The Last Word by George F. Will
Published in
Newsweek, July 10, 2000
CHESHIRE CAT, CHEDDAR
MAN
Bland Tony Blair may have the most radical agenda in
British history: the end of Britain
"All right," said the (Cheshire)
Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail,
and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had
gone.- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
London-About Prime Minister Tony Blair, architect of
"New Labour" and apostle of the "Third Way" (American-style capitalism blended
with European statism), the question is, what is there besides his grin?
The Third Way is thin gruel, its mantra of "modernization" as watery as Bill
Clinton's 1992 celebration of "change." Blair's government, preoccupied
with the politics of presentation, has a remarkably high ratio of rhetoric to
real programs. However, it is advancing, or allowing to advance, the most
radical agenda in the nation's history. How else to describe the
dissolution of the nation, and the submersion of its component parts in the grey
leviathan called "Europe"?
Blairism is the radicalism of purposeful
inertness. It is part cause and part effect of both centrifugal and
centripetal forces. After not quite three centuries as a unified entity,
bits of Britain, a composite nation, are spinning outward ("devolution," via
legislatures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). But all are being
tugged toward a new center, Brussels, the cold bureaucratic heart of "Europe,"
as that becomes a political as well as a geographic category.
Blair's political profile is not just blurry at the
edges, it is blur straight through. Blairism consists of embracing
conservatism but calling it something else--deploring Thatcherism while
preserving its consequences, such as deregulation, privatization and
democratization of the trade unions. Blair's most specific campaign
promise, to reform, and particularly to end the waiting lists in, the sclerotic
National Health Service (with three quarters of a million employees, one of
Europe's largest employers), remains spectacularly unfulfilled. Although
in 1997 Labour gave Tories their worst shellacking of the 20th century, winning
a 179-seat majority, a recent poll put the Tories just three points
behind.
The politics of pure presentation ("spin" and "focus
groups" are recent American imports into Britain's political lexicon) works only
until it is recognized as such. But there is a brain behind
Blairism. It belongs to Gordon Brown, chancellor of the Exchequer.
He is a Scot (that matters) who approvingly quotes Alan Greenspan. Even
when throwing red meat to "Old Labour" class warriors (he lambasted Oxford for
being a haven of private-school toffs when it turned down a state-school
graduate who was accepted at Harvard), he does so in a Thatcherite vocabulary
stressing the meritocracy and efficiency necessary for an entrepreneurial
society.
Brown is making sure that the most important issue in
British politics does not come to a boil before the next election, which must
occur no later than 2002 and will probably be next year. The issue is
whether to scrap the national currency and join the euro currency, with all that
implies for surrendering control of monetary policy, and then (inevitably)
fiscal policy, and sliding even deeper into "harmonization" with (meaning
subordination to) the emerging European superstate.
Brown is cleverly kicking this issue down the road by
making much of the five "conditions" that must be met before Britain joins the
euro. But all five are economic, which means political principles (such as
sovereignty and self-government) are irrelevant. Thus does materialism
supplant political morality as Homo economicus has (pace Aristotle)
eclipsed Homo politicus. And all five conditions are so vague, and are
tied to such fudgeable data, that they can be declared met whenever Brown
desires. Which will probably be after the next election, if Labour wins
it.
Many Europhiles are English intellectuals of the sort
George Orwell despised because they despised their nation: "England is perhaps
the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality."
(Orwell did not live to see America in the 1960s and 1970s.) Trust
intellectuals to use a 1,222-page tract to advance their politics. It is
Norman Davies's "The Isles," a slapdash, padded, trendy and tendentious history
of Britain from Cheddar Man to Tony Blair.
Shortly after the last ice age, a man was buried in
Cheddar Gorge in what is now England. His body was discovered in 1903, and
in 1996 samples of his DNA were compared with DNA samples from some villagers in
that area. A close match was found with a 42-year-old teacher in Cheddar
Village, who is thus a direct descendant of the man from the Middle Stone
Age. And--here is Davies's political point--Cheddar Man lived before
nature had separated the British Isles from the European landmass.
Therefore he was "a Continental," so why make a fuss about Britain's going
(back) into Europe?
Also, the Plantagenet kings spent more time
(because they had more territory) in France than in Britain. And the
pedigree of the term "Great Britain" runs only to 1707 (the unification of the
English and Scottish crowns), and that of "The United Kingdom" only to 1801 (the
dissolution of the Irish Parliament). And so on, all of this selective
mining of British history culminating in a crashing non sequitur: contingencies
produced Britain, therefore its dissolution is a matter of moral indifference,
and probably desirable.
The moral of the story supposedly is that
the British nation is a result of geologic caprice and (relatively recent)
political improvisations that are less durable than the cultural and ethnic
differences now recrudescent. Identity politics has come to
Britain.
What is vanishing, and not slowly, is the
nation to which the United States traces much of its political and cultural
DNA. Unless this disappearance is resisted, and reversed, soon all that
will linger, like the Cheshire Cat's grin, will be a mocking memory of the nationhood that was the political incarnation of a people who
(as has been said), relative to their numbers, contributed more to civilization
than any other people since the ancient Greeks and Romans.
George F. Will, Newsweek, 10 July
2000
With many thanks to Patricia who supplied me with this article. Simply Steve
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