ninme

Telegraph Blogs - John Howard champions Anglosphere

John Howard deserves better. The latest polls have him trailing by 14 points and facing the loss of his own constituency, whose demographics have been altered by immigration. Yet, on any objective measure, he has been one of the best Prime Ministers in Australian history. As The Australian’s brilliant Tom Switzer has pointed out:

“Everything that should be up — incomes, economic growth, the budget surplus, consumer and business confidence — is up, while everything that should be down — unemployment, inflation, even (historically speaking) interest rates — is down. The Australian economy is now in the 16th year of the longest economic expansion perhaps, according to John Howard, ‘since the gold rushes of the 19th century’.”

Now it’s true that I have no immediate stake in how Australians vote. None the less, I can’t help feeling that if Howard is wiped out – and, although the old warhorse has come from behind in the past, not a single commentator is predicting that he’ll win this time – it’ll be a blow to the Anglosphere.

ninme sniffles into a hanky

Howard grasped, with a keenness that eludes most British politicians, that modern technology makes geographical proximity irrelevant. He saw that the obsession in some Aussie metropolitan circles with “being an Asian power” – rather than a member of the alliance of free English-speaking nations – was obsolete.

No longer is the Commonwealth a matter of sentiment. The Internet short-cuts whole continents. Countries that are bound together by the English language, by the common law, and by shared commercial norms and accountancy practices, have far more in common one with another than those that happen to be within a few days’ sailing distance. The idea that Britain or Australia – or the United States or Canada, come to that – should aim for regional integration belongs to the 1950s.

ninme digitally embraces her antipodean readers for comfort

John Howard has been a good friend to the other Anglo-Saxon democracies, not from nostalgia, but from a hard-headed understanding of how the modern world works. If his countrymen don’t want him any more, perhaps we could persuade him to try his luck here.

Get off! We get him first!