Mick Hartley

Spend any time online and you’ll come across Americans vigorously pushing their “the UK is finished” line. James Marriott in the Times has noticed:

Sneering at Britain is a favourite pastime in the high-minded American press. The present issue of The Atlantic magazine contains a classic of the genre, a long report that paints the country as somewhere between Airstrip One and one of the less hospitable regions of Mordor. Britain is a land “gripped by sclerosis”, of potholes revealing “Victorian-era cobblestones”, of children afflicted with “rickets and scurvy” and benighted locals reduced to “extracting their own teeth”. British people, American readers are soberly informed, believe that a luxury hotel is one “costing £200 a night.”…

I can’t be the only one who detects something increasingly hysterical in the disdain heaped on Britain by Americans. The right-wing American blogger Rod Dreher recently revealed that lying awake at night he “nearly came to tears” contemplating the “world historical catastrophe” facing Britain. One popular school of thought is that American conservatives are sincerely appalled by a multicultural London that looks dismayingly unlike the one portrayed in the 1964 Disney musical Mary Poppins. That theory runs aground on the fact that Americans of every political complexion are morbidly obsessed with Britain and its failings. And for wildly different reasons. According to taste, Britain is a country in which “the Far Right is Moving into the Mainstream” (New York Times), or it is a woke hell hole “going full Stalin” (Musk). Economically, Britain is either mired in classic European-style overspending or the victim of austerity. And so on…

Britain, readers will not need reminding, has its problems. But the intensity of the American preoccupation and the comically wide range of diagnoses should lead us to conclude that this is more about them than it is about us. As their own democracy sinks ever deeper into dysfunction, American pride demands they find someone to pity. And the people Americans are determined to condescend to are the British, fellow English speakers who can be easily mocked on social media.

Yes, we’re now looking to our seventh leader in ten years. All is not well. But if you’re leader is Trump…..