I’ll start this by confessing I don’t know much about politics: I tend to avoid debates, as the descent into shouting gets me down. What I do know about is the difference between content, what we argue about, and process, how we argue. When an individual or a couple or a family made use of my professional psychotherapy services, this is what I’d be interested in. Because it isn’t conflict and difference that make a system dysfunctional: it is the process of how these differences are addressed that matters.
A few days ago I watched an Instagram video by the Chinese commentator Yuanpu Huang, known online as @YuanUnpacksChina. He pointed out that Britain is likely to be welcoming its seventh prime minister in 10 years and suggested that perhaps we are asking the wrong questions.
Perhaps the question is not what is wrong with this prime minister or that one. Perhaps the question is: what sort of political system produces this level of instability?
Psychotherapists often notice that families under strain can develop a habit of identifying one individual as the problem. It may be the teenager who is acting out, the parent who withdraws into work. Everyone else gathers around this identified patient and hopes that if only they would change, leave, recover or behave differently, harmony would return. And yet it doesn’t, because it is rarely one individual but the system that needs to change. The reason is that the person may be expressing something that belongs to the whole system. The family dynamics remain in place and then somebody else begins carrying the symptoms.
I wonder whether British politics has fallen into a similar pattern. We remove one leader and look to the next with relief and optimism. Before long disappointment sets in and attention turns to their successor. Since the Brexit referendum we have moved from David Cameron to Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, and it looks like Andy Burnham is coming next. Some have entered politics with a stronger sense of public service than others. Some have been diligent and some have been driven by ambition or ego. None of them, however, have remained in office long enough to provide the sort of continuity that allows governments to think beyond immediate survival.
If politics becomes primarily about winning, changing your mind begins to look suspiciously like losing
Yuan compared our current position with the final years of China's Ming dynasty, when emperors changed their chief ministers with increasing frequency. Eventually it became difficult to avoid the conclusion that the issue was not the ministers but the structure within which they were operating. There are reasons to worry about what repeated changes in leadership do to a country. Large projects require consistency. Reforming social care, improving infrastructure, building houses, reshaping education, addressing climate change, building internal and international relationships all require a time horizon that stretches beyond the next headline or internal party rebellion.
Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs, October 2025. Photo: House of Commons/PA Images/Getty
Earlier this year, the political journalist and comedian Matt Chorley took me to prime minister's questions. I had never attended before and I left feeling dispirited. I had imagined disagreement, challenge and scrutiny, but what I saw felt closer to ritual humiliation. Members shouted across the chamber while colleagues laughed and jeered behind them. Personal insults seemed to receive applause. The atmosphere wasn't one of a serious workplace, not even a school debating society, but a playground where insults and bullying were valued above thought. It was horrible.
Politics requires disagreement. Different parties exist because they hold different ideas about how to organise society and spend public money. Yet I found myself wondering whether our political architecture encourages performance over problem-solving.
The room itself may contribute to this. The benches of the House of Commons face one another across a narrow divide, physically embodying opposition. The language we use reflects this arrangement. There is government and opposition, winning and losing, defeat and victory. Where is there room for changing minds, nuance and complexity, in such a system? If politics becomes primarily about winning, changing your mind begins to look suspiciously like losing. Yet in therapy, science and ordinary life we tend to regard the ability to revise our views in the light of new evidence as a strength rather than a weakness.
Conflict has become the government’s dominant mode. Perhaps it is time to ask whether a debating chamber designed for a two-party system in another century still serves us well. I would happily see the Palace of Westminster become what it increasingly is already: a museum and historical monument. The work of government could move elsewhere into a modern chamber arranged in a circle, where representatives face the issue under discussion rather than sitting opposite an enemy to be defeated. Round tables encourage collaboration in families, schools and workplaces. It seems odd that we assume politics should be immune to such considerations. There is a perfectly good conference centre opposite the House of Commons off Parliament Square that would probably work better.
When we read about countries such as Denmark, where public trust in institutions remains comparatively high and coalition governments require negotiation and compromise, we are reminded that our political system is not a law of nature. It is a human invention and can be redesigned. Britain still clings to first-past-the-post voting as though it were an immutable feature of democracy rather than one possible method among many. Proportional representation remains a minority interest despite the fact that millions of votes effectively disappear at every election.
Harmony is not achieved by eliminating difference but by finding ways for difference to coexist without tearing the whole system apart
The same systemic thinking applies to corruption. Every scandal produces demands for accountability, as indeed it should. Yet if we stop there, we miss an opportunity to ask a more useful question. What allowed this to happen? What safeguards failed? What structures encouraged secrecy or rewarded risk-taking? A well-designed system does not rely upon everybody behaving impeccably. It assumes that some people will not and designs accordingly.
Forcing a resignation of a well-meaning public servant achieves nothing, except perhaps that the next one learns to be better at PR. Who knows?
But if the similar frustrations, scandals and disappointments continue appearing under successive governments, we may eventually have to consider that the problem lies less with the occupants of the offices and more with the whole inefficient system.
If there is an assumption that the political arrangements we inherited are the only ones available to us, we need to question it. It was refreshing to see the new Green MP Hannah Spencer challenge MP’s alcohol arrangements; not exactly the main problem, but it’s a start.
Yuan inspired me to google some Chinese philosophy. I found "harmony without uniformity"; I think this is Confucius? The idea is that people do not have to think the same thing in order to work together successfully. Agreement is not the goal. Harmony is not achieved by eliminating difference but by finding ways for difference to coexist without tearing the whole system apart. I think this might have something to teach us politically. A political system should concern itself not only with what people disagree about (content) but with the process through which disagreement is handled (process). From where I’m sitting, I think that a system that rewards humiliation, tribal loyalty and victory over opponents risks damaging the harmony of the whole, regardless of the merits of any individual argument. Perhaps the question is not how we eliminate conflict from politics but how we create structures that allow disagreement to be useful rather than destructive.
But, as I said, I know little about the workings of politics. I only know that if the process of how we resolve issues is flawed, no matter what the issues are, we are unlikely to be dealing with them efficiently.
Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist, writer and broadcaster. Her Ask Philippa advice column is on Substack, and her debut novel – Shrink Solves Murder, published by Hutchinson Heinemann – is out now