Re: Britain/US split?

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

   Tony Judt book from UC Press on the French Left intelligentsia is quite a
rollicking read, though. Funnier and more polemical than Mark Poster
book from Princeton Univ. Press. (See his website at UCI, the book is o.p.
but, he has scanned it all.)
  Course, nothing beats, Regis Debray, "Teachers, Writers and Celebs, " from
Verso back in the early 90's.
Michael Pugliese
P.S. The NYRB website has alot of Judt archived. Understand that politically
he is a Flemish (?) socdem.


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Keaney <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>
To: PEN-L (E-mail) <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Monday, August 20, 2001 6:33 AM
>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
>