The Political Dance
The Editor has lived in Britain most of the past 29 years. Margaret Thatcher was already Prime Minister on my arrival, and I watched her subsequent election victories, as well as her fascinating denouement. I watched the grey Major years from other parts of the world, and returned to the UK just three months after the sweeping New Labour election victory that brought Tony Blair to power. As an American citizen I have not had a voice in any of these elections (taxation without representation all over again—don’t talk to me about tea parties!).
Thus, I have been an outside observer to both American and British politics throughout these three decades.
The day my family arrived in Manchester in the Summer of 1981, riots broke out. The two events were not connected. At the time, the media treated them as race riots. They were not. The reasons were economic.
I was returning to a church in inner Manchester that I had first seen in the early 70s, as a student. Back then, approaching the church by bus, my wife and I saw the brick rubble of whole city blocks (in American terms) of demolished houses. The lasting impression it left was of the devastation of cities in the blitz of World War II. This was ‘urban renewal’ in brutalist 60s fashion. All the housing stock, built in the 19th C, was condemned and knocked down so new low rent housing could be built. It was a positive response to urban decay, but a social disaster. The people in those houses were moved to a variety of locations across the city. Later, when the new houses were built a different variety of people were put into them. In one great social experiment, communities were destroyed and replaced by people with no connection to each other. Only now, forty years later, are these neighbourhoods regaining a sense of community. All largely thanks to the Marxist-leaning Manchester city council. (Yes, real socialists.)
The 80s, however, was Margaret Thatcher’s decade, and I observed first-hand the consequences of Thatcherism (so beloved by Ronald Reagan and Tony Blair). Local unemployment in our area was among the highest in the country, at about 25% - rising to 50% for under 35s. The industries that had made Manchester world-famous disappeared, leaving vast stretches of empty factories and derelict land. Manchester was a bleak and ugly place.
Thatcher’s hatred of left-wing councils, which governed all the main cities, took the form of cutting the central government funding for public services. Schools and hospitals lacked funds to maintain their buildings; salaries of nurses and teachers fell behind comparable incomes in private business. Schools sold their sports fields to property developers to maintain running costs; extra-curricular activities disappeared. Hospitals tried to keep the roofs of 19th C workhouses from leaking onto patients’ beds. Meanwhile, the financial centres of the City of London built taller buildings, and the young bankers dined on lobster and champagne with their bonuses.
I witnessed this social experiment by the woman who famously declared ‘There is no such thing as society’. A whole generation of young people in my parish had no chance to find employment, have grown up unemployable, and now their children—having never seen their parents work—are beginning to pass their experience on to a third generation. These are the ‘layabouts’ politicians created and now blame for the cost to the public purse.
My return residence in Britain coincides with the New Labour regime. Tony Blair represented the ejection of the socialist left-wing of the party, and the move to the centre, or ‘Third Way’ as he called it. Not a bad thing. Part of the ethos, nevertheless, was grounded in the post-war European social democratic tradition. This little-known aspect of European politics for Americans is important to understand. It is not ‘socialist’ in the Marxist/Leninist sense, but is what Western Europe did to reduce the appeal of that sort of socialism. It took the Marxist critique of society and addressed those issues which gave rise to two world wars and a cold war. It recognised the responsibility of the wealthy to the workers who provide them their wealth. But, all within strong democracies and market freedoms. It worked.
New Labour addressed the social inequities of the previous twenty years by pouring investment into public services. Schools were repaired and new ones built; modern, state of the art, hospitals were built. Salaries of public servants were raised to decent levels. In the 1980s my daughters went to a school made of WWII surplus material, meant to be a temporary measure. In the 2000s a new school was finally built. In the 80s my sister-in-law broke a leg while visiting us, and ended up in a Florence Nightingale ward—a work-house dormitory converted into a ward with beds lining the walls, divided only by curtains. In the 00s all trace of that era has disappeared.
Taxes rose to pay for this, but with the will of the electorate desperate for this to happen.
Then came the great bust of 2008, and the bail-out of the banks. And Gordon Brown, who was the nation’s treasurer throughout the period of growth, is given the blame by the Conservatives. And there is blame to be placed on him for the depth of the problem in the UK. But the Tories should not point the finger too readily, because the New Labour economic policy was to that of Margaret Thatcher, with increasing the role of private business in public services, and giving the market free reign. Thus, Conservative economic management has continued to govern the British economy. One can only imagine what a US Republican/UK Conservative coalition of international finance would have left us with!
Youth unemployment in our area is rising to 1980s levels again. Another lost generation looms.
The third party in Britain, the Liberal Democrats, have surprised everyone by becoming genuine contenders in this election. The Liberals were the leading party of government until the rise of the Labour party in the 1920s, and this successor party has never known any form of government at national level. The polls have them even-pegging with the Conservatives ahead of Labour. The nature of the electoral system means that they could have 1/3 of the electoral vote, but still have only a fraction of the number of seats in parliament of even a third-place Labour party. There is a great desire for change of government in the UK, but much less enthusiasm for seeing it return to the banker’s friends, the Tories. At the moment, the result is wide open.
On the record of government in my neighbourhood, there is no reason to trust that Cameron’s new Tory party is any different from the old one. A Labour government that acted less Tory would be preferable to the present one. Perhaps a coalition government would offer an opportunity for politics to pull politics out of its rut.
Who would I vote for if I had a vote? In the UK one votes for one’s local Member for Parliament, not for the Prime Minister. I know my MP, having brought issues to his attention on behalf of people in the church and community. He knows his community, always responds immediately to letters, and has brought positive results to our requests. He is a consummate politician in the positive sense, able to speak off the cuff for fifteen minutes on a subject without hesitation or repetition, and bring his peroration to close with a neat tie-in to his first sentence.
I would vote for him. He happens to be Labour.
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