Reappraisals (38 page)
Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), has built his political career on the claim that he has made Labour a party of economic responsibility. But a large minority of British voters wasn’t even born the last time Britain had an economically “irresponsible” Labour government. For them that’s history, and voters aren’t interested in history. If economic “irresponsibility” reduces grotesquely long hospital waiting lists, makes the trains run safely at affordable prices, or gets a math teacher for your child’s school, what, they ask, is wrong with it?
That is Britain’s real “European” question, and British politicians will not be able to dodge it indefinitely. The German and French press have recently made great play with the British mess—one German news magazine notoriously described Britain as “third world.” That isn’t quite fair, but it is more accurate than the British care to admit. And
pace
widespread continental opinion to the contrary, the British are not like Americans. They expect a certain level of service from the state and are willing to pay for it. That is why the Liberal Democrat Party actually improved its vote at the 2001 election by advocating increased taxation to pay for better services.
12
Sooner or later, British politicians are going to have to provide satisfactory public services to a community that so depends upon them— or else explain just why they cannot or will not do so.
pace
widespread continental opinion to the contrary, the British are not like Americans. They expect a certain level of service from the state and are willing to pay for it. That is why the Liberal Democrat Party actually improved its vote at the 2001 election by advocating increased taxation to pay for better services.
12
Sooner or later, British politicians are going to have to provide satisfactory public services to a community that so depends upon them— or else explain just why they cannot or will not do so.
If Blair has been able to postpone such uncomfortable thoughts it is perhaps because, despite what everyone says, the English at least have changed less than they think. Their public amenities are often squalid and inadequate; their chosen prime minister is an object of widespread skepticism and mistrust; their rail network has fallen prey to an absurd scheme, cynically executed; their hospital doctors rain devastating criticism upon an understaffed, underfinanced health service; by their own admission the English think most other people are better off than themselves.
13
13
In almost any other country this level of public dissatisfaction would be politically lethal. In England it has so far produced nothing worse than electoral apathy.
14
A few months ago, listening to exhausted commuters on a filthy, stalled train regale one another contentedly for nearly two hours with tales of woe and frustration at the hands of doctors, civil servants, and politicians, I concluded that the English are not just a bit different. They are truly unusual. Maybe Baroness Jay was right after all. The English are actually contented with their deteriorating lot. They are the only people who can experience schadenfreude at their own misfortunes.
14
A few months ago, listening to exhausted commuters on a filthy, stalled train regale one another contentedly for nearly two hours with tales of woe and frustration at the hands of doctors, civil servants, and politicians, I concluded that the English are not just a bit different. They are truly unusual. Maybe Baroness Jay was right after all. The English are actually contented with their deteriorating lot. They are the only people who can experience schadenfreude at their own misfortunes.
This essay, written in 2001 in the immediate wake of Tony Blair’s second general election victory, first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
in July 2001. Since then, Blair’s trajectory, culminating in his shared responsibility for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his embarrassingly protracted “cérémonie des adieux,” has given me no cause to revise my low estimate of the man and his “legacy.”
New York Review of Books
in July 2001. Since then, Blair’s trajectory, culminating in his shared responsibility for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his embarrassingly protracted “cérémonie des adieux,” has given me no cause to revise my low estimate of the man and his “legacy.”
NOTES TO CHAPTER XIII
1
He is apparently a convinced Christian, but as beliefs go this cuts little ice in contemporary Britain.
2
Except when it can be exploited for demagogic ends. When in the year 2000 Magdalen College, Oxford, didn’t offer a place to a young woman from a state school who has since been admitted to Harvard, the government and Britain’s tabloid press vigorously outbid one another in accusing Oxbridge of “elitism.” Britain’s two leading universities duly groveled and promised to do better in the future.
3
Many British towns are “twinned” with continental counterparts—an excuse for town managers and local politicians to get free holidays at municipal expense. The only lasting echo of Barnsley’s earnest proletarian past is a rusting sign on the main road into town: “Barnsley: twinned with Gorlavka, Ukraine.”
4
“Alas! Wigan Pier has been demolished and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.” George Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
(London: Penguin, 1989; first published in 1937) 68. Much the same might be said of England today. . . .
The Road to Wigan Pier
(London: Penguin, 1989; first published in 1937) 68. Much the same might be said of England today. . . .
