,,, you two aren't being very nice about the Brits - after all they've given us!
Posted on 05/08/2005 5:40:39 AM PDT by NZerFromHK
Americans are accustomed to thinking of Britain as their most reliable ally, always there in a crisis. Broadly speaking that has been true since 1941 — and mutual. With the exception of a few wobbles like Suez and Edward Heath's refusal of landing rights to U.S. planes supplying arms to Israel in the Yom Kippur war, the Brits have shared a common approach with the U.S. on defense policy, intelligence cooperation, nuclear weapons, trade liberalization, and much else. Margaret Thatcher's backing for Reagan's Libyan raid and Tony Blair's commitment of British forces to the Iraq war strengthened this habitual cooperation. There was even government-to-government agreement for much of the time on the desirability of Britain's joining the European Union to frustrate any tendency the latter might show toward anti-Americanism. By and large this mix of policies worked well.
It is now threatened, however, by three developments: the rise of anti-Americanism in British politics, a growing anti-Americanism in continental Europe, and the EU's moves toward a common foreign policy. It is the first of these that is the main topic of this article.
Traditional anti-Americanism in Britain has been of two kinds: a left-wing political anti-Americanism rooted in anti-capitalism, and a right-wing hostility based on the decline of British power and the resentment at being displaced by the U.S. Neither was politically important; both were easily contained. But a much more dangerous, complicated, and surprising situation developed in the recent election campaign: Tony Blair's handling of the Iraq war midwifed the birth of a powerful anti-Americanism of the center-Left. . .
Booker's hypothesis makes little sense - the people who voted UKIP clearly felt strongly enough that the policies of the Conservative Party were wrong to vote for a minority candidate that had no chance of winning rather than a Tory that did. You can't just assume that the UKIP votes would be a net gain for the Tories if the Tories adopted UKIP policies (a complete withdrawal from the EU), as this takes no account of the votes that they did get that could be lost from people who would not agree with that policy.
You might as well look at all the constituencies where the Tories were first and Labour second and see how many Labour would have won if they had recieved the votes that went to the Lib Dems. Doesn't mean that if Labour had adopted Lib Dem policies they would have got an extra 23% of the vote.
Thank you Sara!
Save for the Thatcher/Major era, the Poms have been wonky for generations. Once Blair goes - and he will go sooner than later - Britain will revert to form. The place is completely stuffed!
If America is relying on Britain for any long-term support, it is in for a major letdown.
Much better for the US to look to Australia. We Aussies, apart from a brief peiod in the '70s under the lunatic Whitlam, have ALWAYS stood shoulder-to-shoulder with our American cousins.
I think traditionally Britain lies between Australia and Canada in terms of what they think whether working with the United States is in their national interests. Unfortunately the whole United Kingdom is becoming Canadianized (while at the same time even Canada itself is also becoming ever more left-leaning) in this policy area.
And as for wonky Poms, we don't need to venture outside this forum to know them. Apart from Ivan and a couple of others, most of them are quite shaky.
Yeah, they're a strange breed. Never been able to work them out.
Canadians are the same. I know a couple of self-declared conservative Canadians here and they are to the left of our friend naturalman1975, who humbly calls himself a moderate conservative. Not surprisingly many of the true red conservatives are from Alberta or those who already live in the States.
It is now bed time in Britain. Let's wait until tonight our time when Poms swarm this thread again to see how they respond to our fisking of them. ;-) (Seriously speaking, I haven't seen one particularly caustic Pom FRer named cooper72 post on this thread. Has he been banned?)
,,, you two aren't being very nice about the Brits - after all they've given us!
No thanks shaggy. Much of our nutty leftism were originally only intellectual wetdreams among the leftist Britons. They were brought home by sheeples having done their share of OEs. Now the Poms are re-importing we Kiwi Colonials' "achievements" back to the Mother Country.
Fish and chips and roast beef are all very well and good, but I notice you don't include soap in the list of goodies Poms have given us.
,,, you're right - soap is about as common as Brit space launches.
A lot of them are the exact same in every country of the world, including my own. Hell, look at our own media. Newsweak, the Slimes, CNN, Dan Blather. They are the worst self-haters I've seen. If you take 10 dirtball anarchist and hard-left academia types from any Western Country in the world, you'll find that they are easy to pick out anywhere. The only difference is the accent.
That said, Blair's been great to us as Americans.
The reason I ask is this. You may have European foreigners allowed to vote in UK elections.
A friend of mind is a dual Dutch/US citizen(His dad's from there). He always votes in Dutch elections as well as here. He was staying in Germany for a few months and was able to vote in German elections (not just EU) where he voted for the most right wing party there. That was because he was a EU citizen.
Is that currently or possibly the case there?
I mostly agree with you, except that by New Zealand standards Newsweek is considered conservative! That says a lot about how conservative we Kiwis are. The Poms still have their Telegraph and Guardian, and they still have a sizeable number of old guards at Oxbridge and LSE when their counterparts at Ivy League and Berkeley have all but died out. But Britain is indeed catching up with the leftism of the rest of the Western world - once this process is complete it will be at least a generation after the rest of us (if ever) have broken free of the shackles of cultural leftism for them to do likewise.
Another factor you Yanks have not thought about is there are two types of anti-Americanism in all countries outside the US:
1) Those who hate the US as well as their own nation's past: the types as you described.
2) Those who hate the US precisely because they love their own country so much they want their fatherland to be the boss of the world (again): these are the people who would be super-ciritical of Abu Gabrib and Viernam, but extremely lenient in the case of Belgian Congo or Sudan campaign.
The current crop of British anti-Americanism is an interesting mix of 1) and 2), or a mix of left vs right as well as British vs American if you will. It is not clear cut to Americans just as American conservatism looks murky to Anglospheric conservatives because American conservatism is founded with a set of principles different (similar, but not the same) from Anglospheric conservatism.
Correction to post 79: it should be "Telegraph and (to a degree) The Times". The Guardian crept in without careful thinking.
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