Letter From London

...As a book on monarchy puts it: "Is it any wonder that Britain leads the world in jokes and lags in microchips...

...But the most significant move has been the development by New Labour of a national family strategy...

...When in opposition, all political parties are given to resentful talk of "electoral dictatorship" as they contemplate the unbridled powers that a large majority permits a British government...

...The candidate most likely to lead the assembly, Rodri Morgan, took one look at the plans and commented: "To call it a dog's breakfast would be an insult to the pet food industry...

...This is the same Lord Chancellor who wants sartorial reform...

...It runs as follows: while other countries had revolutions to sweep away the vestiges of feudalism, Britain remained a kind of quaint Ruritanian monarchy, a sort of mediaeval Disneyland for tourists...

...What seems to condemn an electoral system that has so brilliantly stood the test of time is an abstract implication of democracy...

...Take rights, for example...

...There have indeed been changes, including the creation of peers for life, but radical reform has always collapsed in face of the problem of what to substitute...

...What we have here is nothing less than a civil religion...

...It Even the Lord Chancellor is wigging out...

...The bill to abolish such peers was presented by Baroness Jay, well known inside the Beltway in the late 197o's when Peter Jay was British ambassador in Washington...

...New Zealand tried this kind of change, for more or less the same "never again" reasons that now influence Labour...

...They weren't even citizens, merely subjects...

...It is, as the Chinese say, an interesting situation...

...A major complaint on the left was that the British had no rights...

...They went cold on electoral reform for the Commons...

...Not for us the stately American quadrille by which a president elected in November rides into office alongside his predecessor the following January...

...Ten million pounds was advanced for a new building for the Assembly in Cardiff, to be designed by the famous Richard Rogers partnership...

...Hereditary legislators, she remarked as she presented the abolition bill, are an affront to democracy...

...As Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of Labour's new image, remarked recently: "We are deeply relaxed about people becoming filthy rich...

...The Lord Chancellor has celebrated the new access of rights with a chilling remark: Judges will now, he explained, go beyond the letter of law and declare what is right...

...Alternatively, the Lords might be composed entirely of the sort of Life Peers who are already the most active part of it...

...That has not prevented the beginnings of an almost paranoid suspicion that some yet unrecognized plan is afoot...

...Another suggestion is that it might become a semi-federal chamber of the regions...

...It forces political passions into a two-party mold...

...Roy Jenkins, a Labour grandee, was sent away to produce a report recommending an element of proportionality in future elections...

...Baroness Jay has suggested that Emma Thompson should be recognized as a "role model" for young girls...

...The government published a Green (merely exploratory) Paper which proposed setting up what amounts to an alternative church...

...An early move has been the incorporation into British law of the European Convention on Human Rights...

...Defeated Cabinet Ministers are on the streets looking for new jobs...

...The remarkable thing is that, although the Scots are keen on their new constitutional toy, the rest of the country has little passion for Tony Blair's big ideas...

...New Zealanders were quickly disenchanted with a system in which it took many weeks after the election for the various parties to negotiate a coalition to form the government...

...Like his friend Bill Clinton, Blair wants to bestridethe common ground so completely that any challenge to his power can be dismissed as "ideological...

...Still, a Union fractured, a constitution vulgarized, freedoms brought underthe sway of lawyerly caprice and a population on its way to being infantilized — all of this is not a bad achievement for Labour's first eighteen months...

...Margaret Thatcher operated within this system, and her Conservatives governed Britain from 1979 to 1997, leaving a whole Labour political generation out in the cold...

...There's vague theoretical agreement that hereditary peers aren't democratic, but who cares...

...We shall soon be governed up to our eyeballs...

...Tony Blair is to politicians and bureaucrats what Father Christmas is to children, and his presents will cost us dear...

...led one parliamentary sketchwriter to lean over to another with a chuckle: "Hang on, isn't she Jim Callaghan's daughter ?") The Lords might be replaced by an elected chamber, but this would complicate matters for the House of Commons where the real power lies...

...This would create a Second Chamber which had only to be described as a "super quango of Tony's cronies" in order to sink beneath a chorus of derision...

...Institutional destruction is a lot easier, and more fun, than the hard work of creation...

...Celtic nationalism has been appeased by the gift of a whole new level of government, and new premises to accommodate the new politicians and bureaucrats are being set up in Edinburgh and Cardiff...

...Margaret Thatcher was often attacked as a tyrant, but the proof that she respected consensus can be found in the fact that New Labour has not tried to reverse her main reforms...

...He wants, you might say, to "get real," and he has already won the right to turn his back on the Queen after handing over the Queen's Speech at the State Opening of Parliament...

...The feudal survivals (as they seem) of British (and especially English) life will be swept away, creating a People's monarchy and a People's Church of England, but New Labour will guarantee in return that businessmen can go on making money...

...The new assemblies for Scotland and Wales constitute another new level of government, and threaten nothing less than the dissolution of the United Kingdom...

...Activism rules...

...In Britain, the specific form of this disease is called "modernization...

...As far back as 1829, Sir Robert Peel had declared that reform of the Lords is an urgent matter...

...But statistics often mislead...

