Every country in the world has an ambiguous relationship with the United States none more than the United Kingdoms. The nature of this so-called special relationship is generally misunderstood. Like many Americans themselves, people at the heart of the British political establishment especially its executive elite and its security services see America as a model for the rest of the world. The trouble is, their understanding of America is flawed, and this leads them to imitate aspects of America whose context they do not understand.
Also on openDemocracy: analysis of Tony Blairs political future, the Hutton Report and the media by David Marquand, John Lloyd, and Tom Bentley
Why the misunderstanding? Bonds of history, geopolitics, and language (all more tortuous in reality than in official memory) aside, these powerful British leaders routinely make a mistake no American would ever make in reverse: regarding the United States as not really a foreign country.
The intoxication of the countrys most presidential recent prime minister, Tony Blair (following Margaret Thatcher before him), with American models and lessons is especially acute. His uncritical importation of US-flavoured policies reveals not just ignorance of America but of his own country.
Illusions of progress
Again and again, Tony Blair and key allies in his New Labour political project that came to power in May 1997 have reached for a reform that amounted to importing an American practice without understanding its historical original, its context or its probable consequences.
Reform! Nothing is more central to Tony Blairs vision of what he can do for Britain than the idea of reform. But what does he mean by reform? All too often, he means importing sight unseen an idea, a phrase, an institution from the United States. And all too often, because he misunderstands the context of what he is trying to borrow, it doesnt work. Sometimes, Tony Blair seems like a magpie whose eye is caught by the glitter of a fragment. But when he gets it back to his nest, the glitter fades and the fragment bites.
Two examples show the problem. First problem: too many police authorities in Britain! Lets simplify them by introducing an FBI. Now, FBI stands for Federal Bureau of Investigation. But Britain does not have a federal political system, so an FBI wouldnt fit. (The FBI was introduced in America, after all, not because there were too many authorities, but too many jurisdictions. As crime became national, so a police force was needed that could coordinate the hunt for national criminals.)
What Tony Blair has in mind is more like a French-style gendarmerie nationale. But Britains Eurosceptic and Francophobe press (much of it owned by Rupert Murdoch, a US citizen) would make that politically impossible to create. So we are to have a federal bureau in a non-federal system.
Second problem: Britains comic-opera, Gilbert & Sullivan judicial system! A House of Lords Britains upper chamber of parliament sounds feudal, stuffy, all the things Tony Blair and the radical-minded lawyer pals of his younger days were against. These included his former landlord and legal colleague Charlie Falconer now the eminent Baron Falconer of Thoroton and the man Blair has made responsible for Britains judicial system.
Together, Blair and Falconer decided to give Britain a Supreme Court. The judges hate it; lawyers wonder how it would work; constitutional scholars are puzzled. Why a Supreme Court? Would it have power to review legislation, or not? Well, respond Blair and his buddies, its the separation of powers!
A good thing the United States has it. But Britain doesnt. Maybe it should, maybe not. But if it did, Tony Blair would have to resign from the House of Commons the lower chamber of parliament and so would all his cabinet. For the separation of powers in the United States doesnt just separate the judiciary from the legislature; it separates the executive from the legislature too. Somehow I cant see Tony Blair wanting to have to choose between being a member of parliament and being prime minister.
The nature of presidential politics
Even more important for the development of British politics is the way Blair and his circle tried to import a presidential system into the countrys very different political system. It was one thing to pick up electoral techniques (instant rebuttal, war rooms, focus groups) from the American professionals. That was great fun. But it was quite another to imitate the presidential system in Britain without understanding how much further change sorry, reform this would entail.
In the United States, a presidential candidate senator, governor, or insurgent aspirant raises money and gathers around him or (rarely) her a band of condottieri, Max Webers charismatic horde, blood-bonded by hope of booty. The party does not produce this tribe; rather, it sets out to capture the party, operating largely outside its formal machinery. The band of brothers raises very large sums of money, mostly from wealthy individuals and interest groups, to buy television advertising (which is forbidden by law in Britain). When its chieftain reaches the White House, he surrounds himself with a team of operatives, few of whom have any close identification with the party, and most of whom could not possibly aspire to be elected in their own right.
Remind you of something? That is New Labour: a team put together by a chieftain, largely contemptuous of the personnel and traditions of the Labour party and the elected House of Commons, and bound together by loyalty to the leader and the hope of reward at his hands. As in campaigning for the White House, New Labour on the road to Number 10, Downing Street saw manipulating the media as far more important than two-way feedback with a democratically-elected legislature. When Tony Blair arrived at the summit of power, his inner cabal was as close a replica as he and his soldiers could create from what he understood about the Clinton White House.
Three and a half years after Blairs election, in November 2000, George W. Bush replaced Bill Clinton. Tony Blair, it is said with Clintons explicit encouragement, set out to achieve as close a relationship with the new president as he had with the old. Again, he and his team did not fully understand the context. They did not realise that the new president was largely in the hands of two extra-parliamentary, not to say extra-democratic, cliques: the intellectual neo-conservatives, and a caste of traditional economic conservatives from the corporate sector especially from its energy sub-sector (Dick Cheney, Kenneth Lay).
So when the catastrophe of 11 September 2001 came along, Blair had no idea of the context. He sought, honourably enough, to influence George Bush, and calculated that to acquire influence he would have to commit himself to Bushs war. He seems not to have understood the fierce ideological divide between his two friends, Clinton and Bush. He seems not to have seen that for the Bush circle, 9/11 was an opportunity to carry out a policy it had been planning for a decade the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Now George Bushs policy seems to be unravelling, and Tony Blair is entangled in Bushs difficulties as well as several others of his own making.
The wrong America
There are many other examples of the dangers of borrowing what has not been understood. The Blairites were very impressed by the reforms of the Democratic party led by the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLCs ideas are said to have been in large part the model for Blairs policy of moving the Labour party away from its traditional left-wing orientation and policies. But once again, the context of British and American politics is treacherously different.
In the United States, Al From and other leading strategists of the DLC sought to move the Democratic party to the right to counter a party crisis which had its roots in the racial conflict of the 1960s and 1970s. New Democrats argued that the efforts of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to attain a greater measure of racial equality had driven millions of southern whites and working-class Democrats in the north into the arms of the newly conservative Republican party that achieved power under Ronald Reagan in 1980. Democratic strategists, including Bill Clinton himself, argued to win election again the Democrats would have to win back the votes of white males, and especially southern white males.
Tony Blair, by contrast, wanted to move the Labour party to the right to escape, not from the unpopularity of racial change, but from the unpopularity of socialism. It may have seemed the same to him, but the implications are very different.
Again, it took Blair and his strategic thinkers a long time to realise that borrowing ideas (welfare reform, creeping privatisation of public services) from a totally different political context in America, was not going to work in Britain and would be anathema to the Labour majority in the House of Commons on which he depends. Most profoundly of all, Tony Blair and his mostly unelected advisers borrowed from the United States a suspicion of government that had its roots in an American experience that was utterly alien to and irrelevant in Britain.
Margaret Thatcher professed to admire the American political system, but hated immigration, freedom of information, a written constitution and decentralised power. Tony Blair admires the American system, too, but he does not understand that its strength lies in diversity, openness, strong but balanced institutions, checks and balances, and a government not of men but of laws.
In short, Tony Blair, like Margaret Thatcher before him, admires America for the wrong reasons. That, too, is his political tragedy.