Britannia Est Insula

The Tories are back in charge in merry old England, sort of. The Conservative Party, as the Tories are officially named, had to stoop to forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats in order to get a majority in the House of Commons. There are 650 seats in the House of Commons, and the Tories only won 306 of them, so they needed the 57 seats won by the Liberal Democrats to break the 325 mark. This coalition is more than just semantically odd; the Liberal Democrats are more liberal than the Labour Party, which was unceremoniously booted from Downing Street after a 13 year run, so partnering with the Conservative Party is sort of like Barney Frank and John Boehner going on a date.

I don't really know much about the politics of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, nobody in America does. To us, the UK is just a tidy theme park with pastures and fog. We tend to think of the UK as a beloved pet, loyal and obedient and there to comfort us when no one else understands. We often forget that everything, right or wrong, about this great nation of ours is a legacy handed down to us by the British, whether language, law, arrogance or chicken pot-pie. Even our bicameral legislature and fondness for shrubbery are British. We've had a long and often tempestuous relationship since George III lost his marbles and let the colonies slip away, but for the past century, we've been just about inseparable, in peace and in war.

I visited England once, for just a day. I was on my way from Islamabad, Pakistan to Atlanta, Georgia, a popular destination combination, and I had about 20 hours in London because of the el-cheapo British Airways ticket I bought. I took the train from Gatwick to Russell Square, where I spent the evening in a modest hotel with no air-conditioning. It was the first week of June, and the weather was, surprise, cool and overcast with a light drizzle. I had a pleasant meal and pint across the street from the hotel and, being from Macon, Georgia, thought to myself, "no wonder you blokes colonized half the world; you were trying to find some decent summer weather". I had spent three years in the U.S. Army in Europe many moons before, but never made it to the "islands", probably because the Chunnel hadn't been dug, and I'm easily distracted. Anyway, the people were charming, the food was bland, the weather sucked and the weight of history was enormous.

So Labour is out and the Tories are in, just the opposite of what we experienced in 2008, but, of course, the American Presidential system and the British Parliamentary system are two radically different approaches, which are ironically very similar. The House of Commons has all the real power in the UK, even though they have a Queen and the House of Lords. There are even probably a few queens in the House of Lords; in fact, the closet thing we have to the House of Lords is probably the Saturday night Drag-Queen revue at a place we all know about but pretend we don't. The Queen and the House of Lords are like the fuzzy hats the Grenadier Guards wear, they are symbolic representations of the glorious past which nobody but tourists can afford to give a rat's ass about anymore. Anyway, the prime Minister attempts to run the government with nothing but the confidence of his fellow MP's standing between him (or her) and unemployment, and he has to spend all day in the Parliament listening to catcalls. However, lest we laugh at the eccentricities of our North Atlantic cousins, in their Parliament, honest and substantive debate are only masquerading as chaotic insults and hooting, whereas in our Congress chaotic insults and hooting are masquerading as honest and substantive debate. As a nation of obsessive whiners, we still have, perhaps, a good deal to learn from our British friends; stiff upper lip and all that.

The moral of this story is that politics is all about timing. There are forces at work in the world which are as indifferent as they are irresistible. Not even the CIA can control the random events and unnoticed processes which jump out and yell "Boo!" at the worst of times. The economy took a dive and the Republicans were history. The Bush administration may have had something to do with the bad economy, but it was mostly things that had been brewing for some time, "structural" issues which lurked beneath even poor regulation and massive debt. The Euro slumps, so now Gordon Brown has time to go on The Graham Norton Show and take college classes with John Major and the Tories can try and preserve an unnatural and unstable coalition while still facing war, economic hardship, random violence and the gravitational wake of the collapsing America empire.

The problem is thus; whatever your political disposition, and however fervently held it may be, most people can only remember the last 15 minutes and have no idea what kind of commitment and sustained effort it takes for a society to accomplish anything. Every time something goes wrong, we throw the political bums out and start with a new group of bums who want to undo everything the last group of bums accomplished; this is almost the dictionary definition of inefficiency. It would certainly make more sense for us the have a set of principles that were not based upon short-term convenience, fear, hunger, thirst, suspicion, parochial opportunism, the frantic and useless pabulum of the nightly news, or even hope. It would be better for all of us to know who we are, what we want, what is reasonably possible and the plan to get there. Then we could roll with the punches, take the good with the bad, forgive the inevitable human failure and quit swimming in a circle for the entertainment of the sharks. Good luck David Cameron, I hope you have a lot of skin on your teeth.