Some prominent left-wing commentators have devoted weekly columns and blogs to the notion that Great Britain has misguidedly pursued harsh spending “austerity” and that doing so has left the country lingering in unnecessary anguish. In the opinion pages of The New York Times, Paul Krugman inveighs that: Britain, in particular, was supposed to be a showcase for “expansionary austerity,” the notion that instead of increasing government spending to fight recessions, you should slash spending instead—and that this would lead to faster economic growth. Such invocations of the confidence fairy were …
This week brings the nationwide release of The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Streep referred to the challenge of portraying Lady Thatcher as “daunting and exciting,” and as requiring “as much zeal, fervour and attention to detail as the real Lady Thatcher possesses.” Her performance has already been widely praised by critics, but for those who respect Lady Thatcher, not all the omens are positive. In an interview with The New York Times, Streep compared Lady Thatcher to King Lear and commented that what interested …
It is gratifying to see President Barack Obama condemn the disgraceful storming of the British Embassy in Tehran by thugs acting at the behest of the Iranian regime. After all, Obama has been notoriously slow in the past to criticise the brutal actions of the Iranian government after initially extending the hand of friendship to it. But did he really need to make another embarrassing foreign policy gaffe while doing so? In a press conference this evening, the president referred in stumbling fashion to the “English Embassy” in Iran instead …
American readers looking for a sweeping and superbly written study of the British Conservative Party should look no further than Robin Harris’s The Conservatives: A History, just published by Bantam Press. Its more than 600 pages cover every Conservative prime minister from Robert Peel to David Cameron, with in-depth and lively analysis of the premierships of some of the great titans of modern Britain, including Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. As Harris observes in his conclusion, the Conservative Party has for two centuries symbolized the greatness …
According to George Will, some Republicans in both the Senate and the House are unhappy with financial controls at the Defense Department. No question: The Defense Department should produce auditable financial statements. In fact, it deserves credit for how far it has come toward that goal since 2001. But a look at Britain’s experience reveals the problem with making decisions about freezing or cutting defense spending on the basis of allegations about inadequate financial controls. In 2009, British politics were rocked by a series of leaks and then an exhaustive …
Great Britain has been a stalwart ally and friend to the United States, helping us save the world in World Wars I and II, and the Cold War, and is currently helping in our fight against implacable Islamism. Our connection goes deep, which is why the most recent revelation from WikiLeaks is such a blow to our relationship, and further evidence that Heritage was right about its concerns regarding New START. It has been revealed that New START, in addition to requiring traditional information (the number and type of items …
Last Friday, British newspapers reported that the U.S. had agreed to supply Russia with sensitive information on Britain’s nuclear deterrent in order to win Russian agreement to New START. Over the weekend, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley described this claim as “bunk” and asserted that New START simply “carried forward and updated this notification procedure to the new treaty” from the 1991 START. The WikiLeaks document on which the original story was based—and the treaties of 1991 and 2011—tell a different story. The 1991 treaty requires notification of the transfer …
According to British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, the United Kingdom will put into place “a radical new welfare state where it always pays to work.” Newly elected British Prime Minister David Cameron has set forth plans that, according to analysts, will result in the nation’s most dramatic welfare reform since World War II. Wracked with debt, the U.K. is attempting to whittle down their government’s largest expense—welfare—which today stands at approximately $350 billion, or 15 percent of the nation’s GDP. Currently, 5 million British citizens receive welfare, and …
Last week, George Osborne, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, unveiled the results of a wide-ranging review of spending, designed to bring the government’s share of the economy down from today’s 47.5 percent to 41 percent by 2014–15. In the main, the review’s results are welcome, though they do not go far enough. Unwisely, though, the government included defense spending—which had already taken a beating from the previous Labour government—in its review. The result, as defined by the government, is that after inflation, defense spending in Britain will shrink by …
FIFE, Scotland—The White House, the U.S. mainstream press and other assorted Obama defenders are giving the impression that the President salvaged a good outcome at Copenhagen, or so I’ve heard while spending Christmas in Scotland (the holidays being what the locals call vacation, something they spend in Europe, which is a place not here but across the Channel). The narrative of Obama sweeping in and eking out good outcomes is not at all the reading here in Great Britain, where papers on both the left and the right have denounced …
