Opinion

True Brit

LONDON — British Prime Minister David Cameron has done some ridiculous and indefensible things. He called Gaza a “prison camp” and deplored Israel. One of his first acts as prime minister was to cancel a huge job-creating project — another runway at Heathrow — placing the interests of a tiny minority of NIMBYs over the nation’s. And he has allowed himself to be suckered into agreeing to a national referendum on “Alternative Voting” designed to give even more power to the Liberal Democrats, a third party that already wields outsized influence despite a recent poll indicating support of only 11%.

But every so often, the Conservative prime minister sounds intriguingly . . . conservative.

In his now-famous speech declaring the failure of multiculturalism, he stood up for “a much more active, muscular liberalism” that “believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality.”

When faced with gargantuan deficits, Cameron actually reduced spending. This has led to predictable short-term pain, but it’s the crucial first injection (yet to be administered by Dr. Obama) in returning Britain to fiscal health. In so doing, Cameron, like any good healthcare provider, has raised related lifestyle issues. He hopes to return Britain to healthy habits.

Cameron’s big idea, the “Big Society,” means a devolution of power from the capital to local governments, more competition for public services and encouragement for more volunteerism and giving. The national purse can’t shower funding on every local problem, but Cameron frames this as an opportunity for the citizens to take over for time-serving, unaccountable bureaucrats. More than 250 communities have applied to set up their own alternative schools to be paid for by the state but run by the locals. Welfare contracts are being offered to private firms and charities.

“If there are facilities that the state can’t afford to keep open, shouldn’t we try to encourage communities who want to come forward and help them?” Cameron asked this week. It’s a sentence that terrifies the bureaucracy — what if people figure out that they don’t need armies of civil servants with massive benefits and pensions?

Local governments responded exactly the way you’d expect: They announced that cuts in their grants had forced them to reduce hours at libraries and take away bus passes from the elderly.

They were walking directly into Cameron’s trap. Cuts make reporters curious. Where might the money be going?

It turns out that local councils are run by reverse Robin Hoods who are robbing Granny to pay the Sheriff of Nottingham.

About half of Britain’s Town Hall chieftains, the Daily Mail reported, make more money than Cameron. At least 134 of the 400 local chief executives in England and Wales make more than $240,000. The boss of the Birmingham city council, who makes $320,000 a year, presides over a government octopus that includes more than $3 million a year for 28 “equality and diversity” officers. Birmingham even employs two “climate change officers.” Why not an ambassador to Mars? Birmingham plays as large a role in interplanetary diplomacy as it does in climate change. The chief of the London borough of Wandsworth retired last year on nearly $500,000 in pay. Laid-off bureaucrats are getting severance packages that a study rated as four to five times as generous as those in the private sector. And who sets the pay of functionaries? The functionaries.

Think there are some American examples of this? Ask Bell, Calif. Heck, ask Nassau.

Cameron’s Big Society is heir to President George H.W. Bush’s vision of “a thousand points of light,” or dynamic individuals and small groups replacing sclerotic bureaucracies. Unlike Bush, though, Cameron looks as if he may actually follow through.

With the exception of the Thatcher period, the history of post-1945 Britain has been a story of a once-fiercely individualistic people sinking comfortably into the soft, welcoming quagmire of collectivism. Gradually the citizens grow tired and timid, which in turn makes them even more eager for public services as they worry about drifting all the way to the bottom. British couples who earn as little as $55,000 a year are walloped with a 40% income tax, and Cameron raised the national sales tax from 17.5% to 20%. This in a land where gasoline is over $7 a gallon, most of that tax.

All of which sounds shocking to American ears. But Cameron took power in an exceptionally dire moment and seems eager to gently reacquaint Britain with individualism. He said this week that his countrymen need to “take more responsibility” and “act more responsibly.”

Our own political leaders might find that Americans are open to such unexpected candor. Honesty may not be the usual way of doing business in Washington, but it might be useful when all else fails.