Once upon a time, British and American politics seemed to work in tandem. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took office, supposedly inexperienced and outside the mainstream, at about the same time. Tony Blair shaped his New Labor policies largely with Bill Clinton’s New Democrat approach in mind.
Today, however, British and American politics are heading in very different directions. One reason is that changes of government from one party to another have become very occasional in the UK. The only event in the last 30 years, since Thatcher’s victory in 1979, was Blair’s victory in 1997. Indeed, the break was the longest since Britain developed contemporary political parties in the mid-19th century.
This is quite remarkable: since 1979, we Americans have had four changes of government. The only period in our history when we had only one change of government in 30 years was in the early 1950s.
However, a change of government does not always result in major policy changes. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has held senior positions in two Democratic and four Republican administrations, argues in his memoir “From the Shadows,” it’s quite challenging to turn around a giant ship of state. Yes, modern presidents and prime ministers typically make course corrections, some of which have significant expected and unexpected effects. But not total returns.
From this perspective, Britain and America look rather similar. Only two leaders have made truly major changes in policy, domestic and foreign, in the last 30 years – Thatcher and Reagan. Blair and Clinton accepted these changes and made some adjustments. The same could be said about the two George Bushes.
But now economic difficulties and changes in government, here and probably next year there, raise the prospect of major policy changes. And this brings us to the second way in which British and American policies are heading in different directions.
Barack Obama is trying to move America firmly to the left, while David Cameron, whose Conservative Party leads Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labor Party by a wide margin in the polls, may seek to move Britain slightly to the right.
It is now unclear whether Obama will be successful and what exactly Prime Minister Cameron would do. The union’s card check bill appears to be dead on Capitol Hill, the House cap-and-trade bill appears to be dying in the Senate, and Democrats’ health care bills are in some trouble.
One reason is that American voters fear the prospect of massive deficit spending. Britain faces an even larger budget deficit of around 14 percent of gross domestic product. The Blair and Brown governments, in good macroeconomic times, slowly increased the government’s share of gross domestic product from 37 percent to 47 percent, adding to the public sector payroll to include teachers, nurses, diversity advisers, and the like (similarly, much of Obama’s stimulus spending so far has been devoted to preventing the reduction of the ranks of state and local government officials). However, the British financial sector has suffered a breakdown worse than ours, and this in a country where it constitutes a much larger part of the overall economy.
Until this year, Cameron and his team promised not to significantly cut public spending while opposing tax increases. The current fiscal situation means these promises are backfiring – Cameron even accepted Labour’s 50% tax on the prosperous. So while Democrats are fighting to make the American government bigger, conservatives are wondering whether they can shrink the British government.
The voter has a say here both on Election Day and in the polls. A recent Quinnipiac poll showing Obama’s withering approval ratings in Ohio may have upset Democrats as much as the ghastly jobs numbers in June. But it seems to me that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic – American Democrats and British Conservatives – face the same fundamental problem: how large should government be?
They also face the question of whether the economic hardships caused by the financial crisis have created an increased need for larger government. The evidence from the 1930s is mixed: while Americans voted for the New Deal, the British rejected Labor socialism.
Today’s poll results in both countries are mixed, but they don’t reassure supporters of larger government as they hoped. Turning things around on a giant ship of state is challenging, even with a change of government.
