Will Britain Become The Next Ukraine?

To have had any exposure to media at all in the past few weeks is to witness the uprising in Ukraine by its people against its authoritarian government and that government's equally authoritarian Russian sponsors.  Yes, Mr. Putin, I'm talking about you, and am grateful that your ridiculously expensive Winter Olympics cannot and will not hide what you really are.  It's horrifying to see this much carnage in a country whose liberation a few decades ago, along with others in the former Eastern Bloc, served as a beacon of hope to oppressed peoples everywhere.

As it turns out, however, internal disasters are by no means limited to former Soviet republics these days.  Consider the situation in our former colonial ruler and staunchest ally, Great Britain, which is being torn apart by events of almost Biblical proportions--from student riots to lowland flooding to Highland rebellion.  This, despite "austerity" policies that were supposed to unleash the magic of the marketplace to solve everyone's problems.

Well, guess what?  There are some problems the marketplace can't solve.  The marketplace wasn't designed to solve all of our problems, any more than government is designed to solve all of our problems.  The public sector does some things better than the public sector, and vice versa.  This was the prevailing view in most Western democracies in the last half of the last century, and it produced the greatest era of prosperity the world has ever known.

But then, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher led their respective countries away from the path of reason, and down the path of ideology--the path favored by those who wish not to govern, but to rule.  In other words, the path our Eastern neighbors tried to follow, and failed.

Great Britain is now beginning to get a sense of what that kind of failure may feel like.  By electing a government that has willfully surrendered much of its own power and authority to a private sector that cares about nothing except the rise of the stock markets, it has begun to trod down a path that leads to internal destruction, much like the turmoil currently engulfing Ukraine.  And the United States, truth be told, may not be far behind it, depending on the outcome of the next elections.

I call upon Prime Minister Cameron and his party to toss Thatcherism into the dustbin of history it has done so much to earn.  I call upon them to respect and follow a less authoritarian version of Toryism, one that served Britain well from Disraeli to Heath.  I call upon them to reclaim the power and authority to act as the government should--as the agent of all of the people of Britain, and not just the ones that contribute to its campaign coffers.  I call upon them to do this, before Britain becomes another Ukraine.

And I call on conservatives in this country to do the same, before we become like either of these neighbors of ours in the global neighborhood that connects us all.