When a country cycles through leaders at breakneck speed, the problem runs deeper than personnel. Some systems are simply incapable of producing good leaders. Britain is the textbook case.
Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced his resignation, making him the seventh prime minister Britain will have churned through in a single decade. Starmer served less than two years in office. The previous six were dominated by five Conservatives: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.
Then, in 2024, Labour won power with just 34% of the vote. Thanks to Britain's first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all electoral system, it secured a parliamentary majority and governed alone. Two years on, swapping the party in power has done nothing to revive Britain's fortunes.
The political force enjoying the highest approval ratings today is the far-right Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage. Before 1992, Farage was a Conservative member. His Euroscepticism — his opposition to Britain joining the EU — drove him out. This anti-immigration, far-right figurehead has since become Britain's most popular politician.
Cast your mind back ten years to today — the eve of the Brexit referendum. A red campaign bus plastered with pro-Brexit slogans became "a beautiful sight to behold". Its message read: "We send the EU £350 million a week - let's fund our NHS instead. Vote Leave."
Standing in front of that bus, freshly departed as Mayor of London, was a buoyant Boris Johnson, training his sights on his old Eton and Oxford classmate, Prime Minister David Cameron. Both were Conservatives, but at university Johnson commanded the room while Cameron kept a low profile. Johnson clearly could not stomach watching his old classmate rise to the top job. So when Cameron recklessly called a referendum on EU membership, Johnson seized the moment, positioning himself as a sniper waving the Brexit flag.
Dominic Cummings, the enigmatic architect of the Leave campaign, later admitted that it was precisely that red bus slogan that drove them to victory. With the benefit of hindsight, every Brexit promise Johnson made — chasing away migrants, saving on EU membership fees, improving British healthcare — now reads as pure farce. Johnson also served as Prime Minister from 2019 to 2022, holding real power. None of those promises were kept.
Start with the claim about NHS funding. The £350 million-a-week figure was itself inflated — the net contribution was closer to £250 million. But that deception is only the tip of the iceberg. The NHS waiting list stood at roughly 3.7 million patients in 2016. By April this year, it had ballooned to 7.22 million. The median waiting time for treatment climbed from 6.9 weeks in September 2011 to 11.9 weeks as of April this year.
The most direct cause is Brexit's dismal return on investment. Leave campaigners had promised to redirect EU membership savings into the NHS. Instead, Brexit slashed Britain's revenues. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that Brexit has permanently reduced UK productivity by 4%, with the overall economic cost shrinking the economy by between 4% and 8%.
The financial damage and fiscal pressure from Brexit far outstripped any savings on EU contributions. Meanwhile, inflation and an aging population have continued to push NHS running costs ever higher. Beyond empty promises, the Conservatives proved utterly incapable of addressing the NHS crisis.
The healthcare debacle, however, is only a small part of Britain's political comedy. The bigger punchline is "Brexit will drive out migrants."
Johnson pledged to bring net migration down to 100,000 a year after leaving the EU. Reality delivered the exact opposite. According to the Office for National Statistics, net migration in the year of Brexit stood at 252,000. During Johnson's three years as Prime Minister, the figure surged dramatically — peaking at 891,000 in 2022, a wave widely dubbed the "Johnson surge." Only after Labour took office did net migration begin to ease, falling to 171,000 last year.
Johnson's immigration record is steeped in irony. The core Brexit promise was to "take back control of our borders" — primarily by curbing immigration — a rallying cry that resonated with voters in England's old industrial heartlands in the north. Brexit did succeed in severing the free movement of EU nationals into the UK. Data from 2025 shows that net migration from Europe has actually turned negative, at minus 70,000 — meaning more Europeans are leaving Britain than arriving.
Plot twist: a massive influx of non-EU migrants filled that gap: care worker visas shot up from 22,000 to 101,000, and international student and academic visas poured in alongside them.
Brexit drove out the Polish lorry drivers and French chefs. First came a wave of Hong Kong BNO holders driving Ubers, then far larger numbers of refugees, workers, and students from South Asia and Africa. By year-end last year, under Labour's aggressive intervention, net migration had finally retreated to 171,000 — close to pre-referendum levels.
