KEIR STARMER’S RESIGNATION OFFERS SOUTH AFRICA A CAUTIONARY MIRROR
The collapse of Britain’s old political order carries lessons for South Africa’s governing coalition, according to analysis published this week by The Common Sense. Both nations face the fracturing of traditional party structures, though through different mechanisms and with divergent long-term implications.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.thecommonsense.co.za/Columns/common-sense-s-diary-uk-edition.
At a London briefing attended by The Common Sense editorial team, a Labour MP captured the disarray afflicting Britain’s government with a single remark: “We won and won big but we had no idea what we were doing or why.” The observation applies with striking force to South Africa’s Government of National Unity, now 18 months into its experiment in multi-party governance. The initial six months of the GNU showed promise as parties adjusted to the new arrangement. Eighteen months on, a coherent reform agenda has failed to materialize, and the coalition has begun to stagnate.
The structural vulnerabilities differ sharply between the two countries. In Britain, the Conservative-Labour duopoly that dominated postwar politics has fractured as public disillusionment with both parties has deepened. Insurgent parties of the right and left now command voter share rivaling the combined strength of Labour and the Tories. South Africa’s political landscape operates under different constraints. Party funding laws enacted in recent years have made it nearly impossible to establish new mainstream rivals to the ANC or DA. The caps on donor funding are deliberately restrictive. This was by design: actors who anticipated the ANC’s decline and recognized that President Ramaphosa would not drive genuine reform understood that once his failure became evident, private capital would seek alternative political vehicles. The funding restrictions were imposed to prevent exactly that outcome. The result is that insurgent parties, the MKP and the EFF, have emerged primarily as ANC splinters, and their open histories of corruption have invited speculation about undeclared funding sources. Legitimate mainstream parties with coherent policy platforms cannot practically be established under the current legal framework.
The ideological fracture in Britain runs deeper than partisan competition alone. The same Labour MP identified a cultural dimension to the party’s malaise: the perception that “the liberal elite did not want to hear the ideas of others.” This points to a broader civilizational question. Immigration without assimilation, combined with the assertion that all cultures hold equal moral worth, has corroded British social cohesion. Yet Western liberal democratic culture, which privileges the sovereign worth of the individual, is not equivalent to all others. Cultures evolve morally over time; if all cultures were truly equal in worth, such evolution would be impossible. Against this backdrop, the pursuit of net-zero policies in an economy that lags growth among advanced nations appears disconnected from material reality. The fragmentation of British politics becomes less surprising when viewed through this lens.
South Africa faces a parallel elite arrogance, though with more acute consequences. The pursuit of net-zero ideology while youth unemployment approaches 50 percent represents a moral failure. The country cannot afford Western climate orthodoxy when so many citizens live in severe deprivation. Race-based empowerment policy similarly denies South Africa the flexibility to select talent and investment on merit, a principle that has driven success elsewhere. Yet in South African halls of power, many politicians, businesspeople, and journalists dismiss such arguments as fascistic rather than engaging them substantively. Merit-based selection offers a more sustainable path forward.
By contrast, the response to GNU staleness differs between the nations in ways that matter. Without viable insurgent parties to channel voter frustration, South Africans are constructing parallel structures. Communities are assuming responsibilities once held by the state, building enclaves that function independently of national governance. This fragmentation occurs through different means than Britain’s, but with potentially more hopeful outcomes. South Africa’s capital base, entrepreneurial capacity, tax base, and employment base may remain intact regardless of national political direction, insulating the country from the precipice that has engulfed other post-colonial emerging markets. Britain, by contrast, faces a darker outlook for its middle classes, as national politics must fundamentally realign to reverse decline.
For South Africa’s middle classes, this divergence offers unexpected perspective: their material prospects may exceed those of their British counterparts, despite South Africa’s broader development challenges. Whether the GNU can translate that underlying resilience into a coherent governing agenda before stagnation hardens into something worse remains the open question.