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British Tory Party - a bunch of wankers?
Sadly, Steyn's pretty much on the Mark (as usual) with this current analysis of the Conservatives... Slightly EFLAccording to The Sunday Telegraph, "Howard Tells Bush: I Don't Care If You Won't See Me". Presumably he didn't actually "tell" Bush, since his lack of access to the guy is what this thing's all about. "Face time" they used to call it in Bill Clinton's day. So Bush is probably unaware that Howard doesn't care if he won't see him. By next Sunday we might be seeing headlines such as: "Furious Howard Slams Reeling Bush: I Don't Care If You Don't Know That I Don't Care If You Won't See Me". We are, as has been noted, two nations separated by a common language. Take - to pluck at random - the word "conservative". In America, "conservative" has certain common meanings: devotees of small government, gun nuts, fiscal hawks, anti-abortion groups, the religious Right. Bush is a problematic figure for several of these constituencies, but all of them are numerous and indispensable to the election prospects of the President, senators, governors, congressmen and state legislators. Now turn to Britain. What does "conservative" mean? There's no religious Right or pro-life groups, not much social conservatism at all, and, if there was, the Tory leadership would recoil from it lest they offend shortlisted gay candidates with safe seats. There are no gun nuts, because the party has a rather unpleasant authoritarian bent and has traditionally eschewed the Englishman's-home-is-his-castle stuff in favour of a knee-jerk deference to the monumentally useless British constabulary. (Howard's time as Home Secretary makes an instructive study in this regard.) As for fiscal conservatism and small government, the Tories are against "waste" and in favour of "choice", but so's everybody else, at least rhetorically. So what does "conservative" mean in British English? If you look it up in the OED, does it say "obs."? Last-known citation, by Toby Helm in The Daily Telegraph, August 7, 2004: "Senior members of Michael Howard's frontbench team believe the Conservative Party will have to consider changing its name as part of a fundamental `rebranding'." Whoa, not so fast. Despite the great gaping nullity of the party this past decade, there was still one thing it stood for: like the Republicans, the Tories were the party that took foreign policy and national security seriously. That's what Howard threw away when he chose to repudiate his own Iraq-war vote, accuse Blair of "dereliction of duty" and demand his resignation. Posted by: Bulldog 2004-08-31 |
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