Oxford University's Migration Observatory, nonetheless, put it sharply in its ten-year retrospective: while the numbers may have returned to pre-Brexit levels, the composition is entirely different.
Why did Johnson's promise of Brexit reducing migration produce the exact opposite result? Brexit dramatically reduced the supply of working-class labor from EU countries, leaving the government little choice but to admit more refugees and new migrants to fill low-wage roles. Brexit also drove large numbers of high-net-worth Europeans out of the UK.
Johnson then exploited Hong Kong's social unrest in 2019 to attract Hong Kong people — along with their assets — to migrate to Britain, propping up a faltering economy. Johnson was not motivated by compassion. Using new migrants, Johnson merely robbed Peter to pay Paul , to plug the labor and capital shortfalls that Brexit itself had caused.
This is how British policy operates. The system elects a performer like Johnson — a man who perfects the art of disheveled hair and studied eccentricity. It lets him champion a catastrophic Brexit referendum. It watches him quietly abandon every campaign promise he made. Then it stands by as he imports waves of migrants as damage control. He went on to interfere in Ukrainian-Russian peace negotiations, prolonging the war. Ordinary Britons footed the bill for soaring energy prices.
And what became of this former Prime Minister? Globetrotting for paychecks — traveling all the way to Mumbai, India, to attend the lavish wedding of the younger son of Mukesh Ambani, India's wealthiest man. Collecting appearance fees and continued to rake in easy money.
Johnson faces zero consequences for the ruinous decisions he made while in power. That, apparently, is British democracy.
Some commentators say Britain has been asleep for ten years. The reality is far worse: Britain has gone bonkers for ten years, and will continue to be mad for years to come. The British system churns through accountability and prime ministers in equal measure, yet the issues people care most about only get worse. The process looks right, but it never produces the right results.
Friends who have emigrated to Britain truly need to take heed. Raising the next generation under this kind of system offers no promising future in sight.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
China envisions a world in harmony. Nations talk through their differences instead of fighting them out, and the rising tides lift all boats.
On June 18, the British Financial Times republished an article by Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, titled "China's Tribute System and the New World Order." Dalio writes that earlier this year he spent a month in Asia, meeting with senior policymakers from China and across the region. He returned convinced that the global order is undergoing a profound shift.
Two developments stand out.
First, Washington's handling of Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has left Asian leaders broadly skeptical about whether the United States is truly willing to bear the costs of war.
Second, China is generating enormous wealth through exports. Its companies and banks are piling up vast capital surpluses. That buildup is pushing the RMB higher and driving its wider use in trade and financial transactions. China's investors and capital markets are emerging as genuine rivals to their American counterparts.
Dalio then argues that, having visited China over 42 years, understanding China's worldview is essential. That worldview, he says, is rooted in Confucian culture, the tributary system, and Sun Tzu-style strategic thinking.
China's historical lessons matter just as much. During the century of national humiliation, foreign powers seized vast swathes of Chinese territory and exploited its people. A lesson seared into China's psychology and strategic outlook.
The tribute system Dalio refers to describes an order between states built on explicit hierarchical roles: not one of equality, but one that openly acknowledges superior and subordinate relationships. He argues that China's leaders do not seek to build an empire to control other nations, because doing so would be inefficient.
The Western approach, Dalio argues, has always relied on war to seize territory and impose control. The primary reason why the United States maintains 700 to 800 military bases across 80 countries. China, by contrast, has only one overseas military base. Dalio even interprets the stream of foreign leaders who visited China over the past six months as a sign of willingness to forge ties with China akin to tributary allegiance.
Dalio gets some things right. China does indeed practice "winning without fighting" — one need only observe how President Xi has handled his dealings with Trump to see this in action. But China has no desire to build a tribute system. Such feudal imperial mindset is fundamentally at odds with the modernizing vision of China's current leadership.
