When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (49 page)

Mr Thompson said: ‘American education aims to get the best out of the greatest number. We are trying to educate the very best to the highest level. We ignore a large percentage of those who could be stretched much further.' Americans, he added, are thought of as ‘natural' democrats, but actually they work hard at it through mechanisms designed to release potential. It is easy to sneer at degrees in hairdressing, but people who take them are going to have a better shot at business than the youth who leaves school at sixteen. Widely available higher education, giving the greatest number of people the greatest chance, is closely related to an adult democratic society. The British, said Mr Thompson, are full of good intentions, but bad at carrying them into effect. ‘The government has not seen the centrality of education to economic development.'

Mr Thompson spent considerable time on World Bank related business in China. He had seen there opportunities for the export of British scientific and educational equipment, and had first lectured to an appropriate British trade organization about the Chinese potential in 1983. But four years later nothing had been done; people were still talking. ‘Foreigners want to buy certain things that we make, but our manufacturers are not geared up to explore the markets. I was rocked on my heels when I got home from the States by the reluctance of our salesmen to get on a plane and export,' he said. The lack of enterprise amongst the best educated British was even illustrated, he argued, by the hostility of students to a system of repayable loans rather than grants. ‘What can possess these intelligent kids to think they have a right to a free university education? They will benefit with enhanced salaries for the rest of their lives, yet they resist loans even when resources are so scarce that university places are being closed down.'

It is the British rather than the Americans who really compete with one another, often – in world markets – fratricidally, said Mr Thompson. For example, civil engineers seeking a contract in the Third World seldom get together behind the firm with the best chance, which would allow the local high commission or embassy to lobby on behalf of just one contender. British rivals never share information, and operate in units that are far too small.

The virulent rejection of anything to do with America by, on the one flank, left-wing intellectuals like E.P. Thompson, and, on the other, by saloon-bar populists whose prejudices can be traced back to the wartime complaints – ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here' – compounded the claustrophobia that I felt on my return. The America they disliked was not the America I had found, and the Britain they inhabited was hardly the model society they apparently imagined it to be. If we, the British, were so damn superior and clever, why had we made such a mess of things? Why were more than three million people out of work? Why did we import millions of pounds' worth of the goods we had invented? Why was our environment so filthy that we needed a national clean-up campaign? Why were our soccer hooligans so vicious that English clubs were barred from Europe? Why were we offering free airline tickets to 5,600 despised Americans to come here and spend their dollars? Why did many elderly people and some Asians lock their doors at dusk? Which country, America or Britain, I wondered, would the notional visitor from outer space prefer? I have twice visited Vietnamese boat people awaiting resettlement in Hong Kong camps, and heard in no uncertain terms which destination they would choose.

We, the children of Kipling and Rhodes, find the nationalism of Ronald Reagan – ‘America, the last best hope of man' – nauseous; we, the besotted celebrants of royal births and weddings, sneer at such beanfeasts as the centenary of the Statue of Liberty; we, who have almost no Afro-Caribbean middle class, castigate Americans for their racism. The list of such contradictions would be a long one, and there are many aspects of life in Britain that the judicious space traveller would embrace. But many Britons sincerely believe that their country is superior to other nations in areas in which we have long been overtaken. We will deny heatedly that the Italians are economically better off, or that the Taiwanese send a higher number of young people to university, as if such facts flew in the face of nature. The journalist Ian Jack reported in the
Sunday Times
on a peace mission made by Liverpool's civic leaders to Turin after the Heysel Stadium carnage. The Liverpudlians had no concept that life in Turin might be different from the life they knew; that shops might offer fresh fruits and mountains of cheeses rather than sliced white bread and tinned peas; that working people might earn middle-class salaries in enterprises like Fiat and Olivetti; that football could flourish outside a mean and deprived culture.

