Joyce McMillan: Obama: the rhetoric and the reality

RUMOUR has it that embarrassing scenes took place in Westminster Hall on Wednesday, following Barack Obama's historic address to both Houses of Parliament. MPs were apparently seen shoving and jostling one another in their eagerness to shake the hand of greatness, and it was strange to see the adoring smiles on their rows of uplifted faces, as the president stood to address them.

In a sense, of course, the reason for their joy was not to hard to grasp. As the Times argued yesterday, Mr Obama - being American - was not shy of articulating what the paper called "what is great about this realm". He referred to the long tradition of rights guaranteed to the individual citizens, to the proud evolution of a parliamentary democracy and to a culture which assumes a general freedom of speech and association. These principles, he said, were developed in Britain, or in England, and passed on to our "rabble-rousing colonists" across the Atlantic; and he argued that today they form the bedrock of the values which Britain and the United States share, and which make both nations unusually pro-active on the world stage in intervening to protect those values.

It was a flattering portrait, both of Britain's current position in the world and of our relationship with the United States, now no longer "special", it seems, but "essential" and "indispensable". And at a time when the British political class is feeling battered by economic recession, bruised by rock-bottom public esteem and viscerally disturbed by fresh talk of possible Scottish secession, Mr Obama's words must have come as balm to their wounds.

The US president is wise enough to know, though - and indeed pointed out in his speech - that it is one thing to subscribe publicly to the fine values enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, and another to succeed in putting them into practice. It's not for nothing that the most quoted phrase from Martin Luther King's great "I Have A Dream" speech of 1963 refers to the future day when America will rise up and "live out the meaning of its creed".

Living out the full meaning of the idea that "all men are created equal" has so far proved beyond the power of any human society, and it's a vision that the United States arguably embodies less well today than it did two generations ago, when the real incomes of ordinary working families were still rising, and the battle for racial equality was progressing by leaps and bounds.For the truth is that in recent decades, both the US and Britain have made many policy choices which have gravely damaged their claim to be serious about the values which Mr Obama so clearly enunciated on Wednesday. At home, they have embraced economic policies which have led to damaging levels of social and economic inequality, to an entrenchment of privilege and to a shameful decline in social mobility; abroad, they have intervened in the affairs of other countries so selectively, and - in the case of the Iraq War - on such dubious grounds, that their global credibility and influence has been seriously damaged. And their collective response to the attacks of 9/11, in the shape of the so-called "war on terror", boiled down to a panic-driven decision to ditch many of those supposedly cherished freedoms in pursuit of a greater "security" which was poorly defined and rarely, if ever, measured.

So when Mr Obama claims that the young people now crying freedom across the Middle East are striving for the same values we in Britain and America take for granted, he is only partly right. Those young people are not, after all, the children of the Second World War, brought up to hear the chimes of Big Ben as a symbol of freedom. They are the children of the first Gulf war, of Rwanda, of former Yugoslavia, of the 9/11 attacks, of Iraq, and of Afghanistan; and much as they may admire some of the freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of the West, they have their own critiques both of recent British and American foreign policy and of the turbo-charged capitalist system that now shapes every aspect of western society.

To them, freedom of speech - and the balanced centre of global politics - sounds more like Al-Jazeera than the BBC; and their definition of the good and open society will not be one handed down to them by the West, but one shaped by many different influences, including both western and Islamic strands of thought.

For all the pleasure Mr Obama brought to the audience in Westminster Hall, in other words, there was perhaps something slightly unfortunate in his largely uncritical account of an alliance which has recently done so much damage to its own reputation, as a bearer of truly enlightened values. Dig around in the detail of the president's speech, and you will find his acknowledgment that Britain and the US will need to find new allies if they want to contribute usefully to a new global age of peace and prosperity. You will also find his insistence on the need to provide citizens with meaningful social security, health care and pensions, as well as 24-hour counter-terror surveillance.What you will not find, though - at least in the president's public pronouncements - is the acknowledgment of just how radical that commitment to basic social security has become, in a world where deficit reduction, and a continuing bonanza for the rich, apparently matters so much more than the life-chances of vulnerable people dependent on the state. In that respect, Barack Obama is no better than any other western politician of the moment, talking the talk of freedom and equality while avoiding explicit conflict with those who promote the exact opposite. And so long as that gap remains between the radical glory of his rhetoric and the timid reality of his policy, then America's credibility as a global power will continue to suffer; and the hopes of a whole global generation may fade and die, as the man who names himself the world's chief champion of freedom and justice proves unable to deliver either, even to his own people.