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 Who Runs Britain Vote 2005
Who runs Britain? That’s the question we’re asking in this year’s Today Programme Christmas poll. We’ve invited three ‘bloggers’ to follow the arguments. Read their biographies.
You can also comment on the blogs on our message boards:
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Friday 16 December: JUDY
Airstrip One was the name of the UK in the nightmare world of George Orwell's 1984 . That was his satirical vision of the future of a UK eternally in the grip of a Stalinist-style socialist dictatorship which is part of Oceania , clearly based on the US , if you can imagine a US ruled by a Stalinist dictatorship. Oceania , and so Airstrip One, was everlastingly at war with either a Russia-based bloc, Eurasia , or a China-based bloc Eastasia. One of the apparatchiks in the book characterized that regime as "a boot stamping on the human face forever".
The enemy was switched by the regime at will. It didn't really matter which bloc it opposed. What did matter was to use the enemy of the day to build a mindless national unity based on hatred of this external threat. And the main instrument for doing that was the obligatory daily "two minute hate" session which everyone had to join in.
During the years of the fifties and sixties Ban-the-Bomb campaigns of my youth, Airstrip One became a popular protest name for the UK , and it was regularly called the USA 's floating aircraft carrier by the campaigners of those days.
Behind that lay deep-seated hatred, fear and loathing of the USA . It wasn't new for Brits to voice hatred and loathing of the US . It goes back to the mid-late nineteenth century when the British Empire was starting to feel the US to be a potential rival as a world industrial power. It was poets like Matthew Arnold who articulated the view of the US as a land of the ignorant and uncouth. And most loathed as being ignorant and uncouth were the seriously rich Americans whose daughters began marrying into the increasingly cash-strapped British aristocracy.
And it's no accident that to this day, upper class Brits and British intellectuals are on the front line of cheerleaders for today's anti-Americanism.
So when I see today's Today programme slot on "Who rules Britain " being centred on the US , I can predict a number of things.
We will have arguments that Bush runs the UK . That Blair is Bush's poodle . That the UK is a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK , and is no longer a sovereign state.
And of course, we will be told that Bush, although he manages to run the UK as well as the US , is an ignorant, uncultured idiot. Just as the Matthew Arnolds of the nineteenth century portrayed rich Americans as crude uncultured idiots.
Actually, the Today programme's already offered us that vision. On Tuesday, it featured the Dead Ringers mimic, John Culshaw, doing his well known Bush-is-an-idiot-who-also-mangles-the-English-language impersonation.
We may well also get the wholly contradictory vision of Bush, the lamed and limping failing US president who desperately, desperately needs the UK to prop it up because of its failures in Iraq, the Arab world, Europe, wherever.
And then, I am sure we will get the real nasty. The US is controlled by the neo-cons. So they in turn control the UK . And who are those neo-cons? Well, the ones who get mentioned in this particular context always have Jewish names. And quite often, you are told that they do this in order to advance the interests of Israel . So ultimately, behind this particular smooth-sounding political commonplace runs the demented fantasy of the Jews controlling the world. Yes, it's not just in Iran that you meet people running fantasies like that. They appear regularly in the Guardian. And you may well hear the argument about the neo-cons ruling Britain on the Today programme this morning.
Why do I think that?
Look at the panel.
(Lord) Charles Powell. Former right hand man to Margaret Thatcher, a passionate Atlanticist. So we might expect him to argue against the idea that the US runs Britain . He's a distinguished international specialist. But actually, some years back he appears to have had some sort of surprising contact with the Syrian regime.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles
/mi_qa3724/is_200111/ai_n9012733#continue
And he was associated through that with what appeared to be an organised presentation of articles hostile to Israel to which he contributed.
So will he say that the US is fine, but what we have to worry about is the neo-cons?
Then we have an actual American, James Rubin, a distinguished foreign policy expert. Surely he won't be supporting a US-runs-Britain argument? No, I don't think he will. But he is actually a former member of the Clinton administration.
What's more significant is that he was the chief foreign policy adviser to the defeated Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry. Who was of course defeated by Bush, after taking on an increasingly anti-Iraq war stance.
So I wouldn't be surprised to get a line suggesting that Bush's influence on Britain is malign, if not controlling.
Then there's the third panel member. Mark Seddon, probably best known to listeners as the former editor of Tribune and hardest left member of the Labour Party executive.
These days, he has a very interesting job. He's the New York correspondent of Al-Jazeera. And his publication record is amazing. Seddon has published articles firmly suggesting that the neo-cons control the US , and that Blair is Bush's poodle.
So my view is that we will get a decidedly Today-ideology panel yet again. Anti-Iraq war, anti Blair and anti-Bush.
With just a hint about the power of those.... Well, shall we call them neo-cons?
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