The greatest nation? This debt fiasco makes Washington look like a parish council
I love America, and if you look at my Wikipedia entry — which I have neither the vanity nor the knowhow to bother to edit — you might suspect that I’ve been brainwashed to say so,
because I am ‘a leading figure within the British-American Project’. I am indeed active in that excellent networking organisation, which has never been anything like the sinister
Reaganite propaganda vehicle that Pilgerists and Guardianistas imagine it to be. And it has given me valuable insights into the national characters of movers and shakers from both sides of the pond
who form its membership.
The Brits, mostly arts graduates, tend to be argumentative free-thinkers with opinions about everything. The Yanks, many of them lawyers, are more courteous, less comfortable in adversarial debate,
more inward-looking, and more respectful of their leaders and institutions. At one of our meetings they decided to sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’; when ‘God Save the Queen’
was called for in response, half the Brits left the room.
But if there is much to admire about Americans in that comparison, they can also be irritating: I winced when I heard Barack Obama tell his countrymen that ‘We live in the greatest nation in
the history of the world.’ They don’t, and neither do we, and all of us should leave that judgment to future historians. More to the point, what they live in is probably no longer even
the world’s greatest capitalist economy, since it has been so damaged by the shenanigans of its own financiers and is rapidly being overtaken in manufacturing strength by China. Only a
handful of innovative US companies with global reach — Google, Apple, Boeing — still stand as beacons.
As for the American way of government, it too often looks ramshackle and small-town. Remember the ‘hanging chads’, the half-punched ballot cards on which the outcome of the 2000
presidential election depended? Or the federal government’s shockingly inadequate response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans? Or the look on George W. Bush’s face in
front of an elementary-school class in Florida when they told him a second plane had hit the World Trade Center?
And now this ridiculous debt fiasco. The possibility of default on US government debt — averted by a last-minute compromise that has delegated the toughest decisions on deficit reduction to a
bipartisan commission which must report by November — was, we’re told, ‘very remote’. But it was close enough to leave Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs
of staff, unable to reassure soldiers in Afghanistan they would continue to be paid; close enough to traumatise markets and shake confidence everywhere, notching upwards the chance of a global
double-dip; and disturbing enough to leave the triple-A rating of America’s paper in doubt.
The episode has been a disaster for America’s standing in the financial world — and for Obama himself, knocked off his own policy agenda by Tea Party Republicans, disowned by the
left-wing Democrats who are his true constituency, and revealed as no more than an unusually eloquent version of the lawyerish archetype I know so well. Meanwhile, America’s giant debt
problem remains unsolved. If there’s any positive outcome, it is that Americans have been forced to participate in the debate. But what an incompetent, unimpressive way to go about it.
ANYWHERE BUT AMERSHAM
The consultation period on the HS2 high-speed rail route from London to Birmingham closed last Friday with a cacophonous chorus of objections and barely a squeak in favour. Buckinghamshire,
Warwickshire and Staffordshire county councils have come out against it. The Institution of Engineering and Technology says the environmental damage has been underestimated. An ad in The Spectator
by HS2 Action Alliance presented polls from seven different sources, all heavily anti: ‘across the north-south divide’, says the alliance, citizens would rather see public money spent
on local transport projects, ‘or not at all’. No wonder my own recent comment (25 June) to the effect that I was in favour of ‘guillotining the debate… and bringing on the
bulldozers’ provoked such hostile correspondence — particularly from residents of Amersham, where the new trains will rocket out of a tunnel a few hundred yards north of the historic
high street.
I stick to my point nevertheless: a high-speed rail network between major cities is a 21st-century essential, given the growing horror of road and airport congestion. And government is about
persuading intransigent voters to accept change that may have adverse local impacts but is for the wider long-term good. Still, given the volume of opposition and the grimness of the economic
outlook, if I were in Transport Secretary Philip Hammond’s shoes I’d be having a quick look again at the alternatives. One such is ‘Rail Package 2’, a relatively cheap
upgrade to provide faster, more frequent services on West Coast Main Line routes. Then there’s Digby Jones’s theory that it would be better to build the line alongside the M40 motorway
until it reaches a point where it can follow one of the existing rail corridors into central London.
And one Amersham resident, Nick White, has made an ingenious case to Hammond for bringing the line into the St Pancras Eurostar terminal rather than Euston — which, as a London Assembly
committee has also argued, is not well connected to anywhere. White’s route would use existing tunnels out of London via Stratford, then swing north-west through ‘relatively flat and
sparsely populated parts of Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire’, bisecting Stansted and Luton airports (to which spurs could eventually be added) before joining the current HS2 route
somewhere in Warwickshire, or running parallel to the West Coast Main Line. ‘Anywhere but Amersham’, we might label that one. I don’t blame him for trying: if the proposed line
was routed through Helmsley I’m sure I’d see a case for re- routing it through Harrogate. But still I hope it gets built somewhere, some day.
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