Britain has imported kings in the past. Why not an Asian prime minister?

The import of kings in the past led to the invention of central banking and the Westminster form of govt

So, many white Britishers don’t want an Asian to be their prime minister. Reports from the UK suggest Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid are being trolled by all shades of political opinion, right and left.

That’s understandable. In 2004 many of us didn’t want a European to be our prime minister, and we would’ve difficulty accepting a non-Hindu. That’s why we should be the last ones to be outraged by racial resistance to the candidature of Rishi Sunak et al. for British prime ministership.

As Arthur C Clarke wrote more than 50 years ago, humans remain tribal in their politics regardless of all other progress. The British, in fact, don’t also allow a Catholic to be their king or queen. Their law requires them to be Protestant. And thereby hangs a tale.

The year was 1688. The then-English king, James II, suddenly announced that he was a Catholic. The English Parliament swiftly booted him out and imported a king from Holland who was Protestant. He was white, of course.

He came from the province of Orange and is known to posterity as William of Orange and was renamed William III. He reigned for 13 years. His reign had an interesting consequence: the birth of central banking.

Poor William III found that, like many sovereigns through the ages, he had no money, or at least not enough to finance an ongoing war. In those days, England was like Pakistan today, belligerent, untrustworthy and constantly at war with someone.

He asked the City of London, which comprised a bunch of moneylenders, for £1,200,000, and offered an 8 per cent interest. These moneybags initially said no, we don’t trust you. The king and subjects haggled a bit, and the latter imposed a condition: set up a bank whose chief, to be called Governor, and this bank will have exclusive control over all government money. 

Not just that: the new bank would also issue notes in case it became necessary to get the money back that way. That was, and is, the DNA of central banks. William’s bloodline petered out in 1715 when his daughter Queen Anne died. So, the Brits imported another white man, this time from Hanover in Germany.

He became George I, and two other Georges reigned after his death, George II and III. The last one was mad and lost the English their American empire in 1776. The Hanover bloodline has continued uninterrupted since then. The current bunch are all descendants. 

The importation of the first German, George I, had a completely unanticipated constitutional consequence, just as William’s had had an economic one. It resulted in the invention of the cabinet system of government. This happened because poor old George didn’t know English. He needed a minister who at least knew Latin. Robert Walpole, one of the ministers, knew it. Thus, he became the link between the sovereign and his ministers, primus inter pares, or the first amongst equals. 

And that’s how the cabinet system was born because George delegated everything to Walpole. He continued as prime minister, with a four-year break between 1717-21 till his removal in 1742. Then the English lawyers and historians created an entire mythology around this entirely accidental system, just as they have around the Bank of England. They told the world it wasn’t only the best system but also the only natural one.

This system has come to be known as the Westminster form of government, and we in India have adopted it.