British civil servants, visiting Washington from London, often condescended towards their opposite numbers, smirking at what they perceived to be a lack of American sophistication: some embassy families, notably those of specialist officials seconded from other ministries, lived as if they were on a Third World posting, mixing exclusively amongst themselves, laughing at strange native habits, and counting the days until they returned to Surrey or Berkshire. An American Assistant Secretary asked me once why a British visitor was ‘Sir' Edward. I explained the system and that promotion beyond a certain rank in the civil service triggered an automatic knighthood. ‘You mean, the guy's a bureaucrat like me? I thought he was an aristocrat,' he expostulated. From the far side of the Atlantic, Britain often looks like Ruritania.

It also often looks politically and diplomatically insignificant. The ‘special relationship', as Professor Sir Michael Howard has pointed out, was built around the personality of Winston Churchill. It was compensation for Britain's loss of power and prestige, posited on the fragile notion that we had historical wisdom in diplomacy to offer in return for American muscle. (Then we also had atomic scientists and a worldwide network of naval bases.) The majority of Americans now do not trace their ancestry back to these islands. Reporting on Anglo-American relations on the eve of a visit by Margaret Thatcher to Washington, I found foreign policy old-timers still prepared to use the word ‘special', but to younger bureaucrats Britain was simply one of several western European countries lumped together in one basket. The State Department official I went to see had responsibility for six or seven countries, including the Benelux nations. When Americans read of British commentators and journals complaining that Britain is an ‘occupied country', as
Time Out
did after the 1986 Libyan bombing raids – ‘overarmed, overeager and over here' – they have to pinch themselves. The United States remains a deeply isolationist nation, the money spent on US forces in western Europe is resented, as is the country's role as a ‘world policeman'. Contrary to liberal imaginings in Britain, there is no great imperialist head of steam in middle America. The most potent political rallying cry is ‘bring the boys home', as President Reagan did quickly enough after the 1983 Beirut bombing that cost the lives of over two hundred US Marines. Populist enthusiasm at least to reduce American forces in western Europe is held in check with difficulty. Senior figures like Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, have advocated major cuts in troop levels. If the decision were left to a poll of the American people, the ‘occupiers' would be home within weeks.

Anti-Americanism in Britain is based not only on a misunderstanding of America's foreign policy aspirations, but also – as the US ambassador to London, Charles Price, pointed out in March 1987 – on an image of the United States that is as much at variance with reality as would be a picture of Britain as a land of Henley and Wimbledon and inner-city riots. Much of the distorted image, it is fair to say, is propagated by Americans themselves, through television and films, showing violence, materialism, and an infatuation with physical attributes like beauty and toughness. Mr Price complained that this created a biased picture which was seized on by those in Europe who, for political or philosophical reasons, disliked the United States. ‘America the violent, America the crass, America the inept have all become everyday images in Europe. Meanwhile, America the steadfast ally, America the generous and America of the many Nobel laureates get short shrift or lost entirely,' he said.

A liberal/left solicitor said: ‘I have travelled a great deal and have come across nothing that can match the quality of small town England, no culture that is superior. We are tolerant, have a strong sense of community, and value eccentricity. Village England is alive and kicking, and carries the genes of the British genius for good living, for whole living. If I am told that the price for keeping up is to become a mobile, materialistic, enterprise society, I would rather settle for a lower standard of living.' Such a choice is, of course, a luxury for the few. Anti-materialism is relative. To E.P. Thompson it is, no doubt, embodied in a familiar tweed jacket and a book-lined study. To young people in the inner city, it is embodied in a bleak life in filthy, drab surroundings. The solicitor added that he thought that materialistic societies would come tremendous croppers, victims of social dislocation and cultural shallowness. ‘Once you are wrapped up in status symbols, you're finished. Life becomes a series of Pavlovian reactions.'

That may provide comfort for people who believe they have souls and a way of life superior to what they perceive to be basically American values. But we are too far down the materialistic road to turn back. The real pressure is going to come on the cohesion not of those societies that create material aspirations, because that is now true of all advanced countries including those in the eastern bloc, but of those that are unable to satisfy them – or, in our case, to satisfy even the basic needs of a significant minority. When the poor were required for their labour, they could derive dignity and solidarity from the knowledge that the whole national edifice rested on their abused shoulders; now that they are required only for their consumption, they are as valued as their paltry spending power.

