GIVE THANKS IT'S NOT THE OLD COUNTRY
While celebrating Thanksgiving, Mark Steyn concludes that the Old World still has much to learn from the New New Hampshire IT IS 'THANKSGIVING, and I am up to my neck in turkey, and pumpkin pie, and pecan pie, and cranberry walnut pie, straw- berry rhubarb pie, blueberry redcurrant pie, maple plum ginger pie, cappuccino Eurasian milfoil pie . . . Thanksgiving is not just about giving thanks to God for this land of plenty, as the first pilgrims did in Plymouth Colony in 1621, but also, implic- itly, about giving thanks because this land is not that land — because America is not England.
On the whole, I'd endorse that, although this Thanksgiving it's clear that God's blessings are somewhat mixed. Under Bill Clinton, America is an international laugh- ing-stock: he has oral sex but never reach- es what Ken Starr calls 'completion'; likewise, every weekend he waggles his cruise missile at that old flirt Saddam but never reaches completion. Thanks to Mr Clinton, the presidency is now a dysfunc- tional office. Yet for all that, 200 years after junking George III, Americans retain a monarchical reverence for the institution that replaced him. The British, on the other hand, kept the Crown and its ser- vants and, as a quid pro quo, demand only that, when misfortune strikes, they should be able to take a vulgar Hogarthian glee in seeing a grandee slip on a banana skin, or a banana-flavoured condom. Contrasting, say, the Sun's reaction to the Prince of Wales's tampon fantasy with the New York Times's to Clinton's cigar dunking, I've no doubt which culture has the healthier atti- tude to its rulers.
That said, Americans can still give thanks that Mr Clinton is only the Presi- dent and not the Queen's first minister. The mind boggles at the thought of a Bill Clinton with Tony Blair's powers, able to abolish one house of the legislature and substitute one more to his taste, or to replace the present electoral system with a 'closed list' so that you'd never know whether your vote was helping to elect a principled Democrat like Paul McHale or a conspiracy-minded, Starr-baiting Clinton lapdog like Maxine Waters. Last week's events in the House of Lords encapsulate better than anything the difference between America and Britain — or, indeed, any of the Queen's realms: the Toronto Globe and Mail headlined its cov- erage of the story, 'Democracy Advances on House of Lords'. They don't really believe that, do they?
My own suggestion is that the House of Lords should become the House of Gays — on the grounds that, as a small, privi- leged elite wielding political power out of all proportion to their numbers, gays are 'What a salesman. It's packed with English beef.' clearly the contemporary equivalent of the old peerage. Alas, it seems imaginative proposals are not wanted. Passing through London last week, I was amazed to hear Margaret Beckett sneer that Viscount Cranborne's opposition to 'closed lists' was a bit rich considering his own list had closed hundreds of years ago. In fact, the hereditary peerage only became a 'closed list' when Harold Wilson declined to create any more: until then, there was at least the theoretical possibility that an earldom or viscountcy could fall on any citizen. It was the closing of the list that made it indefen- sible, and Mrs Thatcher's limited restora- tion only for ex-PMs or guys with no male issue did nothing to help. Furthermore, Tony Blair wouldn't be able to abolish the hereditary peerage if Harold Macmillan hadn't done him the favour of already slip- ping in place a substitute team of Trojan horses — the life peers, whose creation 40 years ago is a perfect emblem of the loss of nerve of post-war Conservatism. Either you have the guts to defend and maintain a peerage, or you get rid of it. But Macmil- lan's and Mrs Thatcher's feebleness on this issue have now enabled Tony Blair to replace an anomaly with an affront. The lesson for Conservatives should be that the quick fix, the easy compromise, usually rebounds on you. Over here, the Upper House of the US Congress is elected, though it was not always so. Until the 17th Amendment in 1913 mandated popular election, Senators were chosen by their state legislatures. But even this unsatisfactory method at least dif- fused the composition of the chamber through several dozen separate sources. After all, when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, one of their biggest beefs with the King was the way he kept monkey- ing with legislatures:
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of peoples unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places, unusual, uncomfortable, and dis- tant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
Two centuries on, all that's changed is that the King's powers have been appropri- ated by his Prime Minister. For opposuig with manly firmness his invasions on th,e rights of the people, Mr Blair renews his efforts to get rid of the House. The Yell word used to describe his reforms belies the stunted thinking behind them: 'devolution presupposes that power naturally resides a. r the centre and is graciously leased out 10 small measure at the Crown's pleasure. America is the precise inversion of that. Speaking in Nashua, New Hampshire a couple of years back, Newt Gingrich put it this way: 'Under the European model, God endows power to the King who lends some of it to the people. The American model endows power to the people who lend some of it to the government.'
