parliamentary systems work. The Knesset is forever dissolving over scandals and/or deadlock and holding snap elections. Belgium and Italy have both had repeated recent crises over inability of the parties to form governments and/or incumbent governments collapsing. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. It's a pro/con tradeoff compared to our system.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

but there had always been a kinda party-discipline self-preservation thing that kicked in and yet this time it broke.

Perhaps it the last few years have just been too much?

Brexit and May's inability to get a deal through, a COVID response surpassed in ineptitude only by ours, endless scandals under BJ (didn't Sunak resign from the Cabinet over one?), etc

Not only have the Tories presided over seriously bad times - largely tho tbf not entirely of their own making - they've done so mostly badly and looked generally foolish and incompetent doing it. Things like that must have an effect on party discipline.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Idk if there are any specific issues - not counting Brexit which already happened - that foster a no matter what attitude in the electorate the way abortion access does here? Like many people I hold most Democrats in varying levels of contempt but ofc I'll still vote for them so as to not wind up yunno, in a theocracy.

 

[sufi]

Our two archbishops and 24 other bishops sit in the House of Lords, making a major contribution to Parliament's work. They are known as Lords Spiritual.

His Majesty the King is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The King appoints archbishops, bishops and deans of cathedrals on the advice of the Prime Minister.

https://www.churchofengland.org/about/leadership-and-governance we quite like a bit of theocracy actually

 

[Mr. Tea]

One of only two countries (the other being Iran) where religious leaders have an automatic right to sit in parliament.