If imperialism and materialism are the chief charges against the United States, the British left also confuses the States and the American people with what it dislikes about American politics. Accustomed to exerting ideological hegemony over its own followers, the left does not understand the pluralistic nature of American democracy. It perceives a winner-take-all society, 235 million humans fighting to the top of a massive greasy pole, with destitution awaiting those who lose their grip. In fact, the American education system is far more ‘socialist' than anything we have managed to devise, children compete with a standard and not with each other, and there are prizes for all. Schools are programmed to get the best out of everyone. At home we have a shelf groaning with sports trophies. Visitors are deeply impressed. ‘Your children must be great athletes,' they say. The truth is that in the leagues in which our children played, every child was awarded a trophy.

American democracy is also more devolved than the British variety. Tiny communities call themselves ‘cities' or ‘towns', run their own police forces – maybe a couple of sheriffs, enact their own ‘laws' and elect a school board. An elected representative – even in Congress – is free to follow the dictates of his conscience (and of less noble motivations like ‘pork barrel' enticements); it is not heresy to depart from the small print of your party's manifesto. As a human (rather than political) symbol, Reagan's achievements say a great deal about American democracy. He was born in Tampico, Illinois, to a rolling-stone father who sold shoes intermittently and struggled with a drink problem. Reagan, rather uncharitably, in his autobiography described finding his father dead drunk on the porch one afternoon. The family moved many times following the ups and (more usually) the downs of Jack Reagan's career: Ronald was pulled in and out of various schools. We know the future president was not blessed with great intellectual powers, but he gained a place at a local college and was awarded a degree. He went forth to earn his living – at first as a radio sports commentator – and the world was truly his oyster; and that was two generations ago. If Reagan had been born in Britain in 1911 in similar social, geographic and economic circumstances, I doubt he would have had the opportunity to make a significant mark.

Before I left America, I sought Britons who had settled there to discover what had drawn them across the Atlantic and what they missed about Britain. Later I interviewed expatriate Americans living in London to ask them the reverse questions.

I stumbled upon my American Brits by being asked to join the British Embassy cricket XI, which was to play two games in Philadelphia. I had supposed that both the local teams would be comprised of Americans, but natives provided only a small minority of one team and were not represented on the other. (Cricket, being almost entirely defensive –
not
getting out is the foundation of batting success – is not a game to which Americans take easily; bowling with a straight elbow, they find technically agonizing.) But what surprised me more were the differences between the two teams – one blazers and pink gins, the other bucolic and beer – and the social range of expatriates they included. Here on two foreign fields we had a complete cross-section of the old country, divided Britain in the old sense – public school types and the rest. They had exported their social class with them. One ex-public school boy said that he would not mix with someone with a broad Brummie accent – ‘we would have nothing in common.' But among Americans he (and the others) behaved as an American might, moving easily between economic and social groups. They had become bi-cultural.

The first game was at the Merion Cricket Club (founded 1865) on Philadelphia's upper crust ‘Main Line'. The grass was unnaturally green, and certainly springier than cricket turf ought to be. In the middle the most ferocious fast-bowler could only get the ball to sit up gently on the matting strip; the grandeur of the dark red, Victorian Gothic pavilion dwarfed the mediocre standard of play. At the end of the nineteenth century, ten thousand would turn out to watch such matches as the Gentlemen of Philadelphia
v
Mr Warner's English XI. The club had survived by turning itself over to tennis: in the days when the American Open was played on grass, the principal warm-up tournament was staged at Merion. But, with fifteen thousand British in and around Philadelphia, cricket was making a comeback. While the few American spectators peered at their notes – ‘How to watch a cricket match' – a cross-section of the English upper middle classes – including a professor of material sciences, a research doctor, a banker and a lawyer – padded up. The players' ambiguous loyalties were symbolized by the union flag and the Stars and Stripes flying one each side of the scorer. Tea was duly served, but it was poured from coffee urns.