You couldn’t make this stuff up…

photo credit: loungerie

Why exactly did the Cameroonian plan tug on the heartstrings of the John Redwoods and William Hagues of this world?  Above all, it’s important to remember that the modern-day British correlation between Left and Right and Europhile and Eurosceptic is an anomaly in international terms as well as historically (Labour’s 1983 manifesto promised, for example, to pull Britain out of the then-EEC).  Your most ardent Superstaters are likely to be found, not in the Socialist bloc, but within Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats or Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP.  The Tories smell a federalist scent wafting around the hemicycle, and it gives them the jitters. For them, there’s nothing worse than the familiar refrain of common security, immigration and foreign policies.    And don’t get the anti-Maastricht veterans started on the Lisbon Treaty (no really, please don’t). 

So, you might be asking, Cameron’s had four years: how’s he got on?  Not well, is the answer.  And with only three months before a new Parliament is elected, Cameron risks, in Prescottian style, getting the political egg on his face.  The problem is that most of the centre-right parties who make up the EPP are quite happy where they are, thank you very much.  As the largest grouping in the Parliament, they elect its President, who gets to do fun things like fawn over Hillary Clinton, and perhaps more importantly, have an evident leg-up in setting the political agenda and controlling committees.  Bubbling below the surface, as I mentioned last week, are also various propositions to expand the role of the parliamentary blocs.  If the Tories do break away, then, they could deprive the EPP of its largest-party status, giving European Socialists a boon (although the EPP still fancies its chances).  The European Parliament doesn’t like splinter groups, especially national ones.  It somewhat defies the point of a multitude of countries coming together to work towards common goals after centuries of division.  That’s why it takes 25 MEPs from seven countries to create a recognised grouping, eligible for EU funding.  To many, this looks like a bit of a long-shot for Cameron’s comrades, assuming he doesn’t want to end up sharing floor space with Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini or not-quite-Fascists-but-really-pushing-it parties (I’m looking at you, Law and Justice).

photo credit: edmittance

But internal European Parliament arrangements are probably not what are on Cameron’s mind.  For him, the political dilemma is tricky.  Either he stays true to his word, and succeeds in attracting Czech, Baltic, Swedish and Italian Conservatives as seems to be his best-case scenario (good luck…), thereby winning plaudits from within his Party, or he fails, embittering the Eurosceptics who are already miffed at the return of Ken Clarke.  Either way, in a move which will be one of the first to which foreign leaders pay attention, Cameron risks appearing like an isolationist who has no conception of the necessity of co-operation during this time of recession.  Not a great way to dispel doubts about the existence of a foreign policy vision.  By all accounts, Barack Obama wasn’t impressed by this kind of attitude when he met Cameron last summer.  So does Cameron move out of the EPP, annoying other governments to placate an internal faction of his own party, or does he stay in, and risk re-opening the fissures which destroyed the Conservatives in the Thatcher-Major era?  Either way, Dave,  the clock’s ticking…

Update: the decision looks pretty final.

In a recent Huntsman interview, Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted that his thinking resembles a “Republican brand of Clintonism: practical solutions, softened rhetorical edges aimed to appeal to the center and an overall modernization of a party badly in need of a new image.”   If you think this sounds like the tactics of a certain Eton-attending, bicycle-loving British opposition leader, you’d be right:

“I would liken it a bit to the transformation of the Tory Party in the U.K.,” Huntsman explained. “The defeat in ’97, John Major to Tony Blair, after years of strong, conservative rule with Margaret Thatcher setting the mark. They went two or three election cycles without recognizing the issues that the younger citizens in the U.K. really felt strongly about. They were a very narrow party of angry people. And they started branching out through, maybe, taking a second look at the issues of the day, much like we’re going to have to do for the Republican Party, to reconnect with the youth, to reconnect with people of color, to reconnect with different geographies that we have lost. You cannot succeed being a party of the South and a couple of Western states. It just – it isn’t long-term sustainable.”

Okay, so Huntsman is trying to do a David Cameron – get his party to embrace (or appear to embrace) a more moderate, compassionate platform in order to win over the demographics necessary to get into power. It seems to be working for Cameron -  so will it work for the Republican party?

Well, uh, no. At least not for a while. Not only is Huntsman seemingly alone among Republicans in his desire for Cameron-esque moderation, but his recent comments have led to him skipping CPAC – a Republican party get- together where potential candidates traditionally strut their stuff- because he feared he would be booed.  Indeed, Republicans appear to currently be under the command of extreme radio shock-jock Rush Limbaugh, who has openly expressed his desire to see Obama fail and whose keynote address went down a storm at CPAC.  When the Republican National Committee Michael Steele called Limbaugh “incendiary” and “ugly” last weekend, he almost immediately apologised to the radio host for his remarks.  As many noted at the time of Steele’s attack, if you have to insist to an interviewer that you’re the leader of the Republican party, then you’re probably not.   Finally, when favourite contender for the Republican presidential nomination Bobby Jindal gave his reply to Obama’s State of the Union last month, it was a speech straight from the playbook of the last eight years: government is bad, lower taxes are good.

