No parliament anywhere could survive levels of Thai violence seen in 2013-’14

I must admit to coughing in my cornflakes after reading that Thailand, prior to the 2014 coup, had a normal parliamentary system akin to Britain’s. Presumably we are invited to believe that if David Cameron had faced nightly bomb-throwing, street massacres, huge caches of privately owned arms and huge parliamentary fraud, then he would have been left undisturbed to get on with his lacklustre premiership.

In the winter of discontent of 1978-’79 in the UK, when the dead lay unburied in the mortuaries and industrial action was pervasive, there was open speculation that the army could declare a coup to overthrow the government. Moreover, Britain declared states of emergency and martial law several times in the last century – not only in wartime – because of street violence far below the levels witnessed in Thailand. Britain also has the civil contingencies act of 2004, which allows the monarch to take over in a dire crisis.

Britain has never in peacetime faced a domestic political situation like Thailand in early 2014. If she had, or ever does, it is most unlikely that the British “normal” parliamentary system would survive intact.

Barry Kenyon