Re: When right/left get fuzzy
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
When right/left get fuzzy
Chris Burford responds: 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. = It is hardly equal to the task. It simply could not afford the level of commitments made by the US. But even this is to take the implicitly realist treatment of US/UK international relations inherent in your analysis for granted. The truth is that Britain's lesser imperialism is in fact a client imperialism in the service of US imperialism. What are British armed forces doing in Sierra Leone? Kosovo? The Gulf? British imperialism is lesser insofar as it involves the pathetic sight of a toadying Blair trying desperately to stay on message with regards to missile defense and all other aspects of US foreign policy. The day after the Financial Times ran a large article analysing the Bush administration's unexpected interest in Africa (Powell has been touring there), Blair reveals in an interview to the FT that the two unexpected key issues integral to his post-election government will be the environment and ... Africa. And, as the recent IMF thread has highlighted, it's a lot more than just the UK electorate that's not ready for the minimal state. The British power elite has never been ready for it, as evidenced by the developments made during the supposedly anti-statist Thatcher administration. It's one of the great ironies that the person committed to rolling back the frontiers of the state should have presided over its ever tightening-grip upon the social economy. New Labour has no such qualms about state power, unlike the increasingly irrationally dogmatic post-Thatcher Conservatives (including Thatcher, Rees-Mogg, McWhirter, etc., as well as Hague et al.), so who better than the shock troops of structuration theory to tighten the screws? At least they have some understanding of the structure-agency dilemma, instead of the false dichotomy of state and society posed by classical liberalism. = The USA is, despite everything a more reactionary country, than the UK. = E.P. Thompson could write enviously about the freedoms granted to US citizens by its Constitution -- a document singularly absent from the UK, all promises for a Bill of Rights to the contrary. We should be more precise about how, exactly, the US is a more reactionary country. It's certainly more powerful, but it's not at all clear that current regimes in Britain or France would be any less reactionary with the same power. = 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. = This is a persistent refrain, addressing an unavoidable problem. Pedants might riposte that, on a US-based listserv, non-US contibutors ought to be making the mind shift. I don't believe either option is possible in the short run. Continued engagement in discourse with people of other backgrounds will accomplish mind shifts that are maybe more gradual, but also more fundamental, rather like the movement of a glacier. To my mind understanding the US is vital to an understanding of the global political economy, given the unassailable hegemony of the US at present and for the foreseeable future. Being able to interact so freely with US citizens of a critical disposition in a largely US milieu is helpful to that end. We can return the favour by bringing to light relevant materials from our own backgrounds/situations. That is why I argued with Rob that he should not lose heart regarding the relevance of Oz to all this. I think Oz is very relevant to all this. For example, our recent IMF discussions led into considerations of the British state, which is certainly relevant when looking at the transformation of Australia over the last 25 years or so. How was Gough Whitlam deposed? Why? With what means? Is it just a coincidence that, as Harold Wilson was being undermined from within, another scion of the British power elite intervened to depose a democratically elected government that threatened the status quo? At around this time East Timor had just been brutally annexed, was being brutally subjugated, while the British secret state was administering its own justice and order upon Northern Ireland (and getting ready to do the same elsewhere if necessary), Chile was being cleansed by Pinochet, Argentina's Peronists were toppled, Italy was a violent, corrupt anti-Communist mafia protectorate, Vorster et al. were getting to work in South Africa
Re: When right/left get fuzzy
G'day Michael K, For example, our recent IMF discussions led into considerations of the British state, which is certainly relevant when looking at the transformation of Australia over the last 25 years or so. How was Gough Whitlam deposed? Why? With what means? Is it just a coincidence that, as Harold Wilson was being undermined from within, another scion of the British power elite intervened to depose a democratically elected government that threatened the status quo? At around this time East Timor had just been brutally annexed, was being brutally subjugated, while the British secret state was administering its own justice and order upon Northern Ireland (and getting ready to do the same elsewhere if necessary), Chile was being cleansed by Pinochet, Argentina's Peronists were toppled, Italy was a violent, corrupt anti-Communist mafia protectorate, Vorster et al. were getting to work in South Africa (and elsewhere in Namibia, Angola, Mozambique), while the West huckled the Soviet bloc into the Helsinki Accords in 1975. The screws were tighteninginternationally as the Jeane Kirkpatricks, William Simons, Samuel Huntingtons, Margaret Thatchers and Rupert Murdochs prepared to remake and remodel Western capitalism whilst declaring Cold War II. That's a very large structural adjustment whose reach and consequences went far beyond the dreams of its protagonists, never mind its victims. Yeah, it occurs that a combination of global recession and gawd-knows-what intrigue really hit governments with even a skerrick of welfarism in their kits: September 1973: Chile - Salvador Allende dies in right-wing military coup May 1974: West Germany - Willy Brandt (Günter Guillaume scandal) August 1974: New Zealand - Norman Kirk dies (Labour loses election following year) November 1975: Australia - Whitlam sacked by Governor General March 1976: The Perons overthrown in right-wing military coup April 1976: United Kingdom - Wilson resigns June 1976: Right-wing military coup in Uruguay July 1977: Pakistan - Ali Bhutto overthrown in right-wing military coup (Kissinger had just warned that Bhutto would have to pay a heavy price, for his nuclear weapons policy) That's most of the Anglophone world, Latin America and the Subcontinent all nicely parcelled up in less than four years - and the bloke in charge of the CIA during most of that time went on to become president and launch a dynasty, too ... Cheers, Rob (Ludlum)
When right/left get fuzzy
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 EDGBASTON, England -- William Hague says government must provide free cradle-to-grave health care for all. He backs a ban on handguns. He endorses the right to abortion on demand. He supports a monthly handout to every family with children and education subsidies that pay about 95 percent of every college student's tuition. It's a policy portfolio that would put Hague on the far left fringe of American politics. Here in Britain, though, Hague is the leader of the Conservative Party -- and he's been criticized for taking his party too far to the right as he campaigns for the national election on June 7. Hague's big-government style of conservatism reflects the most striking difference between this spring's British election and the U.S. election last fall: The whole debate on this side of the Atlantic is several notches to the left of the American political conversation. At a time when the British are struggling to decide whether their free-market, English-speaking country is more American than European, the tenor of the political campaign demonstrates that the British are thoroughly European in their enthusiasm for the beneficent hand of a generous government. 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]
