THE RIGHT TURNS AGAINST AMERICA

Jonathan Freedland says that traditional conservatives are increasingly disturbed by US materialism

GEORGE W. Bush won't be surprised to learn that he has won few friends on the British liberal Left. He will have known that balling up the Kyoto protocol on climate change and using it to shoot hoops, basketball-style, into the Oval Office wastepaper basket, was bound to anger the Islington class, even if No. 10 moved fast to stop John Prescott from decking Bush over it during his visit to Washington this week. The President will have expected his warlike noises aimed at China and Russia, along with a deliberate scuppering of the rapprochement between the two Koreas, to win equally few plaudits among those who breakfast on oats and wheatbran. He will lose none of those famously copious hours of sleep over the condemnation of Primrose Hill chatterers, lambasting him for reversing Robin Hood and proposing a $L6 trillion tax cut which steals from the poor to give to the rich.

If Bush has thought about it all, which is unlikely, he will not be rattled to learn how quickly he has become a hate figure among bien pensants across the globe. He knew that lefties and liberals were always going to despise him wherever they live, from Greenwich to Greenwich Village — and for the same reasons. No matter that a top-ranking Downing Street official has now suggested that the US President has 'gone mad' — as one did to me recently — or that a Labour bigwig such as Lord Haskins can go on the radio to demand that Britain refuse even 'to engage' with an administration like Bush's. A liberal is a liberal, the Bushies will say with an unworried shrug.

But what troubles the Republican guard rather more is the prospect of a new enemy on the horizon. They are used to anti-Americanism on the Left; but could the Bush era spawn an unexpected cousin, in Britain and beyond — an anti-Americanism on the Right?

So far the line is holding. William Hague's circle insist that they remain 'supportive' of the new president, adding that Bush's sales pitch for his tax cut — in which W. introduced himself to Congress as the representative of the overtaxed American citizen, there to demand 'a refund' — is quoted by Conservatives frequently and with admiration. If Tories have been slow to defend Bush from his left-wing attackers, that's only because they've been busy with foot-and-mouth and pre-election preparation, says Team Hague.

But that view doesn't completely convince. For it's quite possible to imagine a change of heart on the British Right, one that might reverse the current predisposi non, which leans in favour of the United States and against Europe. The Bush presidency could be the catalyst for that change, exposing not only a deep, if buried, strain of Tory anti-Americanism but also a more profound rift — one that splits conservatism against itself.

For now there are only rumblings. There is the curious fact that the leading antiAmerican voice in Europe today is not the leader of the British Labour party but the Gaullist president of France. It was Jacques Chirac, not Tony Blair nor even Tony Benn, who branded the US a typerpower'. Note, too, the criticism of Bush's Kyoto decision found not only on the Guardian's letters page, but also on Planet Telegraph. The editor of this magazine tells me that when he dared defend W. in his Telegraph column, readers bombarded him with 100 shades of foul-mouthed abuse. They regarded Bush's America as the great Satan ready to breathe ecologically ruinous fire on the planet. These, remember, are not subscribers to Peace News: they are readers of the Daily Telegraph.

Boris Johnson was taken aback, but there is deep logic here. To a certain stripe of oldfashioned Tory, anti-Americanism is the natural, default position. If one's Toryism is rooted in a wistful longing for a better bygone era, then Americans are the obvious target of blame. After all, it was the Yanks who dared push Britain off its top perch in the first half of the last century, then to have the impertinence to force us to give up our empire by stopping our adventure in Suez. Now, to make matters worse, they are trampling all over our most precious gift to the human race, the English language. Where once the BBC let nation speak unto nation, now we are one world under CNN. (Lest anyone think this a joke, look again at the right-wing commentaries written during the Gulf War, lamenting not the Iraqi dead of Basra, but the CNN anchors' infuriating habit of saying `misser for missile.) Add the stubborn snobbery so central to old-fashioned, gut Toryism. There you'll find the belief that America is the land of junk culture — all McDonald's and Disney — while Europe remains the cradle of all things noble, from the frescos of Florence to the wines of Bordeaux.

For decades this essential anti-Americanism of the British Right had to be suppressed. Tories may have hated the Yanks, but they hated commies more, and the Cold War compelled them to fall into line. Ronald Reagan may have been a buffoon, ran the logic, but at least he was our buffoon. The nuclear threat tended to concentrate minds, obliging Britain to stand beside those holding the protective umbrella — and that meant the Americans.

