why is the tory party so unpopular? i live in deepest tory country (they think labour wants to take away their land and feed their babies to a giant statue of marx) and it seems to me that it is only people of middle age and above and of resonable income and above who even consider voting for them. is it because of thatcher or major (i actually quite liked major), or is because IDS is so unknown or what?
I reckon William Hague has done bad things for the Tory Party. He may have been a good technical politician but he had now charisma and no charm. All that publicity he tried to make about him being a big beer-drinker and a bit of a party animal just didn’t work for him.
Margaret Thatcher, the iron lady bless her cottons, was such a great PM that I think it was hard to follow her lead and so the Tory party ended up with drips like Major and Hague. My household is certainly Anti-Tory and so I’ve been brought up to support Labour/Lib Dem. Sadly for my parents I will most probably rebel and vote Tory when the time comes.
If i had the chance I wouldn’t have voted for Hague when it was his turn because he was such an uncharismatic leader and he based his whole economic policy on not joining europe which i disagree with. Bring in Ken Clarke and I may reconsider. Instead we have another bald-headed boring Tory who has even less charisma than Hague!
Until the Tory’s start supporting Europe and get a more charismatic leader I shall be voting for Tony.
SHOCK! ben a tory, like OMG!
Firstly, Hague’s charisma (or lack of) was not the first in a likely long line - Major was hardly major, as it were.
Secondly, dear old Marge was not strictly a great PM. It is solely down to her that Britain no longer has any semblence of a manufacturing industry, that the NHS is so poor, and that both education and public transport are under-financed (e.g. the recent report by John Burt which said that the rail system has not had enough investment in the past 20 years to maintain any sort of standard comparable to our European counterparts). Give her some credit though, she did beat the argies!
even though i utterly detest thatcher, you cannot blame the entire situation on her. it is not entirely her fault that the railways/education/NHS are in their current state. it is due to consecutive governments wasting opportunities to invest in them and missing opportunities to pay taxes. it is impossible to spend more money without taxation, but governments have a blood curdling fear of rasing taxation in this country. she also did break the power of the unions, which were ruining british industry, and it is impossible to put the decline of british manufactoring upon thatcher, if you investigate it is a much more complex issue than just that.
also thatcher didn’t beat the argentinian armed forces becuase last time i checked she didn’t get ‘stuck in’ on the front line. she made it the actual task of fighting the war more difficult with her stupid press releases before the first engagement and her demands put upon the military commanders. also the argentinain’s didn’t put up their best forces, the navy stayed in port after one sinking and there was only 2 regiments of regular soldiers on the islands, the rest were conscripts. but the final fact remains it was a colonial war, based upon out dated imperialistic ideals.
BTW - ben was scarcastic about thatcher, i hope
Yes, Thatcher may not have been a great help during the war, but it was down to her that we fought the Argentines in the first place. A lesser PM would not have wanted to risk so many people’s lives over an isolated island. I’m not saying that this is a good attitude, but it is unlikely that Blair would commit so many troops on such a whim. Her insistance on fighting off these invaders is exactly what the British people would look up to, especially 20 yrs back when Britain still had its hugely strong national identity.
As for a weak show of Argentine force, I think you’ll find that any navy retreating to port once they realise that a bunch of nuclear subs are hunting them down.
The tories are unpopular because they aren’t interested in poor people in the same way as Labour are - or appear to be - and everyone in this country is a bit poor.
*exerpt from Nicky’s book of hugely over-simplified politics. Hurrah!
the navy weren’t scared of fighting it was their commanders who ordered them to port. i’m sure if they came into conflict the sailors were just as good as the british ones, and the aregntinian para troopers showed they were a match for the british
i don’t think Thatcher was that bad really. I mean, a bit cold hearted and everything, but at least she made proper decisions, unlike so many whimsical politicians these days.
they arent unpopular
at least, i like them… there’s always a place for comedy in politics.
apart from that tho… they have stupid accents, suits, haircuts, and probably have bad breath aswell by the looks of them.
that’ll be why ben identifies with them 
Many of the posts in this topic seem to come from the UK. I live in the US and do not know much about the UK, but I do not need to tell you that there are also Conservatives in the US as well. They may or not be alike to those of the UK, but they can easily be seen as perhaps too conservative. The Republican party of the US, the party of George W. Bush, was once the party for eqaulity and civil rights, but has recently become a party that excludes many minorities.
thats exactly what your country has been doing since it became a super power
“thats exactly what your country has been doing since it became a super power”
If macca was talking about any nation here other than America then he would be branded a xenophobe. If he was talking about a religion or race then again he would be accused of discrimnation. Why is it cool to hate America, why is it cool to support the underdogs? Macca, I think you should consider your views further and rather than writing so many posts, ensure that what you say in them is accurate, truthful and intelligent (as I’m sure you’re capble of) rather than over-generalised statements that tend to be full of bullshit.
you want me to support that statement then fine.
instances of the american’s descriminating against minorities since it became a super power:-
black people, jesse ownes wins 4 (i think) gold medals at the 1933 olympics, yet can’t even sit at the front of a bus when he returns home.
africa - Rwanada, russia and china present satelite photos showing massacers to the UN security council, within a few days of the first massacres taking place, suggesting an intervention force be despatched, america vetos this.
iraq - they sanction the country knowing it will not topple the dictator but meerly kill the innocent people of the country.
europe/former colony’s - america demands that former colonies of european powers have their tax breaks removed so competition is level with america, knowing full well that the fruit produced is often the only think keeping many of the colonies afloat.
the poor - you recieve only one year of benefits for your whole life, so if you are un-employed you get 12 months to get a job or you are fucked.
foreign companies - menworth hill has been prove to supply trade secretes stolen from european/far east companies to US companies - don’t believe me look up the Mark Thomas site and check out the EU’s offical report.
other democracies - in chile the americans supplied arms to several terrorist groups who eventually over threw the government.
the list goes on…
i think you should consider your views, and realise that america is not anywhere near as good as you want it to be. live in the real world not your fantasy of capitalism.
I would like to announce that i am a tory! i dont agree with a lot of what the labour government do and also i am completely anti-joining the single currency. The economies of our country and that of say greece are completely different it is stupid that we should rely on them for our own prosperity! i do believe we may have had the euro debate already but i think britain should leave well alone, ‘in europe but not ruled by europe’!
ben, why do the tories need to support europe before you support them? i think not enough people know the real issues abotu europe, it sounds a good idea in practise and for the average person (only bothered about the hassle of exchanging money for holidays) it makes things easier but to the country as a whole it is detrimental…
thoughts please
[/quote]
See this is one of my worries about the whole Europe thing. What happens if some other countries need lower interest rates? Do they cut them so that their economies can prosper, or leave them, in case by cutting rates the rest of Europe suffer? At the moment we have a higher interest rate(?) than the rest of europe, and there must be a good reason for that, the only guess I can make is that our economies need different rates to work properly (me being the great economist that i am 
).
My only other concern is that joining the euro will just bring us another step closer to a united states of europe.
swat
yes the euro is a step towards a united europe, but if worked properly is a good thing.
about different economies, to a certain extent the economies of europe are cohesive. the european centeral bank then set an interest rate taking into account everything. this i don’t believe in, as the economies are not similar enough for this to work. but over time and with the correct management they will converge. wht is more worrying is the centre-right coalition in holland wanting to blok all new members to the EU
I’m not convinced… I don’t believe that one massive conglomerate of countries can work (look at russia, yugoslavia)
swat
Strictly speaking, the Tories are no less popular with the voting electorate than Labour, having in fact won the majority of the votes at the last general and council elections.
We should however be asking two things:
- Why are the majority of people not voting at all?
- Why does the voting system mean that a minority party can gain the majority of seats against the will of most of the electorate?
As to Europe, a Federation of Europe would be a positive step in the light of the two world wars of the last century and in view of the fact that a united front should be formed to promote harmony in unstable regions like the Balkans that America has no vested interest in.
The Euro is clearly a political ideal and not wholly an economic one, but I believe that closer ties between states are for the better.
We are as European as any other state on the Continent.
We should be emphasising our shared humanity and our shared values with our neighbours.
Why do we need individual states at all?
With regard to Thatcher, she eagerly seized the opportunity to go to war abroad knowing that Britain’s national identity was fading.
Her incitement of national hysteria and reinforcing of the island mentality have been extremely detrimental to progress in Europe.
I know that the topic has moved on from America but I read this today and feel like posting it. It’s an article about anti-american sentiment which as I have said seems very popular these days and on these boards. It was written shortly after September 11th so parts are factually incorrect (e.g. death toll) but it’s still as relevant today. macca and HVD especially, I think you should have a read…
Why do they hate America?
Bryan Appleyard, from The Sunday Times
Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling - we hope - of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered.
Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world.
Barely 48 hours after thousands of Americans are murdered, the BBC’s Question Time audience told Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, that “the world despises America”. The studio seethes with ignorance and loathing. Lader looks broken.
Or we have the metropolitan elite on Newsnight Review sneering at Dubya Bush. “So out of touch,” Rosie Boycott, the journalist, hisses, “there was no sense of his feeling for people.” Alkarim Jivani, the writer, wades in by trashing Bush’s response when asked how he was feeling: “Well, I’m a loving guy; also I’ve got a job to do.” Jivani thinks this isn’t good enough, no emotion.
Hang on; I thought the bien- pensant left wanted restraint from Bush. And that “loving guy” quote was the most beautiful thing said since September 11. Poetically compressed, rooted in his native dialect, it evoked duty and stoicism. But these are not big values in Islington.
The presence of women soldiers in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf war goaded Bin Laden into extremism
Or here’s George Monbiot in The Guardian: “When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities.” I see; so the United States, the victim of this attack, is to be condemned for somehow deviously making money out of it. I’ll run it up the flagpole, George, but I suspect only the Question Time audience will salute.
Or here’s Suzanne Moore in The Mail on Sunday: “In this darkest hour my heart goes out to America. But my head knows that I have not supported much of what has been done in its name in the past. As hard as it is, there are many who feel like this. Now is not the time to pretend otherwise.” So, Suzanne, how many corpses does it take for it to be a good time to pretend otherwise? Do you laugh at the funerals of people with whom you disagreed?
Or here are two more venomous voices, both quoted in The Guardian. Patricia Tricker from Bedale: “Now they know how the Iraqis feel.” And Andrew Pritchard from Amsterdam: “If the US’s great peacetime defeat results in defeating America’s overweening ego as the world’s sole remaining superpower, it will be a highly productive achievement.” Would that achievement be the dead children, Andrew, or the crushed firemen?
Anti-Americanism has long been the vicious, irrational, global ideology of our time. “It combines,” says Sir Michael Howard, the historian, “the nastiest elements of the right and left.” It is dangerous and stupid and, in the days after September 11, shockingly distasteful.
In the name of God, more than 6,000 noncombatants are dead, more than 6,000 families bereaved. From what dark wells of malevolence springs this dreadful reflex desire to dance on their graves?
From history, says Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington: “There’s an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and ultimately anti-modern theme that always emerges to criticise the dominant power of the day. It was directed at the cities of northern Italy, then in the 17th century at the Netherlands, then at Britain when she picked up the torch of capitalism, and now it’s the US.”
So at the most basic level America is loathed simply because she’s on top. The world leader is always trashed simply for being the leader. The terms of the trashing are remarkably consistent. Nineteenth-century Germans, Lind points out, responded to Britain’s dominance by saying, in effect, “they may be rich but we have soul”. That is exactly what many Europeans and all anti-Americans are now saying: we’re for God or culture or whatever against mammon. This is inaccurate - America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics - but it is the predictably banal rhetoric of envy.
This form of “spiritual” anti-Americanism has close links with anti-semitism. “Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism are closely interwoven historically,” says Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University. “Not because there are so many Jews here - there weren’t always - but because both are in part about fear of openness, rootlessness, change, the modern anomic world: Jews as a placeless people, America as a history-less land.”
As Jon Ronson recently demonstrated in his book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, almost every crazed cult in the world believes there is a global Jewish conspiracy run from Hollywood and Wall Street. Those bien-pensant chatterers are, I’m sure, anti-racists all, but they are swimming in deeper, darker, crazier waters than they imagine.
Judt’s word “openness” is important. The fanatic - in Islington or Kabul - hates openness because he finds himself relativised and turns on the very society which permits his freedom of expression.
George Orwell noted in 1941: “In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.” Elsewhere he wrote of the “unadmitted motive” of pacifism as being “hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism”.
So bog-standard anti-Americanism in the developed world is a dark, irrational combination of hate-the-father/leader and infantile fantasies of rebellion and control. It is a reflex hatred of home - the place that provides succour or, in this case, Levi’s. But of course there are local nuances. The French have, in contrast to the British, been consistently anti-American at governmental and diplomatic levels.
“It is a long-standing resentment born of 1940,” says Judt. “A sense that France was once the universal, modern reference or model and is now just a second-class power with a declining international language to match. There is a loose analogy with British complexes about the US - us in decline, them over-mighty - but in France it is complicated by a layer of hyper-revolutionism among the intelligentsia in the years between 1947 and 1973, precisely the time when the US rise to world domination was becoming uncomfortably obvious.”
In Britain we did not have the Sartres and the Derridas leading us to political and philosophical extremes. But members of the British left had something simpler: a burning hatred for America for disproving almost everything they ever believed. They so wanted rampantly capitalist America to be wrong that even Stalin hadn’t quite turned them off Russia.
There was, admittedly, a pause in this crude British form of anti-Americanism. When Bill Clinton was elected president, the British left suddenly constructed a fantasy America as co-pioneer of the Third Way. The new mandarins - Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie - said that America was where it was all happening. It was a fantasy because Clinton, even to himself, was window-dressing. Capitalist, religious America had merely put on this smiling mask. When Bush was elected the left felt betrayed.
Much of the present wave of anti-Americanism, and especially the awful contempt for Bush, springs from this sense of betrayal. It also springs from an inability to escape from post-cold war attitudes. “The anxiety about American behaviour now,” says Hugh Brogan, research professor of history at Essex University, “is a hangover from cold war anxiety about nuclear war.”
Fear of the bomb was such that it provoked in some an abiding belief that at any moment we would be fried or irradiated because of the miscalculation of some mad American in a cowboy hat - an image burnt into many brains by Stanley Kubrick’s apocalyptic film Dr Strangelove.
Somehow the Soviet Union, probably because of ignorance, escaped our disapproval. It was all wrong, if just about understandable, then. Now it has become a pernicious and destructive failure to know a friend when we see one.
With the cold war confrontations gone, the anti-capitalism, anti- globalisation movements abandoned potentially rational, cultural and environmental anxieties in favour of a monstrous random bag of anti-American loathing. And, of course, the Middle East seemed to provide a clear case of the arrogant, bullying superpower persecuting the poor.
The idea of the bully fits neatly with one of the most grotesquely enduring of all anti-American beliefs: that Americans are all dumb Yanks. This is a delusion of the right as much as the left and it began with Harold Macmillan’s absurd aspiration, later taken up by Harold Wilson, that somehow Britain should play Athens to America’s Rome.
The idea was that America was this big, blundering lummox and we were these terribly refined deep thinkers. Precisely the same attitude inspires the raised eyebrows and condescending tut-tutting of leftish dinner party opinion. They’re so naïve, say the chatterers, so innocent - and this, sadly, leads them to do such terrible things.
Well, I’ve spent some time among the American intelligentsia and I have been awestruck and humbled. They are, without doubt, the best educated, most cultivated and cleverest people in the world. They are also the most humane. There are 30 or more American universities where our best and brightest would be struggling to keep up. Apart from that, how could we be so dumb as to accuse the nation of Updike, Bellow, Roth, DeLillo, Ashbery, Dylan, of Terence Malick, The Simpsons, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of stupidity, let alone innocence?
The roots of this are obvious. We want the bully to be thick for the same reason as we want the beautiful model to be thick. We can’t bear the possibility of somebody having strength or beauty as well as brains.
In fairness, the stupidity charge is partly fuelled by one of the odder forms of anti-Americanism: American anti-Americanism. There has always been, within the US, cultivated East and West Coast elites who take the charge of stupidity seriously and feel they have to apologise for the embarrassment of the unsophisticated masses of the Midwest or deep South.
At its best this produces the brilliant satire of Randy Newman, at its worst the mandarin, Europhile posing of Gore Vidal. The masses bite back with their own form of anti-Americanism - a hatred of the elites. The Rev Jerry Falwell has already made common cause with the terrorists by blaming the attack on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians”. To Falwell modern America really is the Great Satan.
However, it is Middle Eastern anti-Americanism that is the burning issue of the moment. Again this is deeply misunderstood by the chatterers of the West. For them it is simply a matter of Israel, apparently a clear case of a surrogate bullying on America’s behalf, and of oil, a clear case of American greed swamping all other human considerations.
In fact, America has always had more allies in the region than it has had enemies - although, this being the Middle East, allies become enemies and vice versa with bewildering rapidity. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and her allies worked to subvert the secular Arab nationalist power of President Nasser of Egypt by backing Islamicist groups. Good idea, bad tactics. These groups started out pro- American and became anti. The unwelcome result was the more or less total destruction of nationalism and the creation of the powerful religious movement that now haunts Arab politics.
Israel forms a part but not the whole of this picture. Islamicism makes it a larger part because of an ancient enmity that goes back to the story of the prophet’s betrayal by Jewish tribes and, more recently, to the defeat and expulsion of the Moors from Christian Europe.
In this context, Arab hardliners see Israel as a further Christian-backed offensive against the Islamic world. Even without Israel, the idea of such an offensive would still be a powerful imaginative force.
People who suggest September 11 would never have happened if America had pulled back from her support for Israel are almost certainly wrong. Israel is not even in the foreground of Bin Laden’s murderous imagination. The Palestinians have actually complained that he cares nothing for them. For Bin Laden and for many more moderate Muslims, the turning point was the Gulf war in 1990-91.
“Contrary to popular belief that was the first real build-up of American military force in the region,” says Dr Clive Jones at Leeds University. “This was in Saudi Arabia, a country with the holiest sites in Islam at Mecca and Medina. This created a new form of anti-Americanism that cannot in any way be related to Israel.”
To these newest and most savage anti-Americans, Israel is secondary. The primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. One widely circulated picture of two women GIs in a Jeep, their shirts unbuttoned to their waists, driving across the Arabian desert, was enough to inflame the sensibilities of thousands of devout Muslims and to fling the most unstable of them into the arms of the extremists. They had a point but not one that justifies murder. Islam, at heart, is as peaceful a creed as Christianity.
The truth about the Gulf war was that the Americans saved an Arab state, Kuwait, from Saddam Hussein, the most savage oppressor in the region. They would have been as surely damned for not doing this as much as they are now damned for doing it. Now they are also damned by the chatterers for keeping the pressure on Saddam. Do the chatterers know what Saddam is still doing? I do and I’m with the Americans.
Of course America has made terrible mistakes in the Middle East. Much resentment would have been and may still be prevented by a humane settlement with the Palestinians. But America was usually trying to do the right thing, always with the collusion of large sections, if not the majority, of the Arab population. As Winston Churchill said, the Americans usually do the right thing once they have tried all the alternatives.
Yet anti-Americanism has become the savage reflex of the entire region. It is the result of cynical manipulation by, mostly, appalling Arab governments and by extremists who wish to relaunch a medieval war of civilisations between Christianity and Islam.
This is the anti-Americanism that informs the ignorant dinner party guests of the West who, in their comfortable stupidity, pretend to have more in common with fanatical theocrats than they do with the land of The Simpsons and John Updike.
Perhaps worst of all is the deep vacuity of this reflex malevolence. In truth there is little that can be said about the attack on America. Our “thinkers” are trapped in a history they do not understand. They can grasp global conflict only as a series of confrontations between competing humanist ideologies - most obviously capitalism and communism. But this is something different. It is a confrontation between civilisation and an atavistic savagery that has no time for the delicate ways of life we have, at such terrible cost, constructed. Unable to see this, the chatterers must search for something to say.
“It’s not for nothing they’re called the chattering classes,” observes Brogan.
So they blame the victim. It is a heartbreaking spectacle of delusion turned to savagery. What has America done wrong? In the days since September 11, its president and people have done nothing but demonstrate dignity and restraint. Bush will lash out, the chatterers said. But he hasn’t yet. Bush is a bumbling hick, they sneered. But he isn’t. Even CNN, that usually incomprehensible tumult of undigested events, has been steady and calm, devoid of all trace of prejudice, xenophobia or empty emotion.
Civilisation? It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins. I just wish it was closer.
I am sick of my generation’s whining ingratitude, its wilful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves. But I am heartened by something my 19- year-old daughter said: “America has always been magic to us, we don’t understand why you lot hate it so much.”
Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be. Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse. But this is not one of them. This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embarrassing - a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked. So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted.
Whose side are you really on?