The Common Sense’s Diary: UK Edition
A Labour Member of Parliament, briefing journalists in London this week, captured a governing party’s predicament with stark clarity: “We won and won big but we had no idea what we were doing or why.” That admission lands with equal force on South Africa’s Government of National Unity, now 18 months into an arrangement that has yet to crystallize a coherent reform agenda.
Britain’s fragmentation offers South Africa a cautionary tale about the cost of elite detachment from public concern. Both nations face a similar erosion of faith in their traditional governing parties, though the paths diverging from that collapse differ sharply in their consequences for ordinary citizens.
The GNU’s first half-year saw parties adjusting to new working relationships. Time, however, has only exposed the absence of shared purpose. The coalition, once novel, is growing stale.
In Britain, the Conservative-Labour duopoly that dominated for generations is fragmenting as public frustration mounts. Insurgent parties of the right and left now command voter support that rivals the combined share of the two traditional heavyweights. South Africa is experiencing something structurally similar, though through different mechanisms. The country’s party-funding laws, designed to prevent the rise of well-capitalized alternatives to the ANC and DA, have effectively choked off the emergence of mainstream parties with coherent platforms and transparent funding. The result: insurgent movements tend to emerge as ANC splinters, and given their histories, they carry the stain of undeclared funding sources. Legitimate alternatives cannot gain traction because donor caps set ceilings so low that serious political enterprises cannot be built.
The architects of these funding restrictions understood the arithmetic. They saw the ANC as spent and Ramaphosa as no reformer. Once that failure became undeniable, they anticipated a surge of private capital seeking alternatives, money that had once backed the CR17 campaign. Preventing that flow was the intent. That local philanthropists allowed themselves to be drawn into funding some of these efforts, convinced they were supporting transparent democracy, underscores how critical it is that successful business leaders seek proper counsel before wading into political ventures.
The deeper malaise runs to questions of culture and values. The same Labour MP identified a second failure: that the party “reinforced the idea that the liberal elite did not want to hear the ideas of others.” Immigration without assimilation, the notion that all cultures carry equal moral weight, the pursuit of net-zero policies in an economy already lagging growth among advanced nations, these have poisoned public confidence. Western liberal democratic culture, which prizes the sovereign worth of the individual, is not equivalent to all others. Cultures evolve morally over time, which would be impossible if they held equal standing. Yet in Westminster’s corridors there is little appetite for stating this plainly, and in the streets, those who do face accusations of fascism.
South Africa confronts the same elite arrogance. The country cannot afford the luxury of Western climate ideology when youth unemployment approaches 50 percent. Pursuing net-zero policies while so many live in destitution is a moral abomination. Race-based empowerment policies, however well-intentioned, ignore the hard truth that nations do not have the freedom to reject skills or investment based on equity preferences. Merit must govern selection. Yet in South Africa’s halls of power, many politicians, businesspeople, and journalists dismiss such arguments as fascism, as reported at https://www.thecommonsense.co.za/Columns/common-sense-s-diary-uk-edition.
By contrast, ordinary South Africans are not waiting for political correction. Communities are building enclaves and assuming responsibilities once borne by the state. The old order fragments, but through means that may preserve capital, entrepreneurship, tax base, and employment regardless of national political outcomes.
Britain faces a steeper decline. Its middle classes confront a darker outlook because national politics must correct course for conditions to improve at all. For South Africa’s middle classes, this presents an irony worth sitting with: they are likely to live better lives than their British counterparts, a striking reversal of historical expectation. Whether that reversal holds depends on how long the GNU can afford to drift without a shared purpose that actually serves the public it was formed to govern.