Rob Blackhurst

International Herald Tribune

October 2005

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It was only after returning to shabby and sprawling London after a month in Vienna that I finally realized that the British will never be comfortable Europeans.

The Viennese, like most other Europeans, have civic duty hardwired into their souls. They wait patiently at pedestrian crossings for a green light even when the roads are deserted; newspapers are tied to lampposts with an honesty box where readers dutifully leave their euro. And, on their hyper-clean and efficient underground train system, there is no need for ticket barriers or surly "revenue protection officers" to force the citizenry to pay their dues. Shops shut on Sunday, just as they did in Britain 15 years ago.

For all the elevated talk about "European values" among Europe's political elites, polished Vienna, elegant Paris and efficient Berlin feel completely alien to the British. Sure, we are addicted to bargain flights to Europe's cities, have developed a taste for Parma ham, rocket salads and gorgonzola, and have discovered the joys of cafe culture. But philosophically, the English Channel has become wider in the last 20 years. Britain has slowly but inexorably rejected European-style social democracy and embraced American-style individualism.

The press and heat of London's Tube feels Dickensian after Vienna's civilized subways. In my first five minutes back on London's tube, I saw a fight between between two football fans on the platform and a gaggle of drunken teenage girls collapse in a heap. And since the Tube receives nothing like Austria's level of government subsidy, it cost three times the amount of a Viennese journey.

Britain has shaken off Christian morality faster than any other country in old Christendom. The anarchic reality of saturnalian sex-and-shopping Britain confuses foreign visitors who have grown up with the stereotypes of the starched Englishman who, if he will speak to you at all, will only exchange pleasantries about the weather while burying his head in a copy of The Times.

From the mid-Victorian period until the 1960s, the English middle and upper classes lived in an ordered world with a "good chaps" code of conduct. P.G. Wodehouse had so much trust in the civic virtue of his countrymen that he posted letters by dropping them out of his first floor London window on to the pavement, certain that if an Englishman came across a stamped, addressed letter he would feel duty-bound to take it to the nearest mailbox.

At the same time, from the Victorian gin palaces to prewar riots at football matches, the bowler hat and furled-up umbrella never told the full story. The high-minded 19th-century writer Matthew Arnold divided the British into the "heirs of the Puritans" and the devotees of "beer, gin and fun." Now the last vestiges of Victorian restraint have been placed in the national dumpster.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's government plans to "regenerate" faded seaside resorts with Las Vegas-style super-casinos. Britain's anachronistic drinking laws that prevented anyone buying a drink after 11 p.m. are being swept away by 24-hour licensing. Cavernous "beer barns," where all the seating has been removed to encourage drunkenness, are now in every market town.

Doctors warn that they are now regularly seeing teenage girls with cirrhosis of the liver. A famously frigid nation has become sexually incontinent. Cases of sexually transmitted diseases have risen by nearly 150 percent in just six years and the Department of Health recently floated the idea of sending mobile sexually transmitted disease clinics to Ibiza to give advice to the invading armies of British youth.

These appetites for excess are the flip side of Britain's embrace of social and economic liberalism. Yes, we have higher infant mortality rates, educational underachievement and greater extremes of poverty and wealth than other European countries would tolerate. But, as in the United States, the British electorate seem to have decided that these social ills are a price worth paying for economic growth and high incomes. They are more interested in freedom than security.

For all Blair's social programs, no British government has been able to get into office promising to raise taxes since Margaret Thatcher came to power. Like the United States, Britain has sustained its economic success through high levels of migration and weakened social protections for workers policies that would be suicidal for most continental European leaders.

Though British politicians are adept at claiming they are "good Europeans," it is U.S. policies that they are importing on everything from "zero tolerance" policing to tax credits for the low paid. London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, even hired the savior of New York's subway system, Bob Kiley, to run the Tube (though this is one area where Viennese social democracy, if it promised air-conditioning, would win a landslide).