The inevitable, incredible conclusion from all this is that despite the overwhelming political evidence of the public’s shift away from the right, the vast majority of Republican politicians think that the problem is that the party is too centrist and not being bold enough in declaring its right-wing beliefs.  So much so, in fact, that it’s probably going to take another battering in the 2010 congressional mid terms to make them think otherwise. This is not all that surprising: it did, after all, take eight years of being in opposition for the Tory party to begin the process of renewal under Cameron. Republicans, on the other hand, only lost Congress in 2006 and only lost the Presidency last November.  It’s therefore no surprise to see the Republican leadership going down the road of failed British Conservative leaders Michael Howard, Ian Duncan Smith and William Hague: appeal to the base & go extreme.

But at some point, will Republicans be left with no choice but to face the kind of modernising face lift that many believe Cameron has achieved with the Tory party? After all, history suggests that most parties thrown out of power don’t go too long without undergoing a  significant transformation back to electability. However, though such a rebirth may eventually be embraced by the party of Bush, the truth is they’re going to have a much harder task than the simple David Cameron analogy suggests. America is not Britain and if Cameron thinks he had a fight on his hands modernising the Tories, it’s nothing compared to the battle the likes of Huntsman is going to have if he thinks he can drag Republicans kicking and screaming into electoral contention once again. In part two, therefore, I’ll explore why the Cameron analogy isn’t quite as cute – or as accurate – as the Governor of Utah would like to think.

photo credit: Steve Punter

Nor, it would now seem, does the mere mention of “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie” elict the Pavlovian response “Out Out Out!”  The BBC’s sympathetic portrayal, and Gordon’s acceptance of the idea of not only a Downing Street portrait, but even a state funeral, seem to imply that after Harry Enfield’s Tory Boy, an election campaign based around Thatcher’s hair on Hague’s head and spontaneous celebration when she quit, it’s finally OK to be a bit soft on the Iron Lady.  Just when did it go out of fashion to hate Tories?

How has this happened?  Well, as Martin Kettle points out in his Guardian column, part of the explanation is that, unlike in 1999, we’re now on the precipice of a Conservative comeback.  David Cameron is poised to become the next Prime Minister, so, the media seem to be presuming, we’re all a bit nostalgic for the last era of Conservative hegemony, if not (as in the case of my generation) curious about what it was actually like.

There’s some danger in all this.  As Kettle points out, we may be on the verge of a Cameron premiership, but this does not mean that we’ve necessarily turned right:

 

Our era is not like that. This is not a conservative moment. If anything it is the reverse. The failures of 2009 are those of the banks and the absurdly over-rewarded bankers, not of the public services and their low-paid union members as in 1979. The failure of governance in 2009 is the failure of inadequate regulation – not of too much, as was the case in 1979. It is financial ungovernability that has brought the economy to its knees today, not union power. By rational standards this is a left of centre moment.

In the United States, that is exactly what is happening. Barack Obama’s speech to Congress this week, with its key insistence that America faces a day of reckoning, expresses all this with great potency. Britain is more problematically placed to take the same advantage because the country is governed by Labour ministers from a different era who had no alternative but to take Thatcher seriously and no realistic course other than to accommodate their party to her destruction of the pre-1979 order.

 

The Maggie-fest suffers another serious flaw.  It is about political power-plays, not about policy.  It is about personality, not about the people.  And, in turning the fall of Lady Thatcher into a Greek tragedy, as the BBC adaptation seems wont to do, and beatifying her even before her death, we risk casting aside in the collective consciousness many of the terrible consequences of her reign.  Let us never forget what 18 years of Conservative government did to Britain.  Let us never forget that society was torn apart, communities destroyed, inner-cities systematically sacrificed for new Beemers for city bankers and a war waged with the smiling face of jingoism and the unceasing background motivation of electoral politics.  And let’s not forget, in maligning those damned cowards who forced her out, that she went for three very clear reasons: an increasing tendency for autocracy; her ceaseless opposition to Europe which her peers saw as dangerous to the national and international interest; and the imposition of the Poll Tax, the most regressive tax in modern political history.

Yes, she’s defined our modern politics, in emulation and opposition.  Yes, her economic model transformed the country and the Labour Party.  Fine, we can have an honest debate about her legacy (but why we’re having it right now bewilders me), but let’s not allow the damage she did to become a mere footnote in history.  Britain today is a far better place than it was in 1997, after seven years of half-hearted Thatcherism which entrenched the damage of her eleven year premiership.  It’s been a hard fought battle to insist that there is, after all, a society.  In this new winter of discontent, we cannot allow Thatcher to become the standard-bearer for a new Conservative era.  We must fight, as Obama is doing under more favourable circumstances, to preserve what is fundamentally a social democratic moment.  I’ll leave you with Oona King, who gives a personal and emotional account of Margaret Thatcher’s influence on her own career, concluding, as all on the Left should, that whatever her achievements, she can never been forgiven.

And because I can’t resist, after you’ve flicked through the New Statesman’s “Where Were You When You Heard” article, why not savour in the dulcet tones of Michael Burke (and the incredibly authoritative titles of 1990s BBC News!):