5
It is not just the North that has been given the Heritage treatment. In the West Midland Potteries district today you can learn a lot about how Josiah Wedgwood fashioned his wares; but you will look in vain for evidence of how the pottery workers lived or why it was called the Black Country (Orwell describes even the snow as turning black from the belching smoke of a hundred chimneys).
6
Not that the “market” works for buses, either. In London and other big cities, privatized buses duplicate one another along the main roads, competing for the easy business. But no one wants the unprofitable rural routes, many of which have been canceled. This prefigures the likely future of the British postal services too, another state sector about to be opened up to the forces of competition, efficiency, and profit.
7
One of the ways in which the privatized railway companies planned to make money was by cutting labor costs. By 1997 there were just 92,000 men and women employed on the railways, against 159,000 in 1992. Predictably, a disproportionate number of those redundancies fell on engineers and maintenance workers.
8
For an incisive account of the Hatfield disaster and its implications, see Ian Jack,
The Crash that Stopped Britain
(London: Granta, 2001). In this excellent book Jack shows how both the Conservative and Labour governments and the private companies involved failed in their duties, while virtually all in charge emerged without being held responsible. Some went on to bigger and better-paid jobs.
The Crash that Stopped Britain
(London: Granta, 2001). In this excellent book Jack shows how both the Conservative and Labour governments and the private companies involved failed in their duties, while virtually all in charge emerged without being held responsible. Some went on to bigger and better-paid jobs.
9
In June 2000 Blair’s transport minister announced with great fanfare a ten-year program of new investment in transport to the value of £60 billion. This promise has a true Blairite ring to it: In the fine print it is explained that £34 billion is expected from private investment, and £10 billion represents prior commitments brought forward. That leaves just £16 billion over ten years—not much of an improvement upon the low levels of public investment that brought the crisis about in the first place.
10
Scottish politics are different. From Edinburgh the continent feels quite close, and most Scots have no desire to see their public sector reduced.
11
The public sector has suffered in other ways, too. The BBC, in a thankless effort to compete with the lowest common denominator of commercial and satellite television, has abandoned its commitment to enlighten and inform (another elitist legacy vigorously condemned by its political masters). Today it carries a distinctively English mix of gardening, cooking, quiz shows, home improvement, and low-end comedy, interspersed with nostalgic recollections from its better days. At its worst, it reminds one of nothing so much as Italy’s RAI-Uno, minus the good looks.
12
The Liberal Democrats increased their representation to fifty-two seats, with nearly 19 percent of the vote, their best performance since the 1920s. As always, their strongest support came from the professional and middle-class voters of the “Celtic fringe”: Scotland, the Welsh borders, and the English South West. But they have also begun to win votes in “middle England,” at the expense of Tories and Labour alike. Their recent leaders (Paddy Ashdown and now the young Charles Kennedy) are more appealing than anyone in the two big parties, and their refreshing willingness actually to
promise
tax increases as the price of an improved public sector has been taken as a sign of honesty and credibility. They ought to be the biggest beneficiary of the much-heralded breakdown of old class-based voting habits. But their problem is that many people won’t vote for them because they don’t believe the Lib-Dems will ever win enough seats to form a government: a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the constituency-based, single-round, first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all British system the two big parties will always do better and will silently conspire to ensure that third parties are kept well out of the picture.
promise
tax increases as the price of an improved public sector has been taken as a sign of honesty and credibility. They ought to be the biggest beneficiary of the much-heralded breakdown of old class-based voting habits. But their problem is that many people won’t vote for them because they don’t believe the Lib-Dems will ever win enough seats to form a government: a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the constituency-based, single-round, first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all British system the two big parties will always do better and will silently conspire to ensure that third parties are kept well out of the picture.
13
During a year spent in the prosperous south of England, I lost count of the number of times young people in particular, on learning that I was from New York, would ask, “But why have you come back
here
?”
here
?”
14
There is no hint of a populist backlash at either extreme. True, at Oldham—a former mill town in Lancashire where race riots broke out shortly before the elections—the British National Party won 11,643 votes in two local seats, about 14 percent of the vote. Fascists have always been able to get some votes in places with a large ethnic presence. Oldham has many Asians brought there to work in the (now defunct) textile industry. In 1997 the same party won 7 percent of the vote in an East London district with a large Bengali population (which replaced the Jews who once lived there). But the neo-Fascist vote in Britain is negligible compared to that of Marseille or Antwerp. Even the Tories’ desperate ploy of promising to lock away all asylum-seekers in detention centers won them no additional popular support.
