Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings

The British Task

Rather than lecturing our European partners about how wonderful the Union would become if only we all took doses of Mr Broon's medicine, I would like to have heard Blair coming up with someting like this; its from Will Hutton's thoughful "The world we're in." "The British task. First and foremost is to realise that, despite a common language we share with the US-the country that grew out of thirteen colonies- the rise of American conservatism has disconnected US civilisation from the European mainstream. Europe is our continent. We share the same history and the same core values. The British approach to the social contract and the public realm lies much nearer to Europe than to the US, and while British capitalism is organised more along US principles than any other EU countries, it has brought us scant advantage. Inequality in Britain is scandalously high and productivity remains low; Britain’s companies under-invest, under-innovate and under-compete. A decade of raising demand fuelled by a deregulated financial system has given a one-off fix in terms of reducing unemployment: but households cannot go on for ever getting into debt at the same rate, permanently fuelling ever higher consumption. At some stage Britain will have to rely on its underlying productivity-and it is this that bodes ill for the medium term. The country likes to boast that it combines the best of America and Europe. A more honest assessment is that it has developed an economic model that reproduces the worst trends in American capitalism with few of the compensations, but has been unable to build a social contract that delivers anything like the same outcomes as mainland Europe. Indeed, the dangers of allowing inequality to approach American levels in a small island that remains so European in its attitudes are barely understood. The British will not tolerate, nor can they afford, the ghettoisation of their cities, the emasculation of their public services and the pauperisation of their disadvantaged." Cheers t

posted by Tony @ Thursday, June 23, 2005