Commonwealth Election of 2031
Sic Itur Ad Astra: The Commonwealth of Nations in the 21st Century
The 2031 election was a remarkable and complicated one, with countless national parties, large and small, amalgamating into larger groupings for Commonwealth-wide purposes. Of course, this had been something which had occurred for Commonwealth Assembly groupings but in those cases national parties tended to retain formal connections with their AMs, reinforcing the idea of the Assembly groupings as coalitions rather than parties and going some way towards ensuring that the Speakership never evolved into the full prime ministerial role that many in the 1960s had assumed (with either foreboding or anticipation) it would. Now, however, the Commonwealth Constitution had forced the various political elites of member states to think about what governance of this globe-spanning nation would look like in practice.
The Commonwealth Constitution had enshrined the role of Prime Minister and cabinet along with a detailed process by which one would be chosen. Key to this process was the role of Speaker, which was changed from the quasi-prime ministerial role of beforehand to a purely administrative one that was combined with that of the head of the Commonwealth civil service. The Speaker had the power to nominate an AM as prime minister, with a ‘suggestion’ written into the constitution that the Speaker should call on the leader of the largest party first, followed by the leader of the second largest party and so on. The whole Assembly would then vote on the proposed prime minister, who would then be confirmed in his or her position with a 50%+1 vote.
In this environment of explicit parliamentary party politics, the old order of loose groupings could not survive. In particular, the old ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal Democrat’ groupings were completely divided on all manner of policies, with there being legitimate academic arguments about where both of them ought to be put on the political spectrum. Clearly, they could not continue in this new world and it surprised nobody when they announced that they would be wound up ahead of the 2031 election. Similarly, few were surprised when Brian Lara, having been so prominent in the campaign to adopt the constitution, announced that he would be leaving West Indian domestic politics to lead the main centre-right grouping which would be called the People’s Party. In the UK, both the Conservatives and the Libertarians announced that they would be competing under this banner.
Also unsurprisingly, Jacinda Ardern had no intention of remaining in a position that was now purely administrative and so would instead lead the main centre-left party, to be called the Socialists. However, the Socialists would not have a clear run on the centre and centre-left, with Bilawal Bhutto Zardari forming a third party to oppose both the Socialists and the People’s Party. This grouping would be called Centre Party, an attempt to split the difference. These moves caused the final crumbling of what was left of the British party system: most of Labour and Co-operatives went with the Socialists; most Progressives and Liberals went with the Centre Party but by no means all. The resulting mess of MPs crossing the floor was the main subject of media discussion in the autumn and winter of 2030, while Stewart worked on finalising the passing of the constitution.
Stewart himself was rumoured to have been approached by all three of the new main parties but on 2 January 2031 declared that he would not be standing for election in the new parliament and would instead be retiring to manage his farm in Cumbria. In his speech he rather grandly compared himself to Lycurgus, even if that was an analogy that might have gone over the heads of most people. An odd man, certainly, but arguably one of the most consequential of his age.
With the People’s, Socialist and Centre Parties occupying the centre-right, centre-left and centre of the political spectrum, eyes then turned to the Green and the Nationalist groupings, to see what would happen to the far-left and far-right, in turn. The Greens - even if their name no longer made a huge amount of sense given the takeup of environmentalism across the political spectrum - were able to hold together their national party affiliations very well and achieved a notable coup when the charismatic New Progressive Puerto Rican prime minister Alexandria Ocasio Cortez became the party’s leader.
For the Nationalists, however, the passing of the Commonwealth constitution represented an existential crisis. Previously a grouping defined by its commitment to Angloscepticism, the turning of the Commonwealth into a full federal state represented the group’s ultimate failure and seriously called into question its reason to exist going forward. William Ruto, the former Chancellor of East Africa, came to take up the leadership and turned the party down a direction of explicit social conservatism but few were too positive about their chances.
In many senses, the result was unsurprising to many observers of Commonwealth politics, with the Socialists gaining the most seats but failing, because of the electoral system, to gain a majority. After a week of negotiations, however, Ardern was confirmed by the Assembly as the first Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, with the Socialists in government propped up by confidence and supply agreements with the Centre and Green parties.
