AS I WAS SAYING
The only way to defend ourselves against unbridled capitalism is to cleave to Europe
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
To anyone of taste and discernment except for a small minority of such who are also billionaires — it is only in time of reces- sion, when global capitalism momentarily fal- ters, that life in Britain becomes halfway tol- erable: roads usable and no new motorway stations, restaurant tables available, pubs uncrowded, beauty spots unpolluted, yuppies absent or at any rate lying low, and so on and such like. So it should follow that the last thing readers of The Spectator — unless they are also billionaires — want is a long period of unbridled global capitalism operating at full throttle. Apart from a thermonuclear war — now most unlikely — I can think of no other plausible scenario more likely to turn this once green and pleasant land, so unique- ly vulnerable to development because of its tiny size and lack of hide-away nooks and crannies, into a hell on earth.
Nor, by the same token, can I envisage with any equanimity the unbridled capitalist `development' of China, along American lines. The appalling ecological consequences of an extra half-billion people being able to afford two gas-guzzling, exhaust-emitting cars (not to mention the millions and millions of extra package-tour holidaymakers) do not bear thinking about. Fortunately, the Beijing authorities have no intention of allowing unbridled capitalism to take over there, except along the coastal regions; which, as well as being good for the world in general, also means that what remains of China's mandarin culture, having barely survived the ravages of unbridled communism, won't now be plunged straight out of the last century's ideological fire into this one's scarcely less destructive ideological frying-pan.
Sadly, however, the very bourgeois forces, which at the onset and throughout the last century bravely refused to accept totalitarian communism as the inevitable wave of the future, are now sorely tempted, in their turn, to believe much the same kind of fatalistic rubbish about unbridled global capitalism. No way of resisting it, they say. If you want all the economic gold, you must put up with all the social and cultural dross. There is no alternative. Of course they regret unbridled global capitalism's dehu- manising effects — quite as corrosive of the character of those who soar as of those who sink — much as they regret the new flexible employment policies under which workers become as disposable as Kleenex, and all the old bonds of loyalty and mutual corn- mitment that used to bind corporate com- rades and colleagues together become lia- bilities to be rooted out rather than, as they once were, assets to be treasured. Never- theless, like it or not, for any country that does not want to go to the wall, that, they conclude, is simply how it has to be.
So from where might resistance to this lat- est wave of social and cultural defeatism spring? Not, for sure, from the traditional quarters, at any rate in Britain: not from the Labour movement, which exists but no longer counts; not from the best and bright- est members of the intelligentsia, who are now as ideologically committed to unbridled capitalism as their predecessors were to unbridled communism; and, least of all, not from the new Conservative politicians, who can no longer tell the difference between benevolent paternalism and malevolent socialism.
What about Mr Blair's Third Way? you may object. Surely at least its hope is to keep global capitalism on a leash. Hope, yes. But not since Neville Chamberlain thought he could hold off the Nazi menace with an umbrella has there been such absurd wishful thinking. The Third Way is not worth the paper it is written on, any more than was the Munich Agreement. Power respects only power and for the time being global capital- ism, in the tentacles of which the whole human race now both writhes and luxuriates, has no ideological or practical contender. Capitalism has found a way, for the first time, of appealing to man's mind as well as to his stomach. No contender? Well, no actual contender. But might not there be a potential contender — and here we come to the crux — emerging in the shape of a new superpower, the United States of Europe, the historic purpose of which could, and in my view should, be precisely that, not so much in spite of being undemocratic, but precisely because of being undemocratic?
In what sense undemocratic? In the sense that used to be true of British parliamentary government which, having been created in the 17th century by the Whig aristocracy in their own image and interests — as indeed was the United Kingdom itself — remained under their control politically almost until the end of the 20th. As a result Britain was able to embrace industrialisation without allowing industrialists — as happened in Washington's and Jefferson's America — to take over politically. So in Britain at least the state and its parliamentary and govern- ing institutions remained in the hands of roughly the same pre-capitalist social stra- tum around whose landed interests and lib- eral values it had originally crystallised. In Britain, therefore, capitalism ruled economi- cally; it did not reign politically, socially or, most important of all, culturally.
No longer. New men, trained and quali- fied rather than educated and civilised, were needed en masse to run a modern economy, and Mrs Thatcher, responding to necessity, opened the floodgates. She had no choice. But although the economic benefits of the new red blood proved dynamic, beyond anybody's dreams, the political, social and cultural price paid has been much higher than anybody feared. In effect, that historical social stratum, which had been the cement binding the various bricks of the United Kingdom together and lending Parliament a continuous authority over and above the temporary power conferred by elections, has been replaced by a mean and lean, Cassius-like surrogate elite, or 'replacement patriciate' as Tom Nairn contemptuously calls New Labour, wholly lacking in what it takes to fulfil those historic functions. One glance at the House of Commons backbenches tells the sorry story. Seeing them is disbe- lieving them. This applies across the board. So, for the foreseeable future, the body politic will have a gaping hole in its `head', filled only with focus-group saw- dust and public-opinion-poll plastic — the very stuff best guaranteed to lose what remains of the Empire (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) in another fit of absence of mind.
Enter here, providentially, a United States of Europe, with France temporarily as its head. For the French body politic, mod- ernised 200 years earlier, already does have a formidably effective 'head', in the form of a mature and authoritative meritocracy determined to resist — if only because of its post-Cold War healthy anti-Americanism the pressures of unbridled global capitalism, even if this does mean — indeed, because this does mean — accepting a gentler, slow- er and more humane rate of economic growth. Yes, this new United States of Europe will have to grow from the top downwards. But so did the United Kingdom, as also did, it is worth remembering, the United States of America itself.
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