...It suggested Bolshevik-style secular "naming ceremonies" for those who don't like holy water and baptism...

...With our first-past-the-post system, the election result is generally known the next day, and within hours (if the government is defeated) the furniture vans are outside No...

...We are being deprived of the shelter of traditional institutions and given the kind of gimcrack contrivances that the next passion for radicalism could sweep away overnight...

...its z 56 January 1999 The American Spectator does so by violating the effectiveness of votes...

...You'd think that reforming the House of Lords would be a nice simple bit of modernization...

...It's when we move from telephone boxes to the way the country is governed that the real trouble starts...

...Westminster, which is the only real democratic govemment, sheds powers (though it does not shrink) by the minute, but government everywhere else explodes...

...Hereditary peers are legislators by accident of birth, many of them reputedly descended from Charles II's bastards...

...What they forget is a political culture which takes serious notice of long term consensus...

...its corruptions are becoming a matter of increasing concern...

...The first-pastthe-post system is as unfair to third parties in Britain as in America...

...Century's end has, everywhere in Western societies, induced a passion for fast and easy forms of self-renewal...

...Perhaps (as Peregrine Worsthorne has suggested) he is floating an implicit bargain designed to put an end to the class war...

...Resentment just at the moment is focused on the abolition of duty-free privileges for travelers in Europe, even though the Brussels Commission will continue to enjoy diplomatic tax-free concessions and a raft of other benefits...

...LETTER FROM LONDON by Kenneth Minogue Modernizing the Brits T he left in Britain has long been in the grip of a strange legend...

...The French disposed of aristocracy with the guillotine, the Americans with their War of Independence...

...Hot political calculation, however, suggested cool constitutional advantage, in the form of a proportional system of election that would, in all likelihood, guarantee a left-of-center majority for the foreseeable future...

...S uch is the thorny path of the reformer...

...The minister of education is issuing guidelines to parents about when they should put their children to bed, based of course on the best medical advice...

...Instead, the electoral system is under attack...

...And certainly the regions are on the march, because another dimension of Tony Blair's modernization has been to decree elected assemblies for five million Scots and two and a half million Welsh...

...Whatever defects, the British system is certainly dramatic...

...The first new level of government is, of course, the European Union whose laws have gradually taken precedence over our own since 1972...

...Tony Blair has a different program...

...Nothing except government itself stands in the way of enterprise in Britain today, and these shallow constitutional mechanics are not the people from whom anyone sane would buy a new settlement...

...A few years ago, British Telecom began to get rid of the traditional red telephone boxes, but as Mark Steyn reminded readers of The American Spectator some time back, British modernization usually ends up as tasteless imitation of things that work well elsewhere...

...Britain had to get modKENNETH MINOGUE is professor ofpolitics at the University of London...

...58 January 1999 • The American Spectator...

...But none of this has discouraged the government from also taking British society by the scruff of the neck and making it better...

...the new system threatens to make politicians of us all...

...Little free space will be left to the individual...

...In 1996, for example, it took 111,000 votes to get a Liberal Democrat MP, 59,000 to elect a Conservative, and only 32,000 for New Labour...

...She did at least keep government expenditure from escalating much above 4o percent of GDP...

...We are forever reinventing, recasting, and rebranding ourselves and our institutions...

...Meanwhile, however, many in the British Labour Party soon forgot the pains of opposition and responded to their enjoyment of untrammeled power...

...Brussels has become the expensive source of a blizzard of new and often absurd regulations...

...Britain is in fact as free a society as you will find anywhere, and it is only recently that the rule of law has begun to degenerate into the rule of lawyers...

...Nothing more complicated than removing the hereditary peers...

...Margaret Thatcher came to power promising to get government off the people's backs...

...Here, New Labour faced the problem of affirming the traditional two-parent family without quite denigrating lone parents or homosexual couples, to which Old Labour is deeply attached...

...em, and Tony Blair's New Labour government was keen to help...

...io Downing Street...

...It is only this legend that makes sense of what is happening in Britain today...

...They raise serious questions about how England, with 83 percent of the population and most of the wealth, will be representThe American Spectator • January 1999 57 ed at this level...

...The old system was pretty economical with politicians...

...But Britain still has a House of Lords, a monarchy, Ladies in Waiting with quaint names, and as chief legal officer, a Lord Chancellor who wears tights and a wig...

...This The minister of education is issuing guidelines to parents about when to put children to bed...

...The problem is that these changes won't fit the British taste for electoral politics as a blood sport...

...Lawyers are rubbing their hands in glee as Britain becomes an even more litigious society...

...He finds tiresome the everyday dress of Lord Chancellors, consisting of wig, black gown, breeches, tights, and buckles...

...General elections are about changes at the margin, changes of mood...

...Finally, London and other towns are promised American-style mayors...

...Nevertheless, New Labour came to power, after nearly two decades in the wilderness, snorting with vengeful fire and blaming the electoral system rather than their own failures for their exclusion from power...

...Since the Church of England, in particular, has long been behaving like a political party, the Labour Party is now learning to behave like a church...

...Couples would be discouraged from marrying in haste, and marriage registrars and social workers would be given pastoral responsibilities for counseling couples in trouble...

...Ali, if modernization covered only such details...