If the quality press is any guide, Americans are more interested in the British election than the "special relationship is dead" school of thought thinks appropriate. A Nexis search after the first few days of campaigning threw up 32 stories on the election in newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Nor were they merely reprinting agency copy. Bigfoot correspondents, such as Joe Klein of the New Yorker and Ronald Brownstein of the LA Times landed in the shires when voting was still a month away. There is not even the excuse that the rich crop of British scandals is the lure. American journalism is puritanical by Fleet Street standards and-so far at least-its reporting has concentrated much less on "sleaze" than have Britain's own broadsheets.
Why, then, this level of interest? A theme that emerges from many of the reports is that the British election may tell Americans something about how their own politics is likely to develop as the ideological flux of the post-cold war period gives way to new alignments.
This sense of a similar future is not unreasonable. Conservative and liberal trends in the two countries have tracked each other closely in the last two decades: two strongly ideological conservative leaders emerged in the 1970s and set both countries on a new right-wing path; they were succeeded by weaker personalities who embarked on a kinder, gentler pragmatism; this was welcomed at first but subsequently led to serious divisions in their own parties; and after a while, they lost power to liberal parties led by men who had persuaded their followers to accept many of the right's reforms.
That at least will be the story if Blair wins his expected victory. The American interest is, to a degree, a case of liberals seeking reassurance. Clinton was supposed to have demonstrated by now that a new approach to centre-left governance was perfectly practicable. Instead, the ideological direction of Washington is up for grabs, and liberals give the president much of the blame. Not only is he politically compromised by his conservative concessions-welfare reforms and a balanced budget-to the Republican Congress, he is also mired in scandals. Might it have been different under a different man? Could Blair be a Clinton without the character problem?
Hence the theme of much coverage is how alike the two men are-liberal lawyers married to liberal lawyers, ideological modernisers, fiscal conservatives-and yet how different. Clinton, wrote Time magazine, is a flirt and Blair a straight arrow, and these differences are thought to carry over into their politics. Clinton just cannot say no to any interest group, Blair has fixed his affections on middle Britain.
This comparison is unfair to the president. He has, after all, been governing a continent for the last four years-which is a harsher test than running a political party. His political inconsistency has been exaggerated: he was elected and re-elected as a New Democrat; the proposed health plan of the intervening years was the centrist orthodoxy of "managed competition" (liberals wanted the Canadian single payer system); and his concessions to a Republican Congress were hardly more unprincipled than Blair's concessions to a conservative electorate. The hope that Blair will be a better liberal than Clinton ignores the degree to which they are both responding to the restraints of post-cold war global politics.
Thus, a Washington Post editorial, on the Tory party and New Labour, advanced an argument that could have been applied with equal truth to Blair and Clinton: "...both (are) pro-business, both in favour of deregulation, privatisation, liberalisation. This is partly because of the failure of communist governments everywhere, partly because the deregulated economies of Britain and America seem to be working better than those in Japan and Germany, and partly because governments no longer have much choice." The difference is that Clinton, for all his wonkery, was surprised to find on coming into office that he was the slave of the markets; Blair has signalled his obeisance in advance.
That does not mean, of course, that politics has come to a halt and that we are all anti-socialists now. Certain arguments have indeed been settled for good or at least for the foreseeable future; there will be no renationalisations, no dashes for growth, no tax hikes. But as those issues fade away and their advocates die off, other expressions of the interventionist itch will emerge.
It would be a rash prophet, for instance, who predicted that regulation was unlikely to expand. For the one advantage that privatisation has for interventionists is that it liberates them from the responsibilities of ownership. They therefore have much less incentive to consider the effects that regulation will have -and a greater incentive to impose their favoured mandates. In the early 1980s, Norman Lamont, visiting the US as a junior energy minister, was surprised to discover that regulated American utilities often had a more irrational cost structure than British nationalised industries on which governments had periodically enjoined economic pricing. Regulations imposed by US federal and state governments today include not only forcing utilities to lower rates, but also insisting that insurance companies ignore actuarial risks for favoured groups or medical conditions that have attracted public sympathy. Will not a Labour government be tempted down that path when those likely to be harmed by its exactions are not nationalised companies, linked with it in the public mind, but privatised corporations associated with its opponents? No? Welcome to the windfall tax.