Here in the most decentralised state of a decentralised Union, we lend it up the chain, ever more sparingly, through town and county to state, Congress and Presi- dent. Whether or not Herefordshire and Worcestershire benefit from being merged into one county or Stirlingshire sounds more mellifluous under the Stalinist moniker 'Central Region', it would strike Americans as very odd that a man from the national government can simply inflict such changes on you. If a Washington apparatchik were to wander up to some Texan and tell him, 'We're going to slice off half your state, merge it with Olda- homa and rename it Southwest Region — purely for administrative convenience, you understand,' he'd be lucky to get out of town alive.
But in Britain the 'sovereignty of Parlia- ment' boils down to a fetishisation of the House of Commons: you mustn't have an elected House of Lords because that would be seen as a 'threat' to the Com- mons; for the same reason, Mr Blair's new Celtic legislatures, like local councils, have to be constrained in their revenue-raising ability. Hence, my small municipality of a few hundred hardy Yankees has more con- trol over education — in terms of taxation, expenditure and curriculum — than the new Welsh Assembly. As to the 'threat' from different sources of electoral legiti- macy, in my town each citizen can cast a vote for one President, two US Senators, one US Congressman, one Governor, one Executive Councillor, one State Senator, four State Representatives, one County Commission, one Sheriff, one County Attorney, one County Treasurer, one Reg- ister of Deeds, one Town Clerk, one Town Moderator, one Treasurer, one Tax Collec- tor, one Overseer of Public Welfare, one Road Agent, one Sexton, one School Dis- trict Clerk, one School District Moderator, three Selectmen, three Trustees of Trust Funds, three Cemetery Commissioners, five Planning Board members, seven Con- servation Commissioners, seven School Board members, nine Budget Committee members, nine Recreation Committee members and ten Library Trustees.
There may be a few I've forgotten: at any rate, America has more public offices Open to election than any country in the world — 511,039 according to the 1992 Census, which works out at about one per 363 electors. In some towns, they vote for the police chief, too. In Canaan, New Hampshire, after a scandal in the police department, they voted to make the chief an elected position. As part of a policy of more open policing, they also voted to allow citizens to accompany officers on patrol in their cruisers. When a couple of bored teenagers started riding around with the cops for most of the day, this law was modified to restrict the amount of time you could spend in the passenger seat to a maximum of seven hours per day.
The British, of course, cannot be trusted to choose their own police departments and school boards. Instead, there are quangos full of baronesses, moving effort- lessly from the Police Authority to the Health Authority to the Broadcasting Stan- dards Council to Ofwat to the Wainscoting Authority until one day they wind up as Leader of the House of Lords. I make no claims for the superiority of the American system except to note that, when you come across a crummy, screwed-up town in New Hampshire, at least the citizens of that town have screwed it up themselves.
By contrast, just before last year's British general election, I attended an election meeting at the village hall in Kine- ton in Warwickshire. Kineton is a prosper- ous little place — plenty of Jags and Range Rovers in the car park, most of them carefully deadlocked with those 'Club' things — but the overwhelming sense at the meeting was of civic impo- tence. Before the Tory candidate John Maples spoke, a lady from Stratford-upon- Avon district council attempted to allay residents' fears by talking about video surveillance cameras for the village green and promising to speak to Warwickshire Constabulary so that they could send an extra patrol car through the village every second Tuesday. By the time the meeting ended, night had fallen and I emerged from the hall to find the picture-postcard village transformed into a besieged fortress, the shop fronts disfigured by ugly aluminium shutters. Why can't the citizens of Kineton be trusted to decide the level of policing they require and to raise the taxes to pay for it accordingly? The British have more police per capita at higher rates of pay solv- ing fewer crimes than the Americans, and all they can do is advise you to barricade yourself in behind more and more alarms and window locks. Why not try something else?
For the Tories, there's an opportunity here, maybe the only one left, given that New Labour have appropriated most of the politically viable positions on every issue. By the next election, the hereditary peers will have gone and Mr Blair's Scot- tish, Northern Irish and Welsh legislatures will all be up and running. Going back is never an attractive electoral position, so why not expose Labour's false reforms and argue for a genuinely decentralised, feder- al UK? Mr Blair's fondness for 'closed lists' marks him out as the Euroradical he is. If Conservatives were to advocate reforms modelled more on American structures, they would at least be champi- oning the likes of Thomas Paine — English radicals.
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