Jacinda Ardern is congratulated by King George VII on her investiture as the first Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, February 2031
During her tenure, Ardern could look forward to governing a country that was both young and old at the same time. As was the case with her Speakership before 2031, she would find much of her time dominated by constitutional affairs, with the provinces and states of Australia, Canada and West Canada splitting into their own constituent elements as full member states. However, the widespread Balkanisation that some predicted did not come to pass: Kashmiri nationalism dissipated over the course of the 2030s for a number of reasons (most notably the scandal-ridden collapse of the Kashmiri Nationalist Party) and the century-old nationalisms of East Africa and the West Indies (among others) proved more durable than many had predicted.
The biggest change, however, came in the old mother country. Many academics had previously derided ‘British’ identity as an artificial designation layered over English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh identities and made relevant only by the UK’s important global role, first in the Empire and then in the Commonwealth. Now, with the new Commonwealth country occupying that upper level of identity, the need for ‘Britain’ came into doubt. The end came suddenly but without particular drama. On 1 January 2046, the United Kingdom ceased to be a member state of the Commonwealth, replaced by the separate member states of Ireland, Cornwall, England, Yorkshire, London, Wales and Scotland.
Domestically, the Commonwealth would never attain the level of economic growth that it had done in the second half of the 20th century but, frankly, after a few months this no longer seemed to matter: Gross National Happiness was a difficult concept for many people to get their heads around initially but, after a while, it came to be seen as natural. And, besides, few could seriously doubt that Commonwealth citizens are, at least materially, the richest in the world. Combined with the continuing advances in AI and public health, the largest public health crisis that faced the Commonwealth would be that of mental health problems brought about by boredom, as the fastest growing industry by 2050 would be that of psychologist.
In foreign affairs, the world of 2031 looked more uncertain than the one three decades ago. The UN had finally extricated themselves from the quagmire of former-Yugoslavia but the region remained a simmering hotbed of ethnic tensions. Concerns about the stability of the CIS were on the rise, where news of riots by ethnic Romanians targeting ethnic Soviets in Bucharest over the summer of 2030 leaked out into the wider world despite official attempts to suppress it. In Asia, meanwhile, China and Japan remained on wary terms, with Japan’s attempt to ally-build to counteract Chinese influence in the region having, at best, mixed results. The United States, too, was charting an uncertain course in the century: the Monuments Bombing seems to have brought about a long-term change in American political attitudes, with the legacy of the First Yugoslav War and the round up of white nationalists following the bombings making it a more internally wary and globally aggressive nation. Africa, of course, loomed large over the international conversation, with the hodge-podge of small states enshrined by the Damascus Accords being competed over for influence by Azawad, Egypt and Ethiopia, a situation which, with the Commonwealth member states of Rhodesia and East Africa also present, threatened a brute power politics on the continent. Elsewhere, the continued success of the People’s Party in India spoke of an aggressive Hindu nationalism that threatened military flashpoints right on the Commonwealth’s borders.
In the realm of space, the decades to come would see greater investment in the off-world bases, culminating in the birth, on 3 August 2059, of the first human - Lindsay Mirza - on Mars and the establishment of permanent communities at the Cook, Drake and Maui bases, while corporations, cooperatives and trades unions expanded to explore the opportunities in the asteroid belt. Disputes with other powers would prevent these bases from receiving status as full member states in the Commonwealth for some time but their populations nevertheless grew rapidly, soon rivalling certain cities on Earth. Although they had not yet encountered aliens, the Commonwealth Space Agency was keenly aware of its position as the organisation that would likely have to introduce humanity to non-human intelligent life and put much thought into the formulation of words to be used if/when that happens. Finally, it was decided that any Commonwealth astronauts would introduce themselves to aliens as representing “the people, nations and cultures of humanity.” This phrase soon took a hold on the public’s imagination and many Commonwealth citizens, not without more than a hint of arrogance, began to describe themselves in those terms as well, although soon this lengthy formulation began to be abbreviated and, by the 23rd century, most Commonwealth citizens simply described themselves as “the Culture.”
But all of that was for the future. In the immediate aftermath of the first elections, the aged King George VII (who would die only 18 months later) hosted a gala at Windsor Castle, attended by all members of the Commonwealth Assembly as well as certain key figures, such as Stewart and Lara, who were informally, if derivatively, referred to as the Commonwealth’s ‘founding parents.’ One year later, the government would order the building of a ‘Hall of the Commonwealth’ on the Windsor grounds to celebrate the creation of the new country. While academics who specialised in late-Hanoverian architecture would complain that the new building would necessitate the moving of Queen Victoria’s mausoleum, few people had much time for this unremarkable and generally unremembered late-Hanoverian monarch. After all, what kind of influence on Commonwealth history did she really have?
