WHAT THE FOURTH OF JULY BRITISH ELECTION MIGHT TELL US ABOUT AMERICA'S ELECTION COME NOVEMBER

In 2016 Britain and America were rocked to the core by two elections. First the British voted to leave the European Union … Brexit. Then, Americans elected Donald Trump president.

Both countries have been living in a fever dream ever since. But British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s surprise announcement of an election this past week, means that citizens of the UK will have an opportunity to bring this era to a close for themselves.

Will they?

Let’s begin by looking at just how close the right-wing establishments of the two countries have become. Here’s a picture:

That’s Michael Gove, Conservative MP and Cabinet member, with Donald Trump in January 2017, shortly before Trump was inaugurated. Gove at the time had stepped away from the cabinet to lead the successful campaign to take Britain out of the European Union. He was at Trump Tower to interview the President-elect for The Times of London. Trump’s election was almost as big a shock to Britain and the rest of the world, not because of his policies, but because of his style.

Gove, a former journalist, who still penned an opinion column for The Times, was there for one reason: to normalize Trump. [I have known Michael since the late 1990s when he and I both appeared from time to time on a BBC News weekly discussion program called Dateline London.]

Gove described meeting Trump in his “glitzy, golden man-cave” and flushed out of him compliments for Britain doing the smart thing and leaving the EU.

Michael Gove and a correspondent from the German newspaper Bild interviewing Trump in January 2017

The picture above is interesting because someone who was in the room is not in the picture. Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch owns the Times and has a close relationship with Michael Gove. He also had at the time a close relationship with Trump. Murdoch was vehemently pro-Brexit and pro-Trump.

The Murdoch connection is just one way in which the right-wing culture of Anglo-America has come together over the last 40-plus years.

1979-1980 had a seismic effect on Britain and America not far off 2016. The election of first the Margaret Thatcher-led Conservatives and then Ronald Reagan began an era that redefined what “conservatism” meant. Both were radicals who quickly set about trying to undo the post-war political and economic consensus on how to organize society.

Like most radicals who attain power neither completed their revolutions. Reagan because he was term-limited and then hobbled by mental decline. Thatcher was defenestrated by her own party at the height of her powers. In part because of declining popularity which threatened defeat in the next general election but also because of high-handed anti-European attitudes.

Although she was a key architect of the European single market, she clashed repeatedly with fellow leaders of Europe’s Big Three, France’s President François Mitterand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, over closer political integration. She vented her public ire on the European Commission president Jacques Delors, who was, like Mittterand, a member of France’s Socialist party.

Socialism, like conservatism and liberalism, is a word with many meanings depending on how it is used, or in Thatcher’s case, who, is using it. Towards the end of her time in office, as the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union tottered, she was taking a victory lap for bringing “socialism” to an end. In her view the last place “socialism” survived was in Brussels where the European Commission is headquarted. The Commission is the administrative wing of the EU the place where rules governing trade are devised and enforced.

For a certain kind of “conservative” any rule that is not written by their side is “socialism”.

Aided and abetted by Murdoch’s tabloids, the Sun and The News of the World, as well as Britain’s other Tory supporting papers she railed and railed against the European partners in public, and in private berated her cabinet members who favored decent relations with what was not yet called the EU.

Eventually they tired of the abuse and got rid of her.

Now the story becomes one of heirs. In America, the next generation of Republicans dedicated themselves to finishing Reagan’s work and went about it without Reagan’s amiability. In Britain, a generation of future Tory politicians who had been at Oxford during Thatcher’s years in power dedicated themselves to deepening her no-restrictions capitalism and anti-European policies. Among them were Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and David Cameron.

Common ground was found with the slightly older next generation of Republicans who were already making noise in the US Congress, like Newt Gingrich. In 1997, months after Tony Blair led the Labour Party to an historic landslide, Gingrich, at that point Speaker of the House, spent a week in London, the centre-piece of which was a lunch in Thatcher’s honour at Lincoln’s Inn. I wrote a bit about this meeting in an earlier edition of FRDH. I was invited ex officio because I was NPR’s London correspondent.

