Britain-US Special: Two Years into Obama's Era, The Right Takes Over The "Special Relationship" (Winter)

Aaron Winter of Abertay University writes a guest essay for EA:

My academic interest is American race relations and right-wing politics in Britain, from the Revolution and slavery to George W. Bush and the War on Terror (with a brief stopover with Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson for much-needed laughs).

So it was with great interest and anticipation that I watched the British response to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. This was a campaign that not only renewed hope for race relations in and beyond the US but also brought hope for a new relationship between Britain and America, finally end of the era of Bush and his alliance with Prime Minister Tony Blair: a relationship in which, even if not equal, the weaker partner is not a "poodle" and the dominant partner is progressive, internationalist, and intellectual as opposed to imperialist, unilateralist, and fundamentalist.

Well, it is now two years since Barack Obama’s inauguration and several months since David Cameron became Prime Minister. Time for a reality check.

In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, the British media, from the left to the right, from tabloid to broadsheet, was widely celebratory. The Guardian celebrated "Obama’s New America", the Daily Express proclaimed "A New World Dawns", and the <Daily Star said, "Yanks Very Much". Hope in many quarters for another progressive Democrat-Labour coalition such as that between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s died with the defeat of Labour and formation of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010. Despite of this, there were attempts made in the media to draw parallels between Cameron and Blair and Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg and Obama, with Cameron the face of the new conservatism and Clegg the "change" candidate following the US President's lead. 

Before the special relationship could even be negotiated for this new era and leadership, the BP disaster hit the Gulf of Mexico and US politicians and media began engaging in anti-British rhetoric. The British press, politicians such as Norman Tebbit, a colleague of Margaret Thatcher, and Cameron himself reacted with concern, if not anger, over American attacks such as Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s declaration, ‘[O]ur job is basically to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum" and Obama’s expressed desire to find an "ass to kick". Tebbit reacted: 

The whole might of American wealth and technology is displayed as utterly unable to deal with the disastrous spill --– so what is more natural than a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political Presidential petulance against a multinational company?

The Daily Mail saw claimed Obama’s criticism of BP came from a deep-seated personal hatred of Britain itself because of his grandfather’s involvement in the independence movement against British colonial rule in Kenya, his arrest, imprisonment and torture, which "has left a deep scar on the Obama family".

While waters were rough in the mainstream, a new special relationship was being forged on the extremes of British and American politics. Elements of the Tea Party elements found common ground with the far-right English Defence League, whose anti-Muslim activism was endorsed by activists such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, after the British organisation appeared at a New York protest against the planned "Ground Zero Mosque".

This transatlantic activism followed an earlier attempt by Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of the European Parliament, to form a "British Tea Party" in liberal Brighton in February 2010. That gained little traction, but the Tea Party-EDL link could bring on a specific issue. Where the mainstream coalition in the War on Terror targeted Islamist extremists, now a US-UK extremist coalition could target Muslims in general. 

Relations between Britain and America have improved as the oil has dissipated in the Gulf, but what we see is not a progressive, liberal trend from either Obama or from the Liberal Democrats in the British coalition. Instead, what is emerging is an American-style big-society, small-state conservative and neo-liberal reshaping on British welfare, heath care, and education. The American charter school system is entering Britain through new "academies"; in October 2010, Geoffrey Canada, the founder and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, travelled to Britain to meet with Minister of Education Michael Gove to discuss charter schools and education reform and the alleged threat of unions to such reform, as well as to address the Tory Party conference.

As Britain awaits the next round of Tory-Lib Dem cuts to balance the budget, rein in the deficit, and punish the poor in 2011, those meetings and our looks across the Atlantic are likely to continue. President Obama may be entering his third year, but it is "what they are doing on the Right" that may be more important.