THE BEST THING ABOUT CHILE...:

Chile and Britain: left alliances, right futures (Justin Vogler, 12 May 2010, OpenDemocracy)

The temptation to see a Chilean parallel to British experience is one of the enduring motifs of feature commentary on the South American country. Andy Beckett, in his book Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (Faber, 2002), explores the theme in a more substantial way by identifying a curious tendency for the two countries’ politics to echo one another. The events of 2010 - the election of the centre-right Sebastian Piñera as Chile’s new president on 17 January following two decades of centre-left governance, and now the accession to power of the Conservative Party’s David Cameron in London (in coalition with the Liberal Democrats) after thirteen years of Labour rule - offers a new twist on an old theme.
The echoes

The modern era offers several examples of such interplay. Most of the lasting consequences of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government of 1970-73 in Chile, for example, mirrored the legacies of Clement Attlee’s Labour government of 1945-51: among them state-owned extractive industries and free milk for schoolchildren. When Allende was replaced in a violent coup d’etat by General Augusto Pinochet, Chile became the laboratory for the kind of neo-liberal reforms later associated with Margaret Thatcher.

...is it saved the rest of us the need for a fascist interlude.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2010 11:32 AM