Gwydion M. Williams

Britain and the USA increasingly move in tandem.  

Thatcher began the process of copying everything the USA had got wrong.  

This now includes a health service that runs for private profit.  In the USA, it costs twice as much per head, but may be denied to the critically sick or injured.  Withheld from those who cannot prove an immediate ability to pay.  

Long term it can ruin even well-off families when a family member has prolonged expensive sickness.  That’s a theme in many US novels, for instance Joseph Wambaugh’s The Black Marble.  And yet Starmer’s government is intent on following that model.

Wider US failures are also massive British problems.  No man is an island, though some of us are peninsulas.  And in social terms, Britain is a peninsula that foolishly makes new barriers between itself and Continental Europe.

Trump in his Second Coming may push the European Union into reasserting its own interests.  It is not an entirely hopeless hope.  But it is sadly likely that Starmer’s Britain will remain muddled between the two.

We have Trump again, because Kamala Harris stuck with what Bill Clinton began, and Obama and Biden continued.  All rejected decades of belief by their party in New Deal values.  All became defenders of the rich.

Harris, like Hillary Clinton, lost out to Trump.  He is just as much a defender of the rich.  But though he cites the wrong causes, he tapped into a widespread feeling that things have gone badly wrong.  He promises radical measures, though often of the wrong sort.  And it was the less educated who were much more likely to believe him.

Harris was not a drastic failure.  Nor was she doomed as a black woman – the British Tories just surprised many by choosing a black female leader.  And Harris got nearly 50% of the vote.  

Her defeat was exaggerated by the bizarre Electoral College system of the USA.  Small states get extra votes, which is why Republican Presidents get elected despite it being 20 years since they last won the popular vote.  Those states are dominated by rural voters who depend heavily on vast Federal subsidies put in place by Roosevelt’s New Deal.  State spending never touched by Republicans with a theoretical belief in Free Markets.

But she still failed.  Someone following the example of moderate socialist Bernie Saunders would probably have won.  Saunders in 2016 was polling better against Trump than Hillary was.  But the party elite saw Saunders as a worse enemy.

This time round, there is a reasonable suspicion of a fix.  Biden got the nomination for a second term, which has hardly ever failed for a sitting President.  Then he pulled out with the primaries safely over.  Not having Harris replace him would have insulted black and female voters.  But had Biden never claimed to be fit for a second term, a more radical candidate might well have emerged in primary voting.

Trump has the wrong answers to real problems.  Eager impoverished immigrants do undermine the job prospects of a vast ill-educated lower class.  People who are anyway hung up on their supposed status as part of the White Race. But African-Americans also felt threatened, and record numbers voted Republican.  Likewise Latinos born in the USA, or who have legally gained citizenship.  Latinos may figure that fewer illegal immigrants makes their own status better and their acceptance greater.

The Democrats also used to get the votes of individuals among the minorities who had conservative social views, but saw the Democrats as defending their economic interests.  Sadly, the party has got increasingly radical on social matters and increasingly neglectful of the economic needs of ordinary citizens.

It is a sad mess, obviously.  New Deal policies had defended everyone.  It reduced racism, though for a long time progressive Democrat politics depended on White Racist votes in the former Confederacy.  But there was a time when even Republicans accepted state controls on the rich and decent treatment for the poor.

So what, if anything, will Trump do for his ordinary voters?

Economists predict disaster if Trump makes good his promised protectionism.  They also predicted disaster for Russia when it was thrown out of the portions of global trade the USA still dominates.  And for the past ten or fifteen years, they have repeatedly predicted disaster if China failed to follow their demands for less protection and for private property in land.  

State-owned land makes sense.  Farmers can honestly and usefully profit from what they can grow on the land or graze on the land.  Not from selling land for other uses: housing or mining.  China is one of the few places that limit private farmers to their proper function.

