UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
from John Lloyd:
Goodbye to all that centrism
How much longer will the political center hold in Europe? Its erosion, years in the making, is only picking up speed. In Italy, the latest political crisis presages the collapse of the centrist left-right coalition. In Austria, a recent election barely gave a similar coalition enough votes to continue governing. The European Union nations are hurtling toward elections next spring for the European parliament, which will bring real debate and divide to what has been a largely consensual assembly. Not far separated from the yolk of the financial crisis, nationalism is the politics of the times.
While Europe’s economy is making a slow, small improvement (with exceptions in the south), its politics are becoming much more fragile. Most economists say that the crisis can only be fully remedied by taking more powers into a powerful Euro-center, one that’s fiscal, financial, macro-economic, and thus political. Brussels believes it must be done: but no national government, even Germany’s, believes it could deliver popular approval for the move. The crisis is already forcing integration, yet causing citizens to recoil from the EU. That’s the central contradiction of Europe, stark and grim.
Voters now demand that their national governments protect them from the fallout of treaties that their political leaders signed. Citizens are concerned that immigration -- especially from the two latest (and poorest) EU members, Romania and Bulgaria -- is ruining their societies, and the growing recoil is forcing these politicians to retreat from their commitments. Manuel Valls, the French Interior Minister, said in an interview last week that many of the Roma (once known as gypsy) people who have come to France mainly from Romania and Bulgaria and live in squalid camps, should return. A European Commission spokesman responded the next day, saying such a move would break European law.
The day after that response, Pierre Moscovici, the French Finance Minister, came to Brussels with his country’s budget. Under a recent agreement, budgets must be approved by the European Commission before they’re debated in the French parliament. This timeframe, with much else, was decided during the turbulent past two years, to contain the crisis and calm the markets. Now, the consequences of that decision to seek European Commission budget approval, and the suppressed frustration at the national level over the straitjackets on their economies, are becoming more widely evident, and a generally EU-supportive press is becoming increasingly critical.
from Breakingviews:
UK’s politicians race to the bottom on policies
By Ian Campbell
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
The next UK general election is in 2015, and the country’s politicians are already engaged in a classic pre-electoral sport: the race to the bottom. They are desperate for policies which please voters and the competition is fierce. Popularity is the aim, populism is the method. None of it is going to do the economy any good.
from The Great Debate:
China’s commitment to growth will drive the global economy
From outside China, the Bo Xilai trial looks like the Chinese news event of the year, one of the preoccupations of Western media, along with corporate corruption and the clampdown on American and European companies. Yet these issues are no more than sideshows to the most important economic event of recent times, the unveiling and ratification of a major program for reforms for the next decade, which will occur at the Chinese government’s third plenum in November. The reforms promise to bring another great leap forward in China's dramatic ascent.
Chinese officials will reveal how long China will need to make the transition from an investment-led, middle-income country to an innovative, consumer-driven, high-income one -- and thus when it will become the world's largest economy. Can China circumvent what we know as "the middle-income trap" that has for decades denied high-income status for Latin America and Asian countries like Malaysia and Thailand?
from The Great Debate UK:
UK recovery, but not on the high street
It was only a few days ago that George Osborne declared victory on economic malaise saying that the UK economy has turned a corner. The economic data has improved dramatically in the last six months, which gave Osborne a battering ram to launch a political attack on the Labour Party. Osborne used his moment in the sun to prove Ed Balls and all on the other side of the political bench wrong, saying that his austerity programme is right for Britain.
However, a little over 24 hours after Osborne’s speech a report from the Local Data Company made for uncomfortable reading as it detailed grim conditions on the UK’s high streets. High Street vacancy rates remain stubbornly high; out of 650 town centres in the UK the average vacancy rate is 14.1 percent, which is basically unchanged since February.
from John Lloyd:
Mark Thompson’s two-front war
Mark Thompson is a burly, clever, self-confident, occasionally slightly intimidating man who until a year ago ran the BBC and is now chief executive officer of The New York Times Company. He’s been at the center of a very open row with his previous employer and one much more covert with his present one -- not so much because he’s a troublemaker (though he seems to find it easily) but because trouble is being made for news media with high standards.
Thompson was the subject of a recent piece in New York magazine, which reported growing tension between him and Jill Abramson, the Times’ executive editor. It claimed that “the role of ‘visionary’ at the paper, traditionally held by the news chief, was now being ceded to Thompson,” and that he was usurping some news functions. Author Joe Hagan’s sources were mostly unnamed: one of them told him that Thompson had said to “a Times executive” that “I could be editor of the New York Times: I have that background.” That’s not an emollient statement for Abramson, two years into her job.
from John Lloyd:
Why democracy is an insufficient force against WMD
The British parliament’s refusal to countenance military intervention in Syria, and President Barack Obama’s decision to delay a strike until Congress approves it, point to a larger, even more dangerous contradiction of the mass destruction age.
That is, parliamentary democracy and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) sit ill together. Each confounds the other’s natural working.
from Compass:
How to win the vote — and the war — on Syria
President Barack Obama’s surprise decision to seek congressional authorization for punitive cruise missile strikes against Syrian government targets presents the West with a perhaps final opportunity to align rhetoric with reality, and policy with purpose, in its response to the Syrian civil war.
The bad news is that the White House, by gambling on its ability to convince a recalcitrant Congress to go against an isolationist public mood, has opened itself up to the very real possibility of defeat as its opponents will seek to embarrass what they consider a reluctant, irresolute Commander-in-Chief. The good news is that that path to winning the vote in Washington is paved with setting out a new and credible course for a diplomatic solution to the crisis that can justify an act of war.
from John Lloyd:
On Syria, England defects
Thursday’s British House of Commons vote against Britain aiding in a Syrian intervention led me to center on one question: what will happen to the U.S.-UK relationship? Is that alliance now gravely weakened? Can it survive in a meaningful form?
Specifically, will Britain ever again be able to partner with the United States in any future military interventions? Without Britain, the United States will certainly carry on. It has a new best friend in France -- french fries top of the menu now! -- and maybe Turkey will be willing, too. In the UK, Prime Minister Cameron says Britain will remain committed to mobilising opposition to the Assad regime, delivering humanitarian aid, and deploring the use of chemical weapons.
from Mark Leonard:
Syria and the politicization of British foreign policy
Syria’s population -- at the heart of so many proxy battles for influence -- last night found itself drawn into a different kind of conflict -- this time over the future of British politics. After the British Parliament's vote against action in Syria, the former Liberal Democrat leader, Lord Ashdown, tweeted that Britain is a "hugely diminished country" this morning: “In 50 years trying to serve my country I have never felt so depressed/ashamed.” But is he right to see this vote as a retreat into isolationism? I think it is rather a step into a more modern diplomacy, one where politics do not end at the water’s edge.
Once the dust settled on the vote, David Cameron’s closest ally, Chancellor George Osborne, said there will be a lot of "soul-searching" about Britain’s role in the world. There is talk about the shadow of Iraq, pacifism and anti-Americanism as a result of an unholy alliance between conservative little-Englanders and pacifists of the left. But though these tendencies were both represented in the lobbies of the House of Commons, they still represent a minority of the political spectrum. It is worth remembering that the Labour leader Ed Miliband did not argue against military action in principle, and even made a point of saying he could support intervention without a U.N. Security Council resolution.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Thatcher’s determination battled her flaws
By Martin Hutchinson
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
The first volume of Charles Moore’s authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher covers the British prime minister’s life “From Grantham to the Falklands”. In his recounting of her childhood and early years in power, Moore shows her great determination, which was often needed to overcome previous mistakes.
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The Wall
