THE authority of Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown is dwindling fast. He may soon face a challenge to his leadership, even though such a challenge would plunge his party into self-destructive turmoil. He is now spoken of as the most unpopular British leader since Neville Chamberlain.
If his predecessor Tony Blair sold Britain out to US foreign policy, Gordon Brown may equally be said to have betrayed its fiscal sovereignty. With the electoral triumph in 1997 of “New Labour”, the big business-friendly political project of which he and Blair were the chief architects, Britain effectively threw in its lot with the US. As Blair’s chancellor of the exchequer, Brown made the financial sector the cornerstone of the British economy, importing into the City of London the gung-ho US banking practices that have led to Britain becoming lethally embroiled in the American subprime mortgage debacle.
Under New Labour, the British were encouraged to believe that it did not matter if Britain had abandoned manufacturing industry and now made money from abstract financial operations which few could understand, or if the deregulated City of London had become to business what Wimbledon has long been to international tennis — the mere venue for virtuoso performances by foreign players. It was rich that even as he was prostrating himself before unbridled US-style free market capitalism, in the process attracting to Britain an unprecedented influx of cheap foreign labor, Brown liked to wrap himself in the Union Jack, proclaiming his commitment to “British jobs for British people” and boasting about how much the British Empire contributed to world civilization.
BROWN’S phantom economy and the encouragement he has given to white British nationalism bode ill for Britain’s ethnic minorities and for the country’s Muslims in particular, who are already widely seen as either would-be terrorists or at the least terrorist sympathizers. A leaked government report has warned of the potential growth of racism and social conflict, and there are clear dangers that as the country sinks into severe recession, Britain will witness an upsurge in racist scapegoating. The truth is that many Britons already regard Muslims as the “enemy within” and in a period of rising unemployment and falling living standards, with millions feeling cheated and betrayed, such hostility is hardly likely to subside.
Encapsulating the mood of bitter disaffection that has marked Brown’s premiership, the new book, “Our Times”, by the prolific right-wing author A.N. Wilson is well calculated to reinforce popular perceptions that immigrants, and above all Muslims, are to blame for Britain’s ills. Serialized in the mass-market newspaper, the Daily Mail, Wilson’s doom-laden history of Britain during the reign of Elizabeth II argues that Islam has proved incompatible with traditional British values and that the Muslim settlement has contributed heavily to the undermining of Britain as an integrated society. What makes his otherwise often persuasive book mischievous is the impression it conveys that Islam and Islamism are indistinguishable. It is the fact that Britain’s Muslim community has produced suicide bombers and may produce more that Wilson chooses to emphasize, not the fact that it includes vast numbers of law-abiding, patriotic Britons.
As it happens, the evidence gathered by Wilson himself indicates that there is a welter of reasons for the decline of Britain, not least the breakdown of the education system and the growth of an underclass of Britons so mired in ignorance and illiteracy that they have no awareness of their country’s heritage. In his closing pages, Wilson likens the Britain of old to a missing person whose absence many members of her family, sitting in front of the television bloated by narcotics and American junk food, have not even noticed. For Wilson, what most vividly summed up the demise of Britain was Brown’s removal of the image of Britain’s tutelary deity, the trident-brandishing “Britannia”, from British coins. He portrays it as a symbolic act of national self-destruction by a politician who, notwithstanding his professions of patriotism, is barbarously insensitive to British traditions.
And yet, for all that Britain may have lost of its former character, many of Britain’s most characteristic traditions remain intact. A theatrically eccentric Tory patrician, A.N. Wilson himself belongs to a British Conservative establishment whose tenacity is phenomenal. Consider that, despite the emergence of a new, allegedly less class-bound Britain, the current leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron and not a few of his colleagues are alumni of Eton, the exclusive public school which has for centuries trained Britain’s ruling elite. At times indeed it can seem as if Britain has hardly changed at all and that that is what really explains the country’s chronic malaise.
