Unfortunately the rise of xenophobia thing is pretty much Europe-wide, so I don't think that's really a shift towards the US, more a consequence of the ongoing depression. The anti-Europe thing is just xenophobia on a different scale, some of UKIP's partner parties are even worse on the subject.
The military intervention thing is pretty much proceeding along historical lines IMO, Britain and France have a history of intervening in Africa and Asia due to colonial history and ties that's actually gone on fairly consistently since the end of WWII, the other NATO nations have been responding in accordance with how tightly they're bound to NATO aims (the Poles for instance) and local circumstances/politics (which is why the Germans keep swinging from one pole to the other). The interesting change for me is Sweden, which has gone from absolute neutrality to a more typical European position, without shifting any closer to the US.
(rant warning)
There actually is clear evidence that the shift on benefits was triggered by the US insurer Unum, which nobbled the Labour Party back in the late 90s into backing its ideas (which are mostly based around right-wing American sociologist Talcott Parson's concept of the 'socially deviant' 'sick role', and which in the States led to it losing a humongous class action for running 'disability denial mills' and the New York State DA branding it 'an outlaw company'), eventually resulting in the catastrophe that is Atos and the WCA. Notably Unum funded a professorship for DWP's chielf medical offier, which churns out papers backing Unum's idea that disabled people are just lazy, while Unum's chief medical officer in the UK jumped ship to Atos, and has now jumped ship again to Maximus, the US company that's taking over the Atos role on the basis of bidding to do it for £50m a year less than the only other company that was willing to bid. Because what can possibly go wrong when you hand a fundamentally flawed programme, with a record for abusing the most vulnerable people, to a US company with a record of abusing disabled people, on a low-ball bid. And to cap all that, we now find that Disability Rights-UK, supposedly an umbrella group for UK disability charities, is taking Unum money to participate in a scheme to show that everyone buying Unum's disability insurance (the one they wouldn't pay out on in the first place) would fix everything *headdesk*
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Date: 2014-11-11 05:59 pm (UTC)The military intervention thing is pretty much proceeding along historical lines IMO, Britain and France have a history of intervening in Africa and Asia due to colonial history and ties that's actually gone on fairly consistently since the end of WWII, the other NATO nations have been responding in accordance with how tightly they're bound to NATO aims (the Poles for instance) and local circumstances/politics (which is why the Germans keep swinging from one pole to the other). The interesting change for me is Sweden, which has gone from absolute neutrality to a more typical European position, without shifting any closer to the US.
(rant warning)
There actually is clear evidence that the shift on benefits was triggered by the US insurer Unum, which nobbled the Labour Party back in the late 90s into backing its ideas (which are mostly based around right-wing American sociologist Talcott Parson's concept of the 'socially deviant' 'sick role', and which in the States led to it losing a humongous class action for running 'disability denial mills' and the New York State DA branding it 'an outlaw company'), eventually resulting in the catastrophe that is Atos and the WCA. Notably Unum funded a professorship for DWP's chielf medical offier, which churns out papers backing Unum's idea that disabled people are just lazy, while Unum's chief medical officer in the UK jumped ship to Atos, and has now jumped ship again to Maximus, the US company that's taking over the Atos role on the basis of bidding to do it for £50m a year less than the only other company that was willing to bid. Because what can possibly go wrong when you hand a fundamentally flawed programme, with a record for abusing the most vulnerable people, to a US company with a record of abusing disabled people, on a low-ball bid. And to cap all that, we now find that Disability Rights-UK, supposedly an umbrella group for UK disability charities, is taking Unum money to participate in a scheme to show that everyone buying Unum's disability insurance (the one they wouldn't pay out on in the first place) would fix everything *headdesk*
(/end rant)