British Election Issues Overlook the ‘Big Picture’ : Politics: A new Britain was forged in the 1980s and is still evolving, but the politicians and the press are focusing on the same old things.

Intoxicated by the thrill of it all, political journalists the world over naturally assume the election they find themselves covering is pivotal or (this year’s buzzword) “defining.” Yet, as Alex Beam of the Boston Globe pointed out apropos the election here, the really interesting things--like President Bush’s use of halcyon--rarely get mentioned in election coverage. So it is in Britain.

On Thursday, Britain holds a general election. As usual, the frenetic month-long campaign has been compelling. So much of politics in Britain is fun: massed rallies are still held, top politicians still pound the sidewalks looking for votes, party leaders trade insults with each other that would make Roger Ailes blanch. Even as respectable a news paper as the Financial Times routinely prints the bookies’ odds on who will win.

Politics is the great British game, one of the things--like fighting small wars and making great pop music--we are still good at. The doleful consequence is that modern British society has been intensely politicized. It is not just the matter of, say, economic policy, but almost everything else; culture, education, health care, what have you. Even in this election, after nine years of the Labor Party moving to the center, the political parties dress up their appeals in terms that stress how different they are from each other. Labor’s tax plans would squeeze middle-class incomes until you can hear the pips squeak. Conservatives still bash Labor for being “soft on defense.” Consensus, bipartisanship are attitudes the British political class regards as the hallmark of a wimp.

Yet this oppositional politics misses the Big Picture. British voters somehow sense this. By all accounts, the electorate has been engaged far less than the chattering class expected. People are switching off their TVs when the political commercials come on. They are fed up, bored, with politicians. In some countries, this might not be healthy; in Britain, it is.

So what is happening in that damp, green archipelago? Start with this assertion: Britain changed more in the 1980s than in any other decade this century. It is a society going through a wrenching transition, from a tired (and lazy), class-bound, centralized, inward-looking one to one that is aggressive, fragmented, undeferential and international in outlook. Some changes can be measured; from 1979-1990, British productivity growth was faster than that of either Germany or France. Others are more elusive, like the way London, like Los Angeles, has become an international city, the offshore capital of the Arab world, the second-home of Indian entrepreneurs.

Still other changes, though noticed, are ones whose significance is missed. Take the massive investment by Japanese firms in Britain throughout the 1980s. In the period between 1890 and 1920, U.S. firms invaded London. Hoover built an Art Deco pile to the west, Ford (still the city’s largest manufacturing employer) built a massive plant to the east. Just as those then-modern U.S. firms taught management techniques the native commercial class had never learned, so the Japanese are now doing the same, in the electronics and car factories of the North East and South Wales.

Yet another change, and a fundamental one, has been the subject of some comment--but not enough. This is the way the old centralized British state, more Napoleonic than anything now in France, is breaking down. Scotland is going through one of its bursts of nationalism. Even if the Conservatives--the great centralizers--manage to win an overall majority in the House of Commons on Thursday, the weakness of their position in Scotland will be such that they are almost bound to introduce constitutional changes. With any other outcome--an outright Labor victory or a Commons where no party has a majority--a Scottish Parliament is a racing certainty. This will be the greatest blow to the idea of a unitary state since, as the old song put it, a “parcel of rogues” in Edinburgh sold their birthright to the English in 1707.

But fragmentation within the islands is not the only, or most important constitutional change afoot. Nearly 20 years ago, just after Britain joined the European Community, Lord Denning, Britain’s finest modern judge, spoke of an unstoppable “tide” of European law flowing into Britain. The poor man didn’t know the half of it. As, with three steps forward and two steps back, the countries of the community gradually forge common policies, so power will seep from the mandarins of Whitehall and Westminster to those of Brussels and Frankfurt.

With political power both fragmenting and going offshore, the symbols of the British state seem tarnished--none more so than the monarchy. The monarchy had a lousy 1980s. Its position at the apogee of the British class system was implicitly challenged by Margaret Thatcher’s greatest gift to Britain--her hatred of a class system that confined millions of people like her to lives less materially fulfilling than they should have been.

Faced with this challenge, the reaction of the monarchy was anything but convincing. Prince Charles, the scourge of modernism, seemed to epitomize what one writer has called the “glamour of backwardness”--the true British disease. And the monarchy, which was supposed to hold up a “mirror to our better selves” started to do anything but. The marriages of the Queen’s sister and two of her children have broken up; criticism of the younger royals and the courtiers is now more intense than it has been for 50 years. For the first time in decades, it is fashionable to be a republican.

None of the politicians now soliciting votes in Britain will mention that, faintly, the bell is tolling for the House of Windsor. And none will mention what seems to be the most fascinating aspect of modern Britain: the growth of a huge and economically successful British Diaspora. Just in Southern California, there may be as many of 300,000 people entitled to a British passport. In quite ordinary British families, it is easy to find that Auntie Madge emigrated to Melbourne, clever cousin Kevin works for Nomura in Tokyo and sister Sharon is selling houses in Pacific Palisades--you can hear more South London Accents from La Cienega to the ocean than you can anywhere else within five miles of Tooting Broadway.

In the global, mobile economy, the very idea of what “Britain” means, or what to be “British” means, is changing with unbelievable speed. Understanding how the offshore British react with each other and with the Old Country is now the single most interesting question about the future of “British” culture and the “British” economy. It is a question that has been mentioned not once in the British election campaign--the best reason for thinking the election on Thursday will be less significant than everyone will tell you it was on Friday.