6 APRIL 2010 – The announcement today in London that the next General Election will be held May 6 may remind some Americans that the “Conservative” party in Britain has very little to do with American conservatism. At National Review Online, Iain Murray makes the point neatly:
This election is likely to be perplexing for an American conservative, as no party — except possibly the sadly marginal UK Independence Party — is going to campaign on a platform recognizably right-wing in the American sense. (One wonders why something that worked in Massachusetts would not work in the UK, but we are not going to be given that option.) From the looks of things, Labour will be campaigning on a platform that doesn’t look too different from the Conservative Party’s in the mid-1950s, and the Conservatives, well, likewise.
The British political condition, in which political choices are narrowed to insignificance, also contains a realistic preview of an American political spectrum dominated by Obamalike Democrats and Bushlike Republicans. The future is the immediate past, in which the only real distinguishing marks – albeit important ones – have had to to with abortion, whether late-term elective procedures will be permitted and whether or not taxpayers will foot the bill for something many equate to murder.
No serious Republican candidate is proposing the kind of “roll backs” that would mark a true choice. The education budget will remain unmolested under a Republican administration. Entitlements will not be seriously affected by the political party in power. The new health-care plan will not be revised by a Republican Congress, just as Social Security remained untouched. If a Republican Congress is elected and if a Republican candidate gains the White House, the effect will be largely rhetorical. Taxes may be cut, for example, but spending will not necessarily decrease, and may in fact continue to rise. We know this because we have seen it. For years, under a Republican-dominated White House, Senate and House of Representatives, the federal deficit ballooned, entitlements spread rapidly – Bush’s Medicare drug program and his “No Child Left Behind” law together constitute a substantial, Democrat-sized expansion of government – and the only appeasement given to social conservatives was a ban on partial-birth abortions – which have, in any case, been replace by a procedure that kills the infant while it still rests in the womb.
There will always be Republicans who will never vote for a Democrat and Democrats who will never vote for Republican, just as there are Tory and Labour supporters who will never cross a party line. But it doesn’t matter when the only differences between the parties are few or trivial. In Britain, in truth, there are no choices, and in America, there are fewer and fewer.
– Denis Boyles
