RE: Britain/US split?

["Brown, Martin - ARP (NCI)" <mbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I experienced a little bit of this when I was recently in the UK.  As I
mentioned earlier, I attended a play called "Feel Good" in London that is a
satire of Blair, written, apparently, by a member of old-labor.  More to the
point, I needed to take the train from London to York and back.  By U.S.
standards, anyway, the service was fantastic.  But there were some signs of
trouble.  When I went to the Euro-Rail web site a week prior to the trip to
try to find out about schedule and fares, there was no indication that a
London-York route existed.  This is astonishing given that this particular
route is probably the oldest continuous running train line in the world (the
British Railway museum is located in York).  When I mention this fact at the
ticket counter at the Kings Cross station in London, the clerk rolled his
eyes and said something like, " What will the screw up next."  There are
also prominent signs in all the rail stations warning customers that any
loss of temper or out-burst against a member of the rail staff will be
treated as a criminal offense and prosecuted to the maximum extent of the
law.   This seemed odd to me at the service seemed to be excellent, at least
by U.S. standards.  Have these signs always been posted, or is this a recent
symptom of the rail crisis?

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Keaney [mailto:Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2001 9:22 AM
To: PEN-L (E-mail)
>Subject: [PEN-L:16073] Britain/US split?


Penners

The following is extracted from a reasonably insightful and interesting
article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books, entitled "'Twas a
Famous Victory". It gives another perspective on the dilemma facing the
British state that Mark Jones highlighted several months back. I'm not
so keen on Judt's ruminations on Englishness, since it neatly ignores
the class basis of much that is wrong with England and Britain as a
whole. Nor are Judt's implied approbations of Blair's "leadership" re
Yugoslavia much use. But his lengthy analysis of the apparent vacuum
that is British politics gets to the main point quite succinctly.

=====

For four years Tony Blair held out the promise of a Third Way, a
carefully triangulated
compromise between Anglo-American private economic initiative and
continental-style social compassion. Today we hear little
of the Third Way: its prophet, Professor Anthony Giddens, so ubiquitous
in Blair's first term, has of late been conspicuous by
his silence. Since the national trauma of the railway crisis, New Labour
has instead become wholeheartedly devoted to
"delivering" European levels of public service...but apparently at
American levels of personal taxation. This is not going to
happen. You can do almost anything you want with the past, but the
future, like economic reality, is intractable. The British are
moving inexorably toward a very hard choice.

This choice is conventionally presented as being for or against join-ing
the euro, and so in a way it is. But the real issue is not
the euro but Europe-or more precisely, the European social model. The
English (unlike the Scots) still don't feel very
European-which is why William Hague, warning that "the pound" was in
danger, thought he could capitalize on English
national sentiment in his election campaign. They probably never will.
And a party that could demonstrate how Britain would be
better off outside Europe and its currency might yet capitalize on this
sentiment in a referendum on the subject. But the
electorate has something quite different on its mind.

New Labourites rightly claim that Britain is a post-political (actually
post-ideological) society. From this they deduce that people
aren't interested in doctrinal disputes over the state and the market.
They just want whatever works-hence Blair's carefully
pragmatic emphasis on mixing public sector and private profit (which is
why he pulls his punches even when faced with the
mess on the privatized railways, a disaster he could legitimately blame
on Tory incompetence and worse). But my own feeling
is that England in particular is fast becoming a post-post-political
society.

By this I mean that Thatcher and Blair have so successfully uprooted the
old left-right, State-market distinctions that many
people can no longer remember why they need feel inhibited in favoring a
return to the state. Why, they ask, should we not
have a transport network/health service/school system that works as well
as the Swedish or French or German one? What
does it have to do with the market or efficiency or freedom? Are the
French less free because their trains work? Are the
Germans less efficient because they can get a hospital appointment when
they need it?

Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), has
built his political career on the claim that he has made
Labour a party of economic responsibility. But a large minority of
British voters wasn't even born the last time Britain had an
economically "irresponsible" Labour government. For them that's history,
and voters aren't interested in history. If economic
"irresponsibility" reduces grotesquely long hospital waiting lists,
makes the trains run safely at affordable prices, or gets a math
teacher for your child's school, what, they ask, is wrong with it?

That is Britain's real "European" question, and British politicians will
not be able to dodge it indefinitely. The German and
French press have recently made great play with the British mess-one
German news magazine notoriously described Britain
as "third world." That isn't quite fair, but it is more accurate than
the British care to admit. And pace widespread continental
opinion to the contrary, the British are not like Americans. They expect
a certain level of service from the state and are willing
to pay for it. That is why the Liberal Democrat Party actually improved
its vote at the last election by advocating increased
taxation to pay for better services. Sooner or later, British
politicians are going to have to provide satisfactory public
services to a community that so depends upon them-or else explain just
why they cannot or will not do so.

If Blair has been able to postpone such uncomfortable thoughts it is
perhaps because, despite what everyone says, the English
at least have changed less than they think. Their public amenities are
often squalid and inadequate; their chosen prime minister
is an object of widespread skepticism and mistrust; their rail network
has fallen prey to an absurd scheme, cynically executed;
their hospital doctors rain devastating criticism upon an understaffed,
underfinanced health service; by their own admission the
English think most other people are better off than themselves.

Full article at
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14350

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx