The EU vs The Nation State: Who's Winning by Charles Moore

The EU vs The Nation State: Who's Winning

The Margaret Thatcher Lecture 

CHARLES MOORE

Charles Moore has been editor of The Spectator (1984-90), the Sunday Telegraph (1992-5) and The Daily Telegraph (1995-2003).

He is the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher and continues to write for The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph.

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Everything has changed –

pity we’ve got the same old politicians

By Charles Moore

Leaders in Britain and America seem unable 

to grasp the reality of voters’ lives

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David Frum, the conservative writer who is eloquently urging the Republicans to change, has identified what he calls “the conservative entertainment complex” as a tremendous problem for the cause it claims to promote. On Fox News and the Right-wing radio shows, rage – like sex, murder, and snowstorms – will always attract an audience. What it will not do is bring forth policies and people whom voters can trust.

As we see in our own politics in Britain, there is a strong feeling in the United States that none of the leaders grasps the reality of voters’ lives. This column’s mantra has been that, after the credit crunch, Everything Is Different Now. In Britain and America, it really needs a sub-clause – But Politicians Are Still The Same. The language of the Left, about a strong society built up through government entitlements, sounds tinny today. There is too much tax, too much dependency, too much social and family breakdown. But the language of the Right equally fails to hit the mark. In a society where the great rise in home ownership has produced more debt than security, where jobs are casualised, wages are squeezed and savings have vanished, talk about letting the great global market do its work sounds more like a threat than an opportunity.

Both Left and Right in America are emotionally in thrall to the same golden moment in the country’s history – the first 20 years after the Second World War. For Democrats, that period is the time of the dignity of organised labour, the coming of the Great Society and the rise of civil rights. For Republicans, it is the age of wholesome, small-town values, strong families and a white middle class which could be confident, if it worked hard, of rising prosperity and a decent retirement. That age will not return. Both sides know this. Neither knows what to do about it.


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