The 2031 election was a remarkable and complicated one, with countless national parties, large and small, amalgamating into larger groupings for Commonwealth-wide purposes. Of course, this had been something which had occurred for Commonwealth Assembly groupings but in those cases national parties tended to retain formal connections with their AMs, reinforcing the idea of the Assembly groupings as coalitions rather than parties and going some way towards ensuring that the Speakership never evolved into the full prime ministerial role that many in the 1960s had assumed (with either foreboding or anticipation) it would. Now, however, the Commonwealth Constitution had forced the various political elites of member states to think about what governance of this globe-spanning nation would look like in practice.
The Commonwealth Constitution had enshrined the role of Prime Minister and cabinet along with a detailed process by which one would be chosen. Key to this process was the role of Speaker, which was changed from the quasi-prime ministerial role of beforehand to a purely administrative one that was combined with that of the head of the Commonwealth civil service. The Speaker had the power to nominate an AM as prime minister, with a ‘suggestion’ written into the constitution that the Speaker should call on the leader of the largest party first, followed by the leader of the second largest party and so on. The whole Assembly would then vote on the proposed prime minister, who would then be confirmed in his or her position with a 50%+1 vote.
In this environment of explicit parliamentary party politics, the old order of loose groupings could not survive. In particular, the old ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal Democrat’ groupings were completely divided on all manner of policies, with there being legitimate academic arguments about where both of them ought to be put on the political spectrum. Clearly, they could not continue in this new world and it surprised nobody when they announced that they would be wound up ahead of the 2031 election. Similarly, few were surprised when Brian Lara, having been so prominent in the campaign to adopt the constitution, announced that he would be leaving West Indian domestic politics to lead the main centre-right grouping which would be called the People’s Party. In the UK, both the Conservatives and the Libertarians announced that they would be competing under this banner.
Also unsurprisingly, Jacinda Ardern had no intention of remaining in a position that was now purely administrative and so would instead lead the main centre-left party, to be called the Socialists. However, the Socialists would not have a clear run on the centre and centre-left, with Bilawal Bhutto Zardari forming a third party to oppose both the Socialists and the People’s Party. This grouping would be called Centre Party, an attempt to split the difference. These moves caused the final crumbling of what was left of the British party system: most of Labour and Co-operatives went with the Socialists; most Progressives and Liberals went with the Centre Party but by no means all. The resulting mess of MPs crossing the floor was the main subject of media discussion in the autumn and winter of 2030, while Stewart worked on finalising the passing of the constitution.
Stewart himself was rumoured to have been approached by all three of the new main parties but on 2 January 2031 declared that he would not be standing for election in the new parliament and would instead be retiring to manage his farm in Cumbria. In his speech he rather grandly compared himself to Lycurgus, even if that was an analogy that might have gone over the heads of most people. An odd man, certainly, but arguably one of the most consequential of his age.
With the People’s, Socialist and Centre Parties occupying the centre-right, centre-left and centre of the political spectrum, eyes then turned to the Green and the Nationalist groupings, to see what would happen to the far-left and far-right, in turn. The Greens - even if their name no longer made a huge amount of sense given the takeup of environmentalism across the political spectrum - were able to hold together their national party affiliations very well and achieved a notable coup when the charismatic New Progressive Puerto Rican prime minister Alexandria Ocasio Cortez became the party’s leader.
For the Nationalists, however, the passing of the Commonwealth constitution represented an existential crisis. Previously a grouping defined by its commitment to Angloscepticism, the turning of the Commonwealth into a full federal state represented the group’s ultimate failure and seriously called into question its reason to exist going forward. William Ruto, the former Chancellor of East Africa, came to take up the leadership and turned the party down a direction of explicit social conservatism but few were too positive about their chances.
In many senses, the result was unsurprising to many observers of Commonwealth politics, with the Socialists gaining the most seats but failing, because of the electoral system, to gain a majority. After a week of negotiations, however, Ardern was confirmed by the Assembly as the first Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, with the Socialists in government propped up by confidence and supply agreements with the Centre and Green parties.
Jacinda Ardern is congratulated by King George VII on her investiture as the first Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, February 2031
During her tenure, Ardern could look forward to governing a country that was both young and old at the same time. As was the case with her Speakership before 2031, she would find much of her time dominated by constitutional affairs, with the provinces and states of Australia, Canada and West Canada splitting into their own constituent elements as full member states. However, the widespread Balkanisation that some predicted did not come to pass: Kashmiri nationalism dissipated over the course of the 2030s for a number of reasons (most notably the scandal-ridden collapse of the Kashmiri Nationalist Party) and the century-old nationalisms of East Africa and the West Indies (among others) proved more durable than many had predicted.
