You can blame part of it on Margaret Thatcher. It was she who brought some of the worst characteristics of the British temper to the surface and made them respectable: parochialism, petty nationalism, distrust of strangers (the Americans excepted), dog eat dog, and that long tradition of petty-bourgeois stoicism, tolerating the second rate from government and the public sector -- hospitals, trains, schools and so on.
Her originality was to shake the moribund British economic tree until its leaves fell off, revealing a new hard working, thrifty, go-for-it populace -- only 20-30 percent of the population, but that was enough -- that would, by earning more, be able to buy privately what it did not really like in the public sector. All this still lives on after four years of Labour government and will be, doubtless, alive and healthy at the end of another five-year term, unless Prime Minister Tony Blair is suddenly struck by lightening on the way to Buckingham Palace.
You can blame some of it too on John Major, Thatcher's successor. It wasn't so much that he carried on the Thatcherite revolution of privatisation with an earnestness that led to the terrible mistakes of the rail system, it was the way he resigned immediately on losing the election. If he had hung on for six months as leader of the opposition, Chris Patten would have had time to finish his term of office as governor of Hong Kong, return to Britain, win a seat at Westminster in a by-election and then assume the leadership of the Conservative Party.
It was both an act of betrayal and an act of small mindedness. The former because it was Patten who, as chairman of the party, had won Major his second term in office against all predictions and the latter because it threw the Conservatives into the hands of the narrowest of ideologues, led by little Englanders who seemed totally out of touch with the realities of an emerging Europe that celebrates both its strengths and diversity through its unity, and who hark back to some bygone age when closeness to Washington was Britain's only political option.
If Patten had led the Conservatives then a referendum on Europe would have been, by now, long over and done with, and Britain a signed up member of the euro-currency club from the onset, taking its place as one of the major creative forces in building a war-free Europe, which is what all this binding and building is ultimately about.
As it was, Blair, despite an enormous majority that should have enabled him, as far as the electorate was concerned, to walk on water, became frightened at the prospect of calling a referendum with the Conservatives against him and, more importantly, the conservative press, owned by North Americans -- itself a quite ludicrous state of affairs since neither Rupert Murdoch nor Conrad Black have any compunction about using supposedly impartial media outlets to tell the government and a good slice of the electorate what to do over Europe.
This tells us a lot about Blair, a "nice guy" as Polly Toynbee, the shrewd commentator of The Guardian tells us. "Not cynical, not world-weary, his easy sincerity is entirely convincing: he plainly wants to do good. But at each meeting the puzzle is always the same: what holds him back from a great leap forward?" Blair does not set out to challenge long held British attitudes, now alive and well again after the renovation work done on them by Margaret Thatcher.
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