Looking more broadly, it’s a mess that started long before Trump was anything more than the heir of a rich and racist property developer.  Thatcher and Reagan managed to twist conservatism into a defence of rich individuals.  Entrepreneurs, who often degraded actual conservative values.  Rupert Murdoch in the media is a notable case: undermining traditional values while claiming to defend them.

They did stabilise their societies after the disruptions of the 1970s.  But genuine conservatives would have restored the successful balance of New Deal or Keynesian values.  They instead saw these as having failed and being inherently flawed.  They imagined a return to classical capitalism, with all of its injustice and inequality.

And it was pretty much imagination.  Classical Capitalism was amazing in a world where most civilised countries were much the same from century to century.  China in the 19th century was not notably richer or more sophisticated than it had been under the Han Dynasty, which began two centuries before Christ.  But Victorian Britain was growing at less than 2% per year, despite a fast-growing population.  Imperial Germany with a much bigger role for the state in a broadly capitalist economy was pulling ahead of Britain, which is why the British elite wanted a war of destruction.  Got it as soon as they could find a pretext that would pull in the broad mass of Britons, who traditionally preferred Germany to France or Russia.  Jingoism was originally about saving Constantinople from Russia: Britain’s elite secretly promised it to get Tsarist Russia involved in the destruction of Germany.

With the Old Order seen as discredited by the war, much of the European left identified socialism with the Soviet Union.  H G Wells spoke for many when he said ‘I have seen the future and it works’.  Not that he wanted a copy: his world states were always English speaking and had an elite that mixed aristocrats and the cleverer of the middle classes.  In his atomic-war novel The World Set Free, a leading character is a King Egbert who abdicates as King of Britain and then becomes a leading figure in the new and benevolent World State.

The misbehaviour and failure of the late Soviet Union demoralised socialists.  As did the squabbling and ineffectiveness of the various Trotskyist sects.  But this was much too hasty.

While the Soviet Union fell apart, People’s China was proceeding smoothly.  Sticking with Leninist politics, and with strong state control of the newly permitted capitalism.  All land remains state property, with private farming having long leases and not allowed the parasitic process of land speculation.  Nor the disastrous falling into debt of less successful farmers.

Yet in the West, ordinary people are far too ready to trust the rich.  To believe that they are indispensable, and should not be curbed.  Or at least that the state cannot be trusted to do this.

They mostly don’t ask why top managers should get 90 times the salary of most of their employees, when the system worked fine with 25 times as much back in 1980.

It remains the belief of the ruling elite that they should be allowed to pass on their advantages to offspring who have done nothing to merit it.  This has become increasingly easy in the last three decades, even though libertarians are theoretically against it.

It is a sad lapse from the solid trend to equality that the West had from the 1940s to 1960s.

For much of history, rich families dominated and were seen as normal.  A strange town called Catalhoyuk was an ancient alternative.  The cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation lacked the temples and palaces of later urban life, though there was some inequality.  But both of these failed.  Apparently collapsed: there are no signs of violent conquest.  They were among the great range of different societies and empires that rise and then decline and fall.

Running a complex society is a complex task.  It is easy to persuade people that the rich are a vital resource.  That they make money, in the same way that bakers make bread and cobblers make shoes.

From this viewpoint, individual rich families will fail, but the class as a whole must be preserved.  In the crisis of 2007 to 2008, conventional state action was needed to avoid a much worse crash.  But instead of nationalising the banks and saying that dubious hedge fund profits were lost, both Obama and Gordon Brown chose to pick up the gambling debts of the extraordinarily rich.  Then Brown lost the next election, failing to ridicule the suggestion that British government spending had caused the global crisis.  The Tories kept taxes low and the budget balanced by a brutal austerity for ordinary people.  

These are the errors that Starmer continues.  That Biden continued, and Harris would have stuck to.  The examples of past success when the rich were curbed are simply ignored.

And right across the political spectrum of governing parties, they are also failed defenders of Western values.

Meanwhile China keeps faith in Leninism.  But also tolerates any sort of religion that is wise enough not to dabble in treason.