September 2, 2004
THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP HAS ALWAYS REQUIRED SPECIAL LEADERS:
Howard should start caring about Bush (Mark Steyn, 31/08/2004, Daily Telegraph)
It's often said that, whoever's elected, the Anglo-American relationship endures: Bush-Blair, Kerry-Howard, it makes no difference. That's not how Bush looks at it. He sees the war on terror as a struggle requiring enormous will, particularly when the default mode of fashionable transnationalism apropos anything difficult is to wait till it's too late and then issue a statement of concern (see Sudan).To Bush, Blair is a man who was prepared to face down his own party and some tough poll numbers to do the right thing. I'm not saying he thinks Howard's an unprincipled squish who reads the polls and does a U-turn just so he can join the pointless oppositionism of the Blair-bashing stampede but, if you were Bush, would you want to risk it? [...]
The damage to Republican-Tory relationships isn't the point: after all, you can't build bridges when one bank is crumbling into the river. It's the damage to the Tory party's identity. When you stand for nothing saleable that New Labour hasn't shamelessly appropriated, and when new parties are siphoning off votes on your Right, how stupid do you have to be to kick away the party's last remaining leg, the one that still seems relevant to the world we live in? If the Conservatives are no longer credible on foreign policy, what's left?
Or, as Toby Helm reported: "Among the alternative names that Tory modernisers are floating in private are the Democrats, the New Democrats, Progress." The first is the name of the US Left-of-centre party, the second is the Canadian socialist party, and the third could be anything, though it carries the vague whiff of a 1930s Mitteleuropean fascist movement.
We're big fans of Anne Applebaum, but don't expect her to write a column about how Michael Howard is foolishly thumbing an ally in the eye by changing the name of his party to that of the President's opponents. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2004 4:34 PM
The Tories have no place to go. They never were economic conservatives in the American sense. Thatcher never got more than 43% of the vote in an election, and always had sniping from the backbenches in her own party.
There is no religious right movement in Britain. Because there has always been a state church, it has always been co-opted, a catspaw for the Establishment, not the representative of popular faith as churches are in the States. So faith itself is denigrated, maybe two percent of Brits are born-again Christians.
Britain remains a class-riven society. Advancement is often resented among working class people and the self-made man is a stock villain or figure of ridicule in British culture.
Economics is seen as a zero-sum game. If I win, you have to lose, so the fight is about how to divide the pie, not how to increase its size.
Blair is about as economically conservative as any British pol can be. He recognizes that a close relation with the States is necessary to maintain the kind of economic growth that has gotten them from being behind France and Germany to being ahead of France and approaching Germany. Young Euros, particularly French, immigrate to Britain for tech jobs.
On foreign policy, the Conservatives are divided between the Colonel Blimps who think Britain still has an empire and the Europhiles who want Britain to be part of Europe so they can take their dogs on holiday with them in the Dordogne. Neither of these groups is especially friendly to Americans. There is also a residual racism among both these groups which sees America as a mongrelized stew of the world's detritus. The ignorant jabs about 'American cuisine'(which frequently appear in The Spectator) have nothing to do with food, as anyone who has ever eaten in Britain can tell you, and everything to do with notions of moral superiority.
BTW, at the last election, the median age of Tory members was 62.
Posted by: Bart at September 3, 2004 8:34 AM