At my table were a group of young men from the Bow Group, which bills itself as “the world’s oldest conservative think tank”. They weren’t sure what to make of the global situation. Clinton was President, Blair would be Prime Minister for years. They expressed enormous admiration for Gingrich’s combative style. Perhaps if John Major had been more like Newt then he might not have gone down to defeat.

The take-over by think-tanks of much of the intellectual side of the political process particularly amongst Republicans/Conservatives is key to understanding how Anglo-American politics has been shaped since the turn of the millennium.

When George Osborne made his first trip to Washington following his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer, by David Cameron in 2010, he was an unknwon quantity. Rather than introduce himself with a speech at the World Bank or one of the major universities in the American capital, he gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation.

Ties between radical right think tanks have only deepened since then. Unnamed American sources have donated millions of pounds over the years to prop up similar British institutions like the Institute for Economic Affairs

Heritage and the Koch funded Cato Institute worked with Brexiteers to design a post-Brexit free trade deal between the US and Britain, which like every other supposed benefit of Brext never materialized.

Even now, Heritage tries to influence British politics, with unintentionally amusing results.

Nile Gardiner, who is English, runs the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at Heritage. Liz Truss was forced to resign as Prime Minister after 50 days by her own MPs following release of a budget, closely overseen by the IEA, caused a panic in the markets and a dramatic spike in interest rates.

But now this happy coming together of radical right-wings separated by the Atlantic Ocean seems to be reaching an end.

One sign of this is the UK election will not be close. Everyone knows who will win. The Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, is going to form the next government. In the US no one can say with any certainty what will happen in November (and given the age of both candidates you could probably make a side bet of one or the other not actually being on the ballot on Election Day).

It is now time for the obligatory explanation of the key differences between US and British politics.

There is no separate executive branch in Britain. There is no elected upper house in the legislature. The House of Commons is everything. You vote for your local member of parliament. The leader of the party that wins a majority of parliamentary seats in the House forms a government and by custom is named Prime Minister. His or Her power has no effective check on it.

There is a reason the system has been called elective dictatorship.

This “first past the Post” system means that even when the popular vote nationally is close, you can often have a large working majority in the number of seats won.

The polls have been consistent for months. They show Labour with a 20 point lead, give or take. If they are right, the party is headed for a Tony Blair, 1997-style landslide.

That kind of victory still seems improbable. Blair was a charismatic, gifted, some would say glib performer. Starmer is a former Director of Public Prosecutions, the number three position in Britain’s Justice administration. No one would call him charismatic and his performance style can best be described as dull. But he is thorough and prepared as you would expect a top lawyer to be, and his plodding style is an antidote to the mania in which this country has lived since the Brexit referendum.

In Britain, people seem to want a bit of calm and frankly, sanity. The Tories have been in power for 14 years now, by most measures public services are worse, especially the NHS. The water companies, privatized under Thatcher, have dumped so much raw sewage into the sea in recent years that many beaches are unusable for swimming. The sewage dumps are a result of failure to invest in maintaining infrastructure, while at the same time paying large dividends to shareholders.

But this turn against the Tories is not about ideology and whether there is a role for the state in regulating the economy. It is just a sign that the electorate is tired. Over the last 40 years that has been the prime reason for change in British elections. And when change comes, owing to the first past the post rules of the British electoral system, it is like a tidal wave.

From the time of Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, the Conservatives were in power for 17 years. Blair’s landslide put Labour in charge for 13 years. No party won a majority in 2010. The Tories went into coalition with the Liberal Democrats, although they governed as if they had won a landslide. So it isn’t too great stretch to say they have ruled for 14 years.

The current polls show the trend to landslide victories ushering in new governments is set to continue.

Source. BBC News

And if you don’t trust the polls, trust this anecdote: as of now nearly 80 Tory MPs are not standing again for Parliament. If they thought they had a chance of still being in government they wouldn’t be quitting.

Among the quitters is Michael Gove, currently Secretary of Leveling Up [sic], Housing and Communities. Informed opinion expects Rupert Murdoch to appoint him editor of The Times.

Governments in the Anglosphere come and go. Rupert Murdoch is forever.

I headlined this week’s column with a question: can the upcoming British election tell us anything about what might happen in the US in November. Let me answer with another question: Do you think a majority of the American electorate is as exhausted with the shenanigans of Donald Trump and the MAGA party as Britons are with Brexit and the Tories?