My first observation on these Olympics: The Canadians were robbed in their women’s soccer match, and the treatment of that team has been a disgrace. This, and the fiasco with the badminton players who threw matches to get an easier play-off run, are, I am afraid, the tip of the iceberg in the skullduggery that afflicts the administration of the Games.

The admission of professional athletes to the Olympics is at some philosophical variance to the amiable credo about conduct being more important than winning. Moreover, the leading countries, especially the Chinese, Americans and Russians, have been chiefly motivated by the desire to make a political statement for their country. And all the hokum about international brotherhood through sport bears little relationship to the heavy funding and monomaniacal training that are essential to such massive accumulations of Olympic medals as those countries achieve.

My second observation is that these 2012 Games are a fine illustration of the fact that, for all its deterioration in recent years, Great Britain is still a serious country.

The opening show was brilliantly conceived and executed. While it certainly did not approach the Chinese in the billions that were spent constructing architectural landmarks, or in the precision and discipline that only an autocratic regime can produce, the London opener was a triumph of another, and distinctly British, kind. Kenneth Branagh’s sequence on British history at the opening was imaginative and quite absorbing, and given the versatility of his thespian repertoire, it is a high compliment to say that his portrayal of a top-hatted, cigar-wielding Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was one of his most effective.

The emphasis on British culture, civility and industrial history were entirely justified. It is easy to forget that the world owes to that small island the invention and propagation of parliamentary democracy, the Common Law, the English language and the Industrial Revolution. (The performance in honor of the National Health Service, which is a major national problem and a sacred cow rivaled only by the BBC, was dispensable. Most advanced countries have superior health systems to Britain’s, and those that aspire to universal coverage will not be taking the NHS as their inspiration.)

As, and as I am frequently reminded, a citizen of that country, and a member of its Parliament, I hope I will be pardoned for waving the Union flag a little. Britain enjoys its status despite having allowed the departure of most of its manufacturing, and has few natural resources. The three full terms of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown effectively squandered almost all the comparative fiscal and economic strength that Margaret Thatcher had retrieved from decades of “Butskillism” (named after long-serving Tory grandee Rab Butler and 1950s-era Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskill, and referring to bi-partisan soft-left appeasement of militant labour unions, and an immense public sector devoted altogether to disincentivizing work and massaging money around irrespective of merit).

Prime Ministers Blair and Brown steadily increased stealth taxes on transactions and businesses, but not individuals, and thus became the only Labour Party leaders to gain consecutive terms, a modest achievement. It took Blair and Brown three terms to bring the country to its knees, the posture from which the Conservatives normally set out to retrieve it.

The British financial industry, and various forms of consulting, international law and other sophisticated expertise, provided a powerful engine of economic growth in London and the Southeast, which has been imperiled by Labour’s profligacy and addiction to tax increases. In the last three years, the London area has been sustained only by the waves of foreign unrest or actuated political death wishes that have driven (private jet) airlifts of the wealthy from the Middle East and parts of Europe, especially Russia, and most recently France, after the election of a lunatic Socialist government in Paris, to London. This is not a long-term economic strategy for Britain. Yet, as I say, it remains, as it is demonstrating, and as was implicit and strongly expressed in the observations of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, a serious country.

This brings me to my third observation. Britain, under the misguided influence of Edward Heath (prime minister 1970-1974), dove headlong into what was then only a European Common Market, abandoning the Commonwealth, whose more purposeful members — Canada, Australia and New Zealand — had given their all for Britain in two world wars. Margaret Thatcher, once the Eurofederalists had gained control in Brussels and were trying to reduce all western Europe to satellized, socialist satrapies, put on the brakes and rushed into an historic embrace with Ronald Reagan in the special relationship, which had its finest hour since the piping days of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Between them and with powerful assistance from John Paul II and some allies, including Brian Mulroney and Helmut Kohl, they won and ended the Cold War.

But now the United States is uninterested and is in gradual, more or less orderly withdrawal from the world, and Britain is an orphan to larger associations of countries. Europe is in shambles, and what will be saved will be benignly dominated by Germany, especially opposite a France that has suffered a national implosion of rational political judgment.

The most rational international political association, for Britain and Canada, would be a senior tier of the Commonwealth — the U.K., Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand and Singapore, all English-speaking democracies. All the members could focus their development activities on India, to aid it in rivaling China. Those countries have more in common than Britain does with Europe, or even than most of them have with the United States.

Not that our efforts would be combined in the Olympics. But as of Friday morning, those senior Commonwealth countries had a combined total of well over 100 medals — more than the individual totals for China or the United Sates (or Russia and its former satellites). An association, to be redefined in the light of the failings of the EU and the limitations of alliance with America, of the more successful states of the Commonwealth makes more sense now than ever. As in all things, what is needed is a bit of leadership and imagination.

cbletters@gmail.com

From the National Post