As the economic case for socialism evaporates moral arguments come to the fore. Intervention is urged not on grounds of greater economic efficiency, but to promote some concept of equity-race and gender quotas to remedy discrimination, or tort laws that ignore culpability and penalise "deep pockets," or restraints on large retail stores that undermine "community." Unrestrained by any embarrassing test of economic success or failure, these moral interventions tend to multiply and grow vaguer. Blair's book, New Britain (which has been respectfully received here), is rich in such cloudy justifications. There is the "stakeholder concept," of course, which removes from corporate managers a duty to maximise profits for the shareholders and empowers them to pursue a variety of aims negotiated between a variety of stakeholders. And in place of socialism, there is social-ism-which Blair fails to define as "a moral assertion that individuals are interdependent, that they owe duties to one another, that the good society backs up the efforts of individuals within it, and that common humanity demands that everyone be given a platform on which to stand." It is hard to conceive of an intervention which such a test would not allow.
Blair has rejected the outright protectionism now reviving on the union left and the Buchananite right. Far more likely is that a Labour government would follow the Clinton administration's (and the French) example and seek to make trade liberalisation and international regulatory agencies such as the WTO and the ILO vehicles for extending the west's industrial and environmental regulation to the Pacific rim.
Here is the emerging politics of the new New left, camouflaged as yet by the rhetorical moderation of New Labour and sufficiently similar to New Democrat instincts across the Atlantic to look like a future that works. But the question "Who whom?" now arises. Who are the main beneficiaries of this new style of intervention which is not vested in government alone but exercised by both public and private bureaucracies, not justified by economic efficiency but by arbitrary and shifting notions of equity, regulating not merely the economy but an ever-expanding area of social life and not confined to one country but international in scope? There are many such regulators-the corporate managers now empowered to decide which stakeholders should get what, the judges who discern new constitutional rights that prohibit single sex education (for boys anyway), the European bureaucrats who harmonise everything from beer to bananas-but the best shorthand term for them is the new class.
The new class-predicted by James Burnham, first recorded by Milovan Djilas, and best analysed in its capitalist habitat by Irving Kristol-is the educated non-technical intelligentsia which manages government bureaucracies, private corporations, and social, cultural and religious institutions. It is strongest in the public sector and cultural institutions, but it is gradually extending its influence over strongholds of the old elite such as the corporation and the military. Its political style is liberal managerialism, and Clinton and Blair, both public sector verbalisers, might almost be its defining symbols. Everywhere this class seeks to extend its power through law, regulation and opinion management, and to emancipate itself from popular control by transferring powers from living democratic bodies to remote bureaucracies, the courts, quangos, new untested institutions and international bodies.
Few Americans seem to have noticed the extraordinary tribute that new Labour policy pays to the US constitution. Yet almost all its constitutional reforms are influenced by the US model-greater use of judicial review, a bill of rights (which in practice will empower those citizens the rest of us address as "M'Lud"), internal federalism for Wales and Scotland and the ceding of powers to a federal Europe. It is almost incidental that these reforms, although advanced as strengthening democracy, will in fact weaken the central democratic institution in Britain, namely parliament, and transfer power to bodies not directly answerable to the British electorate.
What is more significant, as John Gray has argued, is that the British (and European) left has fixed on the US as its latest utopian model-a multi-ethnic, multicultural polity held together not by irrational ethnic nationalism but by conscious subscription to the liberal political principles in the Declaration of Independence. It hopes to replicate that achievement by building a similar "Europe"-a polity which, like its transatlantic model, would be united by principles and institutions, but divided by language and culture, and so in need of the new class to manage its cultural diversity.
New Labour does not seem to realise that it is the vanguard in this new class struggle, and the US press has overlooked this point in the campaign. Somebody is being cunning here-it may be history.
