San Francisco Blog

If California is now a role model for Britain -- well, God Save the Queen

In the faded English coastal resort town of Blackpool, there's a restaurant three blocks off the shore called West Coast Rock that specializes in California cuisine as a blinkered Brit might imagine.

When my wife and I visited a few years ago the house specialty consisted of a platter of tacos and chicken wings that tasted as if they'd been in the freezer since the time William the Conquerer.

According to the British political magazine The Spectator, that poor island nation now stands at risk of this sort of Bowdlerized California blight, Thanks to an infatuation with the San Francisco Bay Area suffered by the leaders of the Conservative Party, that whole country may soon become Fisherman's Wharf II.

The Conservative Party's chief strategist, Steve Hilton, has come to view the Bay Area as a piece of Conservative paradise, and he's infected party leader David Cameron with his delusion. Hilton's wife works at Google, and during the past few months he's apparently spent his house-husband trips here to soak in a 1999 version of Silicon Valley hype.

This is the place on Earth which fuses everything the Cameroons most like in life, where hardheaded businessmen drink fruit smoothies and walk around in recycled trainers. It is where a dynamic economy meets the family-friendly workplace. And it is here, to an extent that is greatly underestimated, that the Conservative government-in-waiting is looking to find a new blueprint for Britain.

Perhaps nobody told them that California doesn't have a dynamic economy anymore, and that we're among America's worst sufferers of the post 2000 and post 2007 hangovers. Maybe they didn't notice that our politics, as evinced by the recent budget battle, is some of the most dysfunctional this side of Naples, or that California's zenith came and went in 1977, the year before Proposition 13, the Libertarian anti-tax initiative that made us near-last in education, first in sprawl and environmental degradation.

With the Conservatives ahead in recent polls, I can't wait to see West Coast Rock's take on that.