…Cameron has accompanied this… by an extremely radical political and social agenda to try and, if you will, lift the dead weight of the state off of British national life. If I tell you that more than half, or roughly half, of all economic activity in the United Kingdom is accounted for by the state, that the country has, if not the highest, very close to the highest taxes in Europe, it has an enormous public sector workforce of about six million people, about a million of them recruited under the Labour government. Cameron is trying to reverse that. He’s saying this isn’t just a matter of cuts to reduce the deficit to half of what it is by the end of a five year parliament. This is an attempt to revive free enterprise, and to revive, just as importantly, volunteerism in British society. And to understand that, you’d have to know how much weaker is the community reflex, the community instinct in this country than it is in the United States. British friends of mine who go to the United States are always struck by the enormous strength of the community in America. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist here, but there is a much larger instinct to rely on the state to solve problems here than there is in the United States. Cameron wants to reverse that. It’s an extremely ambitious project, and it’s far from certain he can pull it off. If he pulls it off, he’ll turn out to be one of the great prime ministers in British history.
I made fun of Burns’ hair some years ago; however, despite his sixties-era hippie do, he’s quite the astute observer.
I lived in England in the mid-50’s, and despite the camaradie of WW2, which was still on everyone’s mind then, and the crushing economic depression the Brits were in, mostly from trying to fix the war damage to their nation AND install more trappings of Socialism, there wasn’t much community spirit back then, either.
People tended to flock around certain community icons, like St. Paul’s Church, and the National Trust was strong for protecting castles and the like, but the people of one village or one city precinct were pretty much like another, and didn’t compete. Sure, they had their Town Councils, but the time of those groups was largely taken up by fussing with the Council-owned housing.
I got the impression, as an impressionable kid, that Socialism got in the way of civic pride and community involvement. I still have that impression, looking at the inner cities in this country. Pride in a HUD housing project? You gotta be kidding me. Pride results in the likes of Adam Clayton Powell, in ALL the generations (I note that the 4th generation of this race-pimp family is now running for Congress).