The biggest change, however, came in the old mother country. Many academics had previously derided ‘British’ identity as an artificial designation layered over English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh identities and made relevant only by the UK’s important global role, first in the Empire and then in the Commonwealth. Now, with the new Commonwealth country occupying that upper level of identity, the need for ‘Britain’ came into doubt. The end came suddenly but without particular drama. On 1 January 2046, the United Kingdom ceased to be a member state of the Commonwealth, replaced by the separate member states of Ireland, Cornwall, England, Yorkshire, London, Wales and Scotland.
Domestically, the Commonwealth would never attain the level of economic growth that it had done in the second half of the 20th century but, frankly, after a few months this no longer seemed to matter: Gross National Happiness was a difficult concept for many people to get their heads around initially but, after a while, it came to be seen as natural. And, besides, few could seriously doubt that Commonwealth citizens are, at least materially, the richest in the world. Combined with the continuing advances in AI and public health, the largest public health crisis that faced the Commonwealth would be that of mental health problems brought about by boredom, as the fastest growing industry by 2050 would be that of psychologist.
In foreign affairs, the world of 2031 looked more uncertain than the one three decades ago. The UN had finally extricated themselves from the quagmire of former-Yugoslavia but the region remained a simmering hotbed of ethnic tensions. Concerns about the stability of the CIS were on the rise, where news of riots by ethnic Romanians targeting ethnic Soviets in Bucharest over the summer of 2030 leaked out into the wider world despite official attempts to suppress it. In Asia, meanwhile, China and Japan remained on wary terms, with Japan’s attempt to ally-build to counteract Chinese influence in the region having, at best, mixed results. The United States, too, was charting an uncertain course in the century: the Monuments Bombing seems to have brought about a long-term change in American political attitudes, with the legacy of the First Yugoslav War and the round up of white nationalists following the bombings making it a more internally wary and globally aggressive nation. Africa, of course, loomed large over the international conversation, with the hodge-podge of small states enshrined by the Damascus Accords being competed over for influence by Azawad, Egypt and Ethiopia, a situation which, with the Commonwealth member states of Rhodesia and East Africa also present, threatened a brute power politics on the continent. Elsewhere, the continued success of the People’s Party in India spoke of an aggressive Hindu nationalism that threatened military flashpoints right on the Commonwealth’s borders.
In the realm of space, the decades to come would see greater investment in the off-world bases, culminating in the birth, on 3 August 2059, of the first human - Lindsay Mirza - on Mars and the establishment of permanent communities at the Cook, Drake and Maui bases, while corporations, cooperatives and trades unions expanded to explore the opportunities in the asteroid belt. Disputes with other powers would prevent these bases from receiving status as full member states in the Commonwealth for some time but their populations nevertheless grew rapidly, soon rivalling certain cities on Earth. Although they had not yet encountered aliens, the Commonwealth Space Agency was keenly aware of its position as the organisation that would likely have to introduce humanity to non-human intelligent life and put much thought into the formulation of words to be used if/when that happens. Finally, it was decided that any Commonwealth astronauts would introduce themselves to aliens as representing “the people, nations and cultures of humanity.” This phrase soon took a hold on the public’s imagination and many Commonwealth citizens, not without more than a hint of arrogance, began to describe themselves in those terms as well, although soon this lengthy formulation began to be abbreviated and, by the 23rd century, most Commonwealth citizens simply described themselves as “the Culture.”
But all of that was for the future. In the immediate aftermath of the first elections, the aged King George VII (who would die only 18 months later) hosted a gala at Windsor Castle, attended by all members of the Commonwealth Assembly as well as certain key figures, such as Stewart and Lara, who were informally, if derivatively, referred to as the Commonwealth’s ‘founding parents.’ One year later, the government would order the building of a ‘Hall of the Commonwealth’ on the Windsor grounds to celebrate the creation of the new country. While academics who specialised in late-Hanoverian architecture would complain that the new building would necessitate the moving of Queen Victoria’s mausoleum, few people had much time for this unremarkable and generally unremembered late-Hanoverian monarch. After all, what kind of influence on Commonwealth history did she really have?
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