Dalio's use of the tribute system as a framework for understanding China's approach to international relations does have roots in Western political science and international relations theory. Two theories are most frequently cited.
Finlandization Theory
The term "Finlandization" originated in West German political circles during the Cold War. Western strategists now routinely invoke it as a modern analogue for a "neo-tribute system."
The concept is straightforward. A smaller nation, facing an overwhelming neighbor, quietly abandons any foreign policy that might provoke it. In return, the powerful neighbor leaves its sovereignty and economy intact. Survival, not pride, drives the bargain.
Many Western hawks argue that China's economic diplomacy has a hidden agenda. The Belt and Road Initiative, they contend, is the primary vehicle. Its true purpose, they say, is to "Finlandize" neighboring countries and even Europe into a modern-day form of tribute extraction.
The Tianxia (All-Under-Heaven) Framework
Western scholars specializing in East Asia — such as Brantly Womack — frequently bring the ancient Chinese concept of tianxia (天下, "all under heaven") into Western theoretical discourse.
The core argument cuts to a fundamental divide. The West champions the Westphalian system, built on the absolute equality of sovereign states. The East, by contrast, emphasizes "relationalism." International politics is viewed as a web of asymmetric but reciprocal relationships. Proximity, hierarchy, and mutual obligation matter more than legal equality.
These scholars argue that China's vision of a new world order is not built on legal contracts binding nations together. It is defined by how close, or how distant, each country's relationship with Beijing actually is. Precisely what Dalio describes as "superiors and subordinates acknowledging their relative positions, with pressure applied through harmony and strategic acumen."
These two Western interpretations of China's supposed tributary mentality represent two distinct schools of thought.
The first, the realist school, leans critical, viewing China as simply using repackaged language to expand its sphere of influence.
The second school is cultural-historical in its approach, and it takes a more sympathetic view. It accepts that China operates from a security logic that is genuinely different from the West's. It also holds that China's preference for non-violent, coercion-free order is real. The condition is simple. Other nations must satisfy China's cultural-psychological need to “save face, earn respect, and occupy a central role”. Meet that need, and China will choose harmony over confrontation every time.
Alas, neither of these Western political theories can adequately explain China as it actually exists today. China has put forward the concept of “a community with a shared future for mankind", as the strategic foundation of its foreign relations. Modern China's external policy differs fundamentally from the ancient tribute system in two key respects.
Asymmetric Reciprocity
China advocates a correct approach to justice and interests — placing righteousness before profit. It extends unilateral tariff exemptions to the vast majority of African nations, helping them export more goods to China. It has also funded the construction of substantial infrastructure on their behalf and written off portions of their debt.
Such are the actions of a responsible great power. Having grown prosperous itself, China hopes to extend the same opportunity to other developing nations.
Sovereign Equality
The tribute system's defining characteristic is an unequal ruler-subject relationship. The vision of "A Community of Shared Future for Mankind," by contrast, is grounded in the legal principle enshrined in the UN Charter: the absolute equality of sovereign states and non-interference in internal affairs.
This differs from the ancient tribute system, which demands the political submission of weaker states. A framework built on international treaties rather than bilateral relationships.
Western political scientists — even those sympathetic China-watchers with deep understanding of the country — tend to characterize China's leaders as driven by a need to "save face, earn respect, and occupy a central role."
In reality, those three descriptions fit US President Trump far more aptly. It is American leadership, not Chinese, that insists on remaining the supreme superpower, the center of the world.
Consider the controversy in which Trump claimed that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had "begged" to take a photo with him at the G7 summit, only for Italy to flatly deny the allegation and subsequently cancel its foreign minister's visit to the United States.
Clearly, it is not Beijing that cannot afford to look small.
Americans have a habit of projecting their own impulses onto others. Since US GDP surpassed Britain's in 1914, America has spent over a century constructing a system of asymmetric global power dependency centered on itself. Now that this hegemony is showing cracks, America projects its own image onto China.
China does not need other nations to come and pay tribute. It simply seeks to build a peaceful, mutually beneficial new world.
Lo Wing-hung
