I have to admit: last week was a bad one to take off. Plenty happened in Britain, which I’m digesting now (what was Mercer playing at?). But for what it’s worth, here are a few observations from my week in New York…
1. Rudy Giuliani’s campaign is more advanced and heavyweight then is appreciated this side of the pond. His foreign policy is the most convincing explanation on world affairs I have read so far. Hillary is bereft of new ideas: Team Giuliani is buzzing with them. Everyone I spoke to expects the presidential race to be a battle between these two.
2. New York will this year have lowest murder rate since records started in 1963. So the city’s local press predict. The fruits of Giuliani’s zero tolerance policing continue, a standing rebuke to the defeatist idea that UK violent crime is somehow an unavoidable symptom of Western lifestyle. If anyone tells Rudi “New York would have cleaned itself up anyway” he can point to Britain.
3. New York employs Americans. In my far from exhaustive research, I was struck by how, in New York, Americans still do the jobs that Britain has outsourced to immigrants. Ken Livingstone once asked why he’s only been served coffee by a Londoner once in seven years if there are 740,000 on welfare. Answer: in Britain, the proceeds of economic growth are used to keep 5.4m on benefits while we import people to do the jobs. That’s Labour’s perverse definition of social justice. In America, growth helps the poor by giving them jobs, not handouts. This is why the US welfare caseload has more than halved since 1997, while in Britain progress has been shameful –from 5.7m to 5.4m.
4. Iraq reporting is fundamentally different. Even anti-war reports are studded with facts. In Britain, a report on US Iraq policy usually means a blast of opinions. This morning, for examples, the BBC Today report on “what the White House calls progress” had MoveOn, Madeline Albright, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and John McCain – all folk with entrenched positions. Yet what struck me was the list of Democrats who now concede the troop surge is indeed showing progress, while some Republicans despair. We’re at a fascinating juncture in the Iraq war and the political picture is far more nuanced than is that often projected here. With honourable exceptions, of course.
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