‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,’ said Dean Acheson sixty years ago. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00000015
Perhaps I can help.
Our greatness is not in Empire; not even in joining someone else’s, as we did so disastrously in 1973. You can tell it was an awful mistake by the way that around the time of the Maastricht Treaty John Major assured us we would continue to be ‘the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, etc.’ He did pride himself, didn’t he, on being able to talk to the man in the four-ale bar (loading up on Hooky as old maids cycle past to Holy Communion.)
What could be a better role than ‘being at the heart of Europe’ and ruling us in conclave with bibulous bureaucrats? How about being the best-run country in the world? One that works for all its people, without the Blairite ‘many not the few’ garbage?
Please don’t splutter, but unions and the Welfare State did make a huge difference in their time. However, I’d like to suggest that paradoxically, the next step forward towards moderate prosperity for all is not on the traditional socialist path.
Also sixty years ago was a speech by Hugh Gaitskell to the Labour Party Conference, warning against the enthusiasm for membership of the Common Market. https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/speech_by_hugh_gaitskell_against_uk_membership_of_the_common_market_3_october_1962-en-05f2996b-000b-4576-8b42-8069033a16f9.html He laid his finger on the tension in the socialist movement between international brotherhood and promoting the interests of working people at home; a tension that has never been adequately resolved and which has been clouded over with dreamy rhetoric from bloviators on both sides of the Commons debating chamber.
The key, I think, is in control of the rate of economic change. It is not in our interest to have a trade war with e.g China (even if we could do it); on the other hand, it has certainly not been in our long-term interest to let the World Trade Organisation break down all the lock gates on the money canal and see multinational businesses become insanely rich while Western workforces struggle in the mire left behind by the outrushing floodwater.
My understanding of Conservatives (not the ‘hard-faced men who had done well out of war’ but the ones who were brought up short by the 1945 landslide and realised that the game had changed) is that they would like a country in which individuals can improve their lives by industry and thrift. That involves setting rules for their economic environment so that it is possible to work and save money.
The Welfare State will crash if we allow claimants to multiply; we have to tackle economic immigration when there is so much structural unemployment and under-employment, and we have to tackle the latter by negotiating trade arrangements that allow for benefits on both sides. Is our political establishment sufficiently aware of how the system works, and could be made to work; and is it willing to tackle systemic challenges systemically?
If not, I have to be thankful that our airport is only twenty minutes away.
9 comments:
Lots of conservatives seem to have the impression that our modern standard of living is a result of capitalism.
It is not. Most is a consequence of government funding in Science, especially since WWII, and the free exchange of ideas in academia. Both are under serious attack in the West.
Not to mention civil engineering.
Civil engineering has saved more lives than all of medicine.
JD comments:
The fundamental error of the Labour Party, if it is indeed an error, was to assume that the working classes were socialists. The trades unions were not socialists, they were 'exclusive' and for members only. The Cooperative Wholesale Society was an 'exclusive' shop/store and it was the members only who shared in the 'dividend' annually. Same goes for the working men's clubs - members only. The work ethic was very strong but with the gradual erosion of Christianity and the encouragement of 'cradle to grave' dependency the rot set in. By the time of the first Wilson government everything had changed and my father used to say that the unions had outlived their usefulness. He would also refer to Chairman Harold as Chairman Mao was prominent on the news at the time!
It should also be noted that after Viscount Stansgate renounced his peerage in order to become a Member of Parliament he inadvertently paved the way for the Lords Home and Hailsham to do the same.
@ Paddington; yes and probably more than you realise. Joseph Bazalgette alone saved more than our beloved NHS: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/bazalgette_joseph.shtml
Wealth is a tricky idea isn't it? Over the 20th century and now in Ukraine, we have seen how governments destroy wealth on a colossal scale however we define it. Yet ironically they also provide a secure framework of laws within which wealth can be created.
I saw a brand new Lamborghini this morning. Is that wealth? It probably won't be in a few years unless the classic car market likes it.
@AKH: At least let's have a Fred Flintstone economy - one where one partner can earn for the family, own a house, run a car, have leisure pursuits and retire without pauperisation. The economy needs rules just as much as a rugby game.
In the US, something like 60% of all GDP flows to the top 1% of households, and the rest are mostly teetering in deep debt.
It wasn't governments which broke the economic systems. It was greed.
Governments could restrain greed, rather than give it full rein.
They certainly could, except that most politicians appear to be owned by them.
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