Will
the British election work
to change the British?
By JONATHAN
POWER
June 6, 2001
LONDON - You can blame part of it on Margaret Thatcher.
It was she who brought some of the worst characteristics
of the British temper to the surface and made them
respectable: parochialism, petty nationalism, distrust of
strangers (the Americans excepted), dog eat dog, and that
long tradition of petty-bourgeois stoicism, tolerating
the second rate in the government and the public sector -
hospitals, trains, schools and so on.
Her originality was to shake the moribund British
economic tree until its leaves fell off, revealing a new
hard working, thrifty, go-for-it populace - only 20-30%
of the population, but that was enough - that would, by
earning more, be able to buy privately what it did not
really like in the public sector.
All this still lives on after four years of Labour
government and will be, doubtless, alive and healthy at
the end of another five year term, unless Prime Minister
Tony Blair is suddenly struck by lightening on the way to
Buckingham Palace.
You can blame some of it too on John Major, Margaret
Thatcher's successor. It wasn't so much he carried on the
Thatcherite revolution of privatisation with an
earnestness that led to the terrible mistakes of the rail
system, it was the way he resigned immediately on losing
the election. If he had hung on for six months as leader
of the opposition, Chris Patten would have had time to
finish his term of office as governor of Hong Kong,
return to Britain, win a seat at Westminster in a
by-election and then assume the leadership of the
Conservative Party.
It was both an act of betrayal and an act of small
mindedness. The former because it was Patten who, as
chairman of the party, had won Major his second term in
office against all predictions. The latter because it
threw the Conservatives into the hands the narrowest of
ideologues, led by little Englanders who seem totally out
of touch with the realities of an emerging European that
celebrates both its strength and diversity through its
unity and who hark back to some bygone age when closeness
to Washington was Britain's only political option.
If Patten had led the Conservatives then a referendum
on Europe would have been by now long over and done with
and Britain a signed up member of the Euro-currency from
the onset, taking its place as one of the major creative
forces in building a war-free Europe, which is what all
this binding and building is ultimately about.
As it was, Blair, despite an enormous majority that
should have enabled him, as far as the electorate was
concerned, to walk on water, became frightened at the
prospect of calling a referendum with the Conservatives
against him and, more important, the conservative press,
owned by North Americans - itself a quite ludicrous state
of affairs since neither Rupert Murdoch nor Conrad Black
have any compunction about using their powerful organs to
tell the government and a good slice of the electorate
what to do over Europe.
This tells us a lot about Blair, a "nice guy" as Polly
Toynbee, the shrewd commentator of the Guardian tells us.
"Not cynical, not world-weary, his easy sincerity is
entirely convincing: he plainly wants to do good. But at
each meeting the puzzle is always the same: what holds
him back from a great leap forward?" Blair does not set
out to challenge long held British attitudes, now alive
and well again after the renovation work done on them by
Margaret Thatcher.
As Toynbee says "A bolder leader might challenge
popular apathy, ignorance, indifference, unambition and
intellectual idleness by offering something more than
amelioration". An attitude of caution perhaps more
understandable with Bill Clinton who for most of the time
had a hostile Congress arranged against him, but less
explicable for Mr Blair who commanded an enormous
majority and who has never seemed in doubt of winning
another one.
I have watched this election from the home of my dying
mother-in-law in Sweden, at peace that my vote won't
count and knowing that for the first time in my 40 years
of voting that there is no party on offer I really want
to vote for.
But Sweden sparks another thought as yet one more time
family events lead me to observe close up how another
nation run their public services. How, for example,
Swedish old people's homes and hospitals manage to
maintain such high levels of medical excellence, the
kindest of nursing care for the dying, coupled with very
pleasant surroundings that would shame even the top-notch
of the private sector in America.
I have long wondered why Mr Blair doesn't hop on a
plane for a 90 minute journey here, followed by the press
pack, while he spends 2 weeks educating himself and the
media behind him on what can work in the public sector,
how it works and why it works. Mr Blair could do anything
he wants and get away with it. He could put Britain at
the centre of Europe. He could challenge - and change -
the British tolerance for second-ratedness. He could give
the country something to aim for and, as Toynbee says,
"seize the imagination of a phlegmatic population
[because] out there is still an outdated,
unmodernized, semi-static nation, encrusted with phoney
traditions, resistant to change, even in the face of
glaring social and economic lassitude."
Good natured as he is Mr Blair is probably too young
and too inexperienced to be prime minister. He came to
office not having travelled much except on holiday, with
few encounters with life outside his studies as a student
and later as a parliamentarian. If he knew how Britain
could be, he surely wouldn't be quite so complacent,
unassuming and diffident about his country's future.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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