The Telegraph (UK): This Fourth of July, Britain should bring the American revolution home
Today is the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and an opportunity to consider what has happened to Great Britain and America since the July 4, 1776. Toby Harnden, the Telegraph’s US editor, reports that the mood in the US is bleak. Many conservatives feel that their country has departed from the principles of its founding fathers: that the state has grown too big and the people have lost faith in the American Way. If they think it’s bad over there, they should visit Britain. America might be piling up debt faster than Elton John on a flower-buying spree, but it can still teach the mother country a thing or two about liberty.
The American Revolution was, in many regards, a British civil war. In 18th century Britain, Parliamentary government was supposed to protect freeborn men from the threat of absolutist monarchy and excessive taxation. However, the British refused to extend Parliamentary representation to the American colonies, creating the unethical paradox of a democratic empire. Edmund Burke, the great grand-daddy of British conservatism, had every sympathy for the American revolt against crippling taxes and restrictions on their right to steal Indian land. In his view “our English brethren in the colonies” were fighting to uphold ancient Anglo-Saxon rights in the face of brutish imperialism by a German-descended king, enforced by “the hireling sword of German boors and vassals”. When the Americans rebelled in 1775, there were plenty of Brits who supported them.
Likewise, the cultural bond between the two continents was strong enough for 15 to 20 per cent of the American colonial population to risk reprisals and fight on the side of the Crown. Popular culture depicts the loyalists as Nazi goons. In fact they were honest dissenters who feared that home rule would result in pure popular democracy and, given the passions of the mob, democracy could end in European-style dictatorship. They rebelled against the rebellion in order to protect the rights that Parliament theoretically guaranteed. The War of Independence was a struggle between men equally committed to liberty but divided as to how best to protect it. The America that emerged from the War of Independence was not an immaculate birth: it was the next stage in the evolution of British democracy.
Since the Declaration of Independence, America has necessarily adapted to changing circumstance. In the 20th century, war and welfare vastly increased the state’s role in society and business. The levels of debt that modern administrations have racked up would certainly have distressed the Founding Fathers. In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote that for the USA to survive, it had to choose “between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.” Public debt leads to taxation, “and in its train wretchedness and oppression.” By those standards, the American Revolution has already run its course.
Yet the gulf between principle and practice can be wide without nullifying the principle. Thomas Jefferson preached self-reliance, but he died $100,000 in debt – most of it spent building a lavish plantation that wouldn’t look out of place on the Las Vegas Strip. Modern America has materially drifted from the country that took arms against King George III, but the spirit of the free man and the good society lives on (imperfectly) in popular culture and the Republican primaries. In contrast, Britain has departed so dramatically from the values of the 18th century that our strain of conservatives can no longer remember them. Our past is so alien to us that we’ve forgotten that America – with its vulgar manners and free market chicanery – is really a part of us.
Men once died for the principle of British parliamentary sovereignty. Today it is an antiquated joke. Large numbers of our laws are made overseas, while our debt and inward investment is controlled by hostile nations. Parliament was erected to resist tax increases but it has become the body that exists to legitimise them. The 2009 expenses scandal revealed the extent to which the political establishment of Britain disregards the institutions that it inhabits. The state has a monolithic, self-aggrandising quality that defies all attempts to limit it. Ed West recently pointed out that the British public sector has more employees today than it had in 1979, when it owned half the economy. Arguably, crucial to the sustenance of individual liberty is the healthy functioning of civil society. Yet the concept of the Big Society is a joke that even Archbishops laugh at.
Of course, the USA suffers from many of these maladies. The difference is America’s ability to renew itself generation after generation. In 2008, Barack Obama’s election seemed to prove that the American Dream is still alive. In 2009, the Tea Party provided a conservative response that gave a silent thrill to historians who once feared that Paul Revere might never be mentioned on television again. For all its many mistakes and crazy contradictions, the Tea Party has revived a debate about the founding principles of America – seeking salvation in values of self-rule and self-reliance that are fundamentally British in origin.
Sadly, Britain has wandered too far from her ethical foundations to build anything as radical as the Tea Party. All we can rely upon to rescue us from the statist Leviathan are a few school chums in Westminster twiddling with the tax code, or a cheerfully dotty UKIP MEP delivering a blistering attack on banana-import regulations in the European Parliament. The Fourth of July provides an uncomfortable reminder of our once radical heritage. Modern Britain desperately needs a revival of the spirit of the 1700s. It needs its own Declaration of Independence – from itself.
