At 28/05/01 21:51 -0700, you wrote:
>Britain's Beloved Welfare State
>Conservative Party Backs Policies Considered Liberal in U.S.
>By T.R. Reid
>Washington Post Foreign Service
>Tuesday, May 29, 2001; Page A10
> The whole debate on this side of the Atlantic
>is several notches to the left of the American political conversation.
>"The British are more European than American in their attitude toward
>tax-and-spend," said London political analyst Hugo Young. "Brits are
>no readier than the French for the minimal state."
>[snip]
Thank God!
But thanks also to the fact that Britain is a much lesser imperialist power
than the US.
In this election campaign the main message is that the Conservatives have
made no dent with their main platform of 8 billion pounds of tax cuts. Some
polls put them up to 20 percent behind Labour. Depending on turnout they
might even lose seats.
This has been achieved by Labout promising again not to raise income tax,
which is appalling low for higher earners. But at least this has created a
concensus across the classes including the privileged intelligentsia that
there needs to be a balance and that significant spending on the welfare
state is important, and may even be too low.
This is a shift from the last election in which Labour pledged to keep to
the tax regime of the outgoing Conservative party. It shifts the centre of
consensus slightly to the left in the UK and does indeed leave it in a
position to have more dialogue with Europe.
Even though that dialogue will be very complicated, William Hague's appeal
to save the pound sounds increasingly desperate and unable to bring out
more than the core vote of the Conservative Party which appears to have
been trimmed to the low 30% of the population.
So I do not agree with the Washington Post that left and right are fuzzy.
The USA is, despite everything a more reactionary country, than the UK.
I would ask progressive people from the USA to try to make a mind shift in
linking up with progressives in other parts of the world in trying to workd
out issues on which there can be effective cooperation in the struggle
against US hegemonism. This is particularly important in international
e-mail lists in which the volume of posts are dominated by contributors
from the USA, partly because of the low cost of internet access in the US.
Chris Burford
London
