An elderly lady greeted me at a party in Beirut on Thursday night. “Don’t worry,” she said, reassuringly patting my hand. “The Conservative Party will win.” She looked around and then leaned in. “Even though Mr Miliband is a Jew”. She nodded knowingly and moved on to greet another guest.
It’s not the first time that Mr Miliband’s faith has crept into a conversation whenever his name is mentioned in this town, even though he, his brother David and his Marxist father, Ralph, are all self-declared atheists. And it might also come as a surprise to those Lebanese for whom the conspiracy theory is a national pastime, but the religion of British politicians is of little concern to all but a dark lunatic fringe of UK voters who believe that there was Zionist faction planning to sweep Labour to power. What happened on Thursday was a resounding vote for continued prosperity in all its brashness.
It was a stunning example of democracy in action with no respect shown for reputations. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor and the man who would have held the purse strings had Labour won, was the most high- profile MP to lose his seat in an election that has probably consigned his party to the political wilderness. The British electorate believed the prime minister David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne when they told the country the economy was still a work in progress and they want them to finish the job.
Lebanon is often described as the most evolved Arab democracy, but that too is still a work in progress. All this is very frustrating for the thin tranche of what I call the non-aligned Lebanese voters, mostly professionals who wanted to make a difference in the 2005 parliamentary elections. Lebanon had freed itself from 30 years of Syrian occupation and we expected genuine change, naively believing that a Lebanon freed from the Baathist jackboot would inspire voters to insist that prosperity, better governance and an improved standard of living be the priorities.
But even in those heady days of what we called the Cedar Revolution, it was clear that Lebanon didn’t do issue-based politics. It wasn’t much different in 2009, the last time the country went to the ballot box and we’ve been pretty much sunk in mediocrity ever since.
Among the diaspora, especially in America and Europe, the Lebanese tend to drift to the right. They admire governments that are tough on law and order and tend to sympathise with economic policies that favour the free market and limited state intervention. They come from a country where people have grown up having to fend for themselves and expect to pay for education, health care and even transport.
They are, like the Chinese, phenomenal savers. They work hard, often as a family unit, and place an enormous, if sometimes overzealous, emphasis on education as a means to achieving security.
The construction cranes that today tower above the London skyline and which symbolise Tory bullishness would make perfect sense to the Lebanese. Beirut is constantly rebuilding, and had the Syrian civil war not put a dampener on the economy, it is not inconceivable that Lebanon’s impressive growth of an average of 7 per cent per year between 2008 and 2011 would have marched on. The only difference is that this growth was the work of the private sector on whose inherent dynamism and hard work the state has traditionally relied.
That is not to say all is well. London, like Beirut, has become unaffordable to all but the wealthiest, and those who wanted a Labour government are predicting more inequality with welfare cuts, tax breaks for the highest earners and the gradual privatisation of the health and education systems. But Mr Cameron, like Margaret Thatcher before him, has put business first and will reward hard work and enterprise.
Back at the party, every Lebanese I spoke to wondered why anyone would vote for anything else.
Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.
business@thenational.ae
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