Over at Hugh Hewitt in the USA, an unexpected comparison:

ES: The Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election will have a major impact on every race in America for generations to come.

HH: It’s a precursor election, 1979, Maggie Thatcher swept into power in England, took on the unions, and what followed? Ronald Reagan. I think this is only five months, but I think five months from now, we’ll see, as Reagan followed Thatcher, Mitt Romney will follow Scott Walker.

SC: Exactly. Wisconsin is England, Scott Walker is Margaret Thatcher, the public school teachers are the British mining unions, which makes Barack Obama Billy Elliott. Oh, no. No.

Hugh asks MS (who else?) for his thoughts:

Yeah, I don’t believe in public sector unions. I mean, I think you can make an argument, I generally, I’m not in favor of unions generally, but I think the argument for private sector unions is that if you get undercut, if your mill has to lay you off because the even more nasty mill worker across the street decides to undercut you by hiring cheap foreign labor, I can see you might take a view that a union, you need a union to protect your interests.

But when you’re hired by the government, when you’re working for the government, there isn’t another government to cross the street to undercut your wages. You’re in a privileged monopoly position as it is. And I think in effect, public sector unions are a form of blackmail upon the public purse.

And Britain learned that in the so-called winter of discontent before Mrs. Thatcher came to power, the winter of 1978-79. Workers across the country went on strike, corpses went unburied, garbage was rotting in the street. There is a point at which…and it was felt that in effect the elected leaders had ceded control of the country.

There was a phrase they used to use, beer and sandwiches at Number 10, which was the procession of union leaders trooping into 10 Downing Street to lay down the law to the prime minister about what was going to happen.

Now Wisconsin chose to pick a battle over that, and they lost. And I think it’s great they lost. I would have loved it if they’d lost by a lot more than 53-47. It should have been 70-30. But the fact is that certain states in this country are basically, the public sector unions have a hammerlock on the public purse, and therefore, the continued viability of those entities. And that has got to be rolled back.

 And what Scott Walker did was he showed other governors around the country that if you take a fight on this, stand on this issue, if you don’t roll over like the terminated Terminator did in California, you can stand up to these guys, and you can win…

Hugh Hewitt is a serious US conservative opinionator, which is why he likes to debate at some length on his radio show with US liberals and progressives. Here is his lively discussion with E J Dionne Jnr on the US political scene. Read it if only to see how much smart Americans love to battle over political ideas in a way quite lost over here these days, and how they take those ideas right back to the Founding Fathers:

HH: Do you believe that Alexander Hamilton would ever have given a half billion dollars to Solyndra? Burr would have, if they were his friends. That was crony capitalism. That was Burr. Or would he have cut the Navy to 283 ships, or reduce the Marine Corps by 20,000, or the Army by 100,000? Would he have ordered the Department of Justice not to defend DOMA, or every citizen in the country to buy health insurance? I mean, come on, E.J., you can’t kidnap Hamilton and the framers. They would hate this Obama administration’s excess.

EJD: Well I don’t think they would have hated the Obama administration, but neither of us can know this. On that long list, I think it’s impossible to know where Hamilton would have stood on most of those things.

But I do, I could very much see Hamilton supporting subsidies for clean energy, including not only Solyndra, but also the ones that have worked out well. Mitt Romney supported subsidies for clean energy back in Massachusetts, so it’s odd for him to attack Obama on Solyndra, but not acknowledge that he supported exactly this kind of thing in Massachusetts, and he supported it, by the way, and the end of 2008 when he called for a large stimulus program. This is your candidate, Mitt Romney.