Across the pond

Not the weather, this time, but political dawns in my lifetime.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whom I voted for since I was an American citizen at the time, and because he promised a better and fairer country than the Eisenhower administration, which was dominated by the business leaders and the generals with whom he used to play golf.

In power Kennedy did fulfill some of his promises. Most notably he fuelled the idealism of those young Americans who joined the Peace Corps and ventured forth to help the poor and oppressed of the world. He was struck down by an assassin’s bullet before he had a chance to do much for America’s poor. But, after his death, his number two, Lyndon B. Johnson, improved their lot with his Great Society programme. So the people who voted Democrat in 1959 were not betrayed.

I also voted for Tony Blair in 1997, because he promised to turn back the era of in-regulated capitalism ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, with its boom and bust economics and its fostering of increasing the gap between the rich and the poor. In power Blair, and his number two, Gordon Brown, concentrated on getting the support of the business community. They lined the pockets of a new class of super-rich managers and bankers who preached the gospel of a boom which would go on forever. And, of course, they took Britain into the Iraq War on the coat tails of George W Bush, without waiting for the verdict of Britain’s European partners.

Blair and Brown certainly fulfilled their promise to make Labour electable and most of the people who voted Labour for the first time in 1997 applauded them. But what they did not do, and still have not done, has bitterly disappointed the vast majority of the Labour Party.

Not only Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and Clement Attlee, but Harold Wilson, that most pragmatic of Labour’s Prime Ministers, have been turning in their graves at an increasing rate of knots.

It is still early days for the Barack Obama administration. Like Kennedy and Blair he can only rule with the help of the rich and powerful, and those of Republican and conservative beliefs. And there are many such in the Government he has chosen.

So many that it is impossible to make any forecast at this moment whether Obama will be able to fulfill his promises to the poor and oppressed.

But, as of now, I am still hoping.