CHAPTER XIV
The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters
Belgium gets a bad press. A small country—the size of Wales, with a population of just ten million—it rarely attracts foreign notice; when it does, the sentiment it arouses is usually scorn, sometimes distaste. Charles Baudelaire, who lived there briefly in the 1860s, devoted considerable splenetic attention to the country. His ruminations on Belgium and its people occupy 152 pages of the
Oeuvres Complètes
; Belgium, he concluded, is what France might have become had it been left in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
1
Karl Marx, writing in a different key, dismissed Belgium as a paradise for capitalists. Many other exiles and émigrés have passed through the country; few have had much good to say of it.
Oeuvres Complètes
; Belgium, he concluded, is what France might have become had it been left in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
1
Karl Marx, writing in a different key, dismissed Belgium as a paradise for capitalists. Many other exiles and émigrés have passed through the country; few have had much good to say of it.
I am neither an exile nor an émigré, but I too had the occasion recently to spend an extended period in Belgium. Unlike most temporary visitors to the country, however, I was not in Brussels, but in a small Flemish village not far from Bruges; and in contrast to most of Belgium’s transitory foreign residents today, I could claim at least a slender bond to the place since my father was born there, in Antwerp. Daily life in rural Flanders is uneventful, to say the least; it is only with time that you become aware of the uneasy, troubled soul of this little corner of the European Union. Belgium has much to commend it beyond the self-deprecatinglytouted virtues of beer and waffles; but its salient quality today may be the illustration that this small country can furnish of the perils now facing states everywhere.
You do not have to be there for very long to be reminded that during the past decade Belgium has been a cornucopia of scandals. The latest of these, mass poisoning of the local food chain through the leakage of dioxin (a highly toxic substance) into chicken feed and pig swill, briefly emptied the village supermarkets last June—though English-speaking visitors were firmly assured that the health risks were negligible compared to those associated with British beef or genetically engineered American corn. But before dioxin Belgium had had other scandals: money laundering, graft and kickbacks in high places, political assassinations, kidnapping, pedophilia, child murder, police incompetence, and wholesale administrative corruption.
All of this has happened in a tiny, prosperous region of northwest Europe whose national capital is also the headquarters of “Europe” (whose bureaucracies are largely segregated from Belgium in an unsightly glass and concrete ghetto). But half the population of the country—the Dutch-speaking Flemings—have divided and federalized it to the point of near extinction, while the other half, the French-speaking Walloons, have no distinctive identity; not surprisingly, there have been suggestions that Belgium might do better just to melt away. Would it matter? Who would care?
2
2
Whether Belgium needs to exist is a vexed question, but its existence is more than a historical accident. The country was born in 1831 with the support of the Great Powers of the time—France, Prussia, and Britain, among others—none of whom wished to see it fall under the others’ sway. The territory it occupies had been (and would remain) the cockpit of European history. Caesar’s Gallia Belgica lay athwart the line that would separate Gallo-Roman territories from the Franks. When Charlemagne’s empire fell apart in the ninth century, the strategically located “Middle Kingdom”—between the lands that would later become France and Germany—emerged as a coveted territorial objective for the next millennium. The Valois kings, Bourbons, Habsburgs (Spanish and Austrian), Napoléon, Dutch, Prussian Germans, and, most recently, Hitler have all invaded Belgium and claimed parts of it for themselves, occupying and ruling it in some cases for centuries at a time. There are probably more battlefields, battle sites, and reminders of ancient and modern wars in Belgium than in any comparably sized territory in the world.
Belgians, then, could be forgiven for a degree of uncertainty about their national identity. The state that came into being at the London Conference of January 1831 was removed from the control of the Dutch, furnished with a newly minted king from Germany, a constitution modeled on the French one of 1791, and a new name. Although the term “Belgium” had older roots (the twelfth-century chronicler Jean de Guise attributed it to a legendary monarch, “Belgus,” of Trojan provenance), most of the inhabitants of the region identified only with their local community. Indeed, urban or communal loyalty lay at the core of whatever was distinctive about the place. From the thirteenth century onward, Flemish towns had come together to fight off the fiscal and territorial claims of lords, kings, and emperors. Even today Belgium is the only country in Europe where identification with the immediate locality trumps regional or national affiliation in the popular imagination.
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