Now that disciplining fear has gone. We might have tolerated White House warmongering when the Reds were in the Kremlin bed. Now, when Bush pokes his finger in Vladimir Putin's eye, it's harder to justify: there is no looming threat from which the Prez is defending us. On the contrary, he seems to be landing the world in needless trouble.

So the Soviet threat, which used to suppress British conservative anti-Americanism, has gone. But look at what's taking its place. Increasingly, middle Britons are expressing alarm about a fear no less apocalyptic than the Bomb. They worry that the earth is burning up, that their food is being poisoned, and that the countryside is being ravaged either by ghastly agri-businesses deploying grotesque pesticides and battery methods or by ugly, out-of-town superstores. They miss the high streets that used to have their idiosyncrasies but which are now decked out in the uniform colours of unstoppable global brands. They yearn for the Sunday of old, when commerce stopped and service was not available '24/7'. The onward march of globalisation is destroying the very things that these British conservatives want to conserve about Britain. And who is behind globalisation but the Americans?

Many have made the mistake of attributing such fears to the Guardian-reading, Green-voting classes alone. That may once have been accurate. But just visit any posh supermarket and check out who's buying organic. Listen to the fine Radio Four voices of the Food Programme or Gardeners' Question Time and you'll soon get the message: saving the environment from the gobble of global capitalism has become a cause for Middle Britain. And we all know the identity of global capitalist public-enemy number one.

A robust right-wing administration in Washington could bring this sentiment — this Home Counties Seattle-ism — to the surface. For now there is an American president who, without apology, will do whatever business tells him, whether proposing oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or tearing up Kyoto. While the nuclear threat forced British conservatives to close ranks with America in the late 20th century, the environmental threat could drive them apart in the 21st.

That process will unleash more than a wave of right-wing anti-Americanism, it will also split British conservatism down the middle. Already there is a rift, just below the surface, waiting to crack open. Ranged on one side are the Thatcherites: economic liberals and free-marketeers who believe in deregulation and the unfettered dominance of capital. Think Irwin Stelzer or Rupert Murdoch. They, in common with Margaret Thatcher, love America, with its Reaganite slashing of red tape, minimal welfare state and gung-ho entrepreneurialism that respects no borders and knows no limits. They used to train their fire on their own economies, jump-starting the lethargic private sector. Now their ambition is to make capitalists not just of their own citizens, but of the whole world. Their church is the World Trade Organisation, their prophets are the corporations and their religion is capitalism. Standing against them, amassed on the other side and, confusingly, also called conservatives, are those whose guiding star is a nostalgic, even reactionary, yearning for the way life used to be. Think Peter Hitchens or Peregrine Worsthorne. They are not Thatcherites; indeed they now regret her breakneck rush to make Britain a modern, capitalist society (though they cheered it at the time). They now endorse those who stand for local tradition and in the way of the stampede of globalisation. They back the 'metric martyr', or the Slow Food Movement of Tuscany, or the French David, Jose Bove, currently in battle with the Goliath that is Ronald McDonald.

For now most of these traditionalist conservatives (though not Worsthome) are still singing the old song — pro-America, antiEurope — but that's probably just habit. Everything about their politics is pushing them the other way. They oppose global homogenisation and the tradition-destroying effects of international capitalism, and now they see a Republican president who positively revels in those trends. Eventually, they will have to oppose him.

Will that send the British Right into the arms of Europe? Will Tories follow Perry Worsthome's conversion, and hail a federal Europe as England's saviour from the American behemoth? It seems unlikely. But if conservatives come to see a Bush-led US as the sponsor of a globalisation that threatens British tradition more severely than anything Brussels could ever dream up, if they see the WTO as a much greater challenge to British economic sovereignty than the European central bank, then such a shift is possible, especially if a second-term Labour government wins a yes vote in a referendum on the euro. Suddenly the British Right, including the Conservative party, will have to make its peace with Europe. If it begins to see America as more enemy than friend, that transition will be all the smoother. But first conservatives have to decide who they are. Are they the party of capitalism, right or wrong, or the would-be custodians of British culture? If they declare themselves the latter, they may find the Europe of Jacques Chirac a much warmer place than the America of George W. Bush.

Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian and the author of Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic, published by Fourth Estate at £6.99.