MY TORY FRIENDS have become very worried–angry even–about British prime minister Tony Blair’s newfound popularity in America. What especially grates on them is that Blair is now admired by American conservatives, the last Tory constituency of any value. “It won’t last, you know,” they tell me, but I recognize the anxiety in their voices. They whine that “Tony”–he’s always Tony to those who hate him most, with the first syllable not just emphasized, but pronounced in a slightly higher tone–will use his newfound influence eventually to introduce something wicked, like the euro. Once he starts to advocate world government the scales will fall from your eyes again, they almost plead. The perceptive Anne Applebaum, who’s not usually given to revelries about black helicopters, writes something along these lines in the Sunday Telegraph: Blair’s American admirers just don’t understand how underhanded he can be. John Laughland, writing in the Spectator, goes further: Blair is “exceedingly pro-American” and Republicans are only now twigging on, he writes. He adds for good measure that the Tories should react by opposing this war, reconsidering their pro-American proclivities overall, and returning to “quintessentially traditional British qualities” such as siding with the underdog (by which I think he means the Taliban). Laughland may actually have something there–though not about the Taliban or the war, of course. The Tories may soon discover that they are not America’s natural ally. The United States is a liberal world power founded on liberal values (and by famous anti-Tories, such as Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson). I am using the term liberal not in the sense that a New York Times reader may understand it, of course, but in the classical sense of advocating small government, open borders, free trade, meritocracy, etc. The Tories may claim they too want all those things, but upon analysis they would find that they want them only up to a point. The only surprise about Blair’s new transatlantic admirers is that it’s taken them so long. There are many things to dislike about the British prime minister, his control freakery being but one. But it is staggering that for the past four years Americans, and especially U.S. conservatives, have continued to look at British politics through the prism of Margaret Thatcher vs. Michael Foot. What has changed in the past two decades is not just personalities. It’s not simply Tony’s ardor for a good war, or Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown’s fondness for vacations in Nantucket, that makes the present Labour leadership slightly more pro-Yank. If this were so, then Labour would return to its ambivalence about American power once the leadership passed to someone with Clare Short’s stridency or Denis MacShane’s squishy Europeanness. Rather, a whole set of historic and economic forces are making Labour the natural pro-American party of the future, and the Tories the reflexively anti-American one. This is not the case yet, to be sure, and it may never be. The second phase of the war on terror might be harder on the Bush-Blair friendship. But the death of Marxism seems to be returning politics to where it was before Marx and the factory. And that is to a debate between classical conservatives and classical liberals (or nobility and bourgeoisie; landed interests and merchant class; Tories and Whigs; Ghibellines and Guelfs). In this debate, it is clear where the Conservative party stands. Its instincts are, well, conservative. It will be the party that will defend tradition, throne, and church. You cannot cherish quintessential Englishness and at the same time be happy about hordes of immigrants moving in, and taking a while to integrate, when they care to. You can’t wax poetic about bucolic country practices and simultaneously welcome in cheaper produce that will devastate British farms. There’s a bright future for Britain in many sectors, but they would have to be those with a high value-added; British agriculture is not one of those and would founder in a true open trading system. If you care about propriety, you also can’t be too meritocratic, really. The Tories I know want barriers to be at least difficult to break. You can rise above your station in life, they say, but we want to see some effort (and once you get here don’t altogether forget whence you came). In this reading, the meritocratic Thatcher interlude was an anomaly. And you need a robust government if you want all these things–who else is going to keep out the foreigners, protect industry, and maintain the status quo? Society needs a party like this; it ensures that we don’t jump willy-nilly into every new fashion. In every society that has at least two sides you will find that one of them is conservative. Britain already has a party like this, and a heritage worth conserving. What’s not clear is where Labour stands. It is a party in flux because its founding clan and raison d’etre–the industrial working class–is emigrating to places like South Korea. It could become Britain’s Liberal party, especially since the party that currently rents that name no longer has a claim to it. Or, it could be hijacked again by a bunch of loonies who would take it into granola-crunching defeatism and a self-evidently empty multiculturalism. But there’s no there there. Even in increasingly poorly educated societies such as ours, where politicians selling anti-capitalist pap can have some success with well-intentioned but vacuous youths, these parties can rarely get enough votes to form even a coalition government. There are only so many teachers, “artists,” and journalists, and they’re not enough to keep such mush afloat. Labour party leaders have been smarter for the past five years, and it’s a good bet they will continue to be so for some time to come. So far, they seem to want to take the party down the road of classical liberalism as much as British society will allow. True, Chancellor Brown hasn’t ruled out tax hikes to get the awful National Health Service in working order, but the Tories also say fixing the service is their priority. As for the rest, it is notable that among the current batch of world leaders, Blair was the most outspoken critic of the anti-globalization demonstrators who sought to put the kibosh on free trade. (And especially so, when such a brilliant Tory philosopher as Roger Scruton sympathized with the demonstrators. “I may not agree with everything they say, but I see where they’re coming from,” said another Tory friend to me regarding the protesters.) And while the Tories were running a losing campaign on stopping asylum-seekers, the Labour government was looking the other way as the foreigners arrived, even though it is Labour voters who will be squeezed by the competition these newcomers bring. Last, it is the Labour party that has taken a stand on meritocracy, at both ends. Not only has it moved against the House of Lords–though admittedly it has botched the job–but it has also moved away from the traditional Labour emphasis on racial quotas and welfare. The losing side–so far–in the struggle for the Labour leadership has understood how corrosive this emphasis on meritocracy is to socialism. This is why it has earned Blair & Co. the wrath of the guardians of the party’s left, such as Roy Hattersley. As Michael Young put it in the Guardian, intelligence and diligence are inherited, so “being a member of the lucky sperm club confers no moral right to advantage.” Now, which party do you think would in time become the natural ally of the United States, a country of immigrants that relies on trade and where birth is very secondary to talent–“a country where people who do well don’t have questions asked about their accent, their class, their beginnings,” as Blair, incidentally, put it at the Labour party’s Brighton conference? Blair’s support for the U.S. cause in the war is a direct result of where he is trying to take his party, not a ruse to mislead some benighted Americans. On this last point, I would say the case has been rather the opposite so far. Bereft of support at home, Conservative leaders have recently all too often run to American conservatives for succor. Just last week, the new Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith took a victory lap in Washington and New York, rubbing elbows with conservatives, publishing an op-ed in the Washington Times, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute. But this may be a last gasp rather than the start of a beautiful relationship. Smith is very pro-U.S. and made all the right noises, but forces militate against him. Tory leaders henceforth will have to cultivate ties nearer to home, and when they look closer they may realize that their philosophy and that of the United States lead in very different directions. Michael Gonzalez is deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.
