Rule the waves, did you say?

The Pioneer, India ^ | Friday, March 12, 2010 | The Pioneer

[James C. Bennett]

This royal throne of kings, this sce- pter’d isle,
This Earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden demi-paradise... 
This precious stone set in the silver sea...”

Britain’s next Prime Minister is unlikely to indulge in such Shakespearean flights about his native land; winning the next general election on the ground — which political insiders assure us will be held in early May — will be nearer to his heart, presiding over an economy whose penury exceeds anything within historical memory will surely test to the limit his political will and intellectual resource. The next occupant of 10 Downing Street will excite little envy since to restore the country’s finances to even satirical likeness to rude health will require a miracle of biblical proportions. The Good Book tells us that water once became wine and that Lazarus rose from the dead, but that was over two millennia ago in the lifetime of one known to his flock as the Messiah. Only with the promised second coming can such such things again come to pass. Meanwhile, the lean years grip the nation, even as the fat kine within grow fatter from their ill-gotten gains.

The governing Labour Party looked dead and buried not so long ago. The burden of Iraq and Afghanistan and the banking collapse, coming on top of the ruined heap of Mr Tony Blair’s reputation, had clearly affected the popular perception of Mr Gordon Brown’s Government and all its works. The backlash was a double digit Conservative lead in the opinion polls. It appeared the election was over bar the shouting. But “a week is a long time in politics”, warned Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister in the 1960s. Much against the odds Mr Brown, it would appear, is up and running as the Tory flood-tide ebbs. “Labour and Tories neck-and-neck in marginals” screamed a Times headline a touch hysterically last week. Mr Rupert Murdoch’s broadsheet has been firing on all cylinders for Conservative leader David Cameron.

Disillusionment with Mr Brown and New Labour may run deep, but the prospect of a Conservative alternative has put the frighteners under sections of the electorate, whose recall of the 1980s include an arrogant and uncaring regime that thought little of throwing thousands of workers on the scrap-heap of unemployment. Mrs Margaret Thatcher ann- ounced triumphantly that there was “no such thing as society”. There are men and women in the north of England particularly, once the hub of British manufacturing, who haven’t worked for almost 20 years. The toll on community life has been devastating. Traditional bonds have withered on the vine. Crime and punishment is the contemporary narrative repeated ad nauseam on television, radio and the printed page. Ian Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, commissioned by his party’s present leadership to report on the state of the nation, warned somberly of a rapidly expanding underclass, semi-literate, unskilled and unemployable, living off the fat of the land in welfare benefits, with drugs, sex and weekend soccer as lubricants.

A television documentary on Mr David Cameron produced a portrait of a well-heeled figure reared in Eton and Oxford, a silken talker with a good sales pitch. But the remedies he proposes for the nation’s ills are solutions rancid from over-use: An immediate cut in public subsidies to reduce public debt at a time of high unemployment, declining production and increasing plant closures will surely take the current recession into a nightmare depression. Mr Cameron speaks ringingly of returning freedom and responsibility to all Britons, which his former Oxford tutor Vernon Bogdanor dismissed as 19th century twaddle. Those with money to spend have all the freedom they want; freedom for those with less entails poor housing, unbalanced diets and indifferent health care. State protection is what they seek. 

Truth is that the Conservative core has always been the party of empire, of the ladies and gentlemen of the shires. The Pitts, Peels, Wellingtons, Disraelis, Salisburys and Churchills embodied an ascendancy long gone. The Tory multicultural makeover is low comedy. US Secretary of State in the post-War Trunan Admistration, Dean Acheson, put the dilemma cruelly: “Britain has lost an empire and not found a role.” Britannia’s ritual prostration before Uncle Sam, habitual Russian bear-baiting, scornful dismissals of the Continentals and pliant accommodation of Pakistani Islamists point to a present that does not work and a future shorn of hope.

Strutting around with a nuclear-armed, US-supplied Trident submarine force at £ 15 billion apiece as a deterrent against one knows not whom is a draining pantomime for a fragile treasury. Delusions of grandeur are a continuing hazard. Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, invented a parallel universe of secret British greatness and glamour, and fabricated an icon who has outlived his maker — Bond, James Bond — “martini-shaken not stirred” — babe-puller extraordinary, wielder of hubristic gadgetry, his evolution encapsulates the trajectory of the Conservative movement, British upper class attitudes toward sex, the monarchy and America. It was an escapist conflation of fantasy and ego in an intellectual void, epitaph on a ghostly past. 

The death of Michael Foot, 96, Labour politician, parliamentarian, author, book reviewer, and robust pamphleteer — The Guilty Men, published in 1940, was a masterly assault on Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler — rung down the curtain on an exemplary life. Long regarded as the sea-green incorruptible of British politics, Foot was formidably learned, his favourite authors extending from Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke to Tom Paine and William Hazlitt and beyond. He was an outstanding orator on the hustings and a debater of distinction in Parliament, who revelled in free speech and the freedom to think independently. Foot was totally without malice towards his political opponents. He was courteous to a fault, but was not by temperament suited to power and the shoddy compromises power frequently entails. An exemplar of lost causes such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, he was less interested in the mechanics of socialism and more in its ethical and moral dimensions. 

Foot’s devotion to Indian independence and Indian causes was firm and resolute. He was never given to dissembling on India as was and remains the case with practitioners of the black art in his party and outside. He will be sorely missed. 

[GenXteacher]

A pity. Once a great nation, and now an emaciated shell. All the life sucked out of it because no government can support the citizens from the cradle to the grave without going broke, or having a totalitarian state with a low standard of living. Finis Britannae.