I wrote this just over two years ago:
My neighbours across the road have a large sign on their door: "Justice for George Floyd". Which prompts me to wonder: what's going on? [And no, they're not black.] Why should the killing of Floyd have aroused such universal interest and universal condemnation? The man was killed in another country. We're a long way from Minneapolis. We don't normally take such an passionate interest in events in other countries....except America, that is. If the police killed a black man in Paris, or Rome, or Rio, or Sydney, there'd be concern, no doubt, but however brutal the murder there's no way my neighbours would be proclaiming their views - hardly controversial - to passers-by and the community in such a public fashion.
I'm sure some of it is the old left hatred of America - fount of all modern evil, and obviously an easy target with its freedom of information and its faults exposed right there for all to see. That kind of gut anti-Americanism is certainly behind much of the undisguised glee on display elsewhere, from the Middle East to China, at this latest US tragedy. But there's more going on. What it shows, surely, is that America is still in many ways at the centre of our world, as it has been, really, since the end of World War 2.
A huge proportion of our popular culture - TV, movies, music - comes if not directly from America, then indirectly. It started in force when the US boomed in the Fifties while the rest of the west, certainly in Europe, was struggling to keep its head above water. And though we like to think things have changed, to a remarkable degree they haven't. In the Sixties the civil rights movement was our movement too. We followed it as though Selma, Alabama, was just south of Basingstoke. Now it's Black Lives Matter - though the echoes here now are greater than they were back then. Back in the Sixties the main issue for the left was Vietnam. The 1968 Grosvenor Square demonstration outside the American embassy was a key moment in the left's development here in the UK. But we weren't even in Vietnam. Harold Wilson, in his wisdom, didn't want the UK to get involved. It didn't matter - we were still out there in force on the street to make our voices heard. And we followed every twist and turn of the anti-war movement in the States - along with everything else over there, from the Black Panthers to Charles Manson to Watergate. It was where the action was. And to an extraordinary extent, for us, it still is.
Now we have the Roe vs Wade decision, and here we go again with the US obsession. Yes, it's a huge deal...for American women. For us in the UK, not so much. Yet we have Corbyn economic adviser Richard Murphy, for instance, tweeting: “Where the Republicans go the Tories follow. We take the right to abortion, contraception, gay rights and same-sex marriage for granted now. We shouldn’t. Very soon Tory think tanks will have their sights on all of them. Fascism is on the march.” This, as Dominic Sandbrook argues, is nonsense:
“Mad,” I thought. I saw that more than 3,000 people had retweeted this ridiculous prophecy, while another 10,000 had “liked” it, and I shook my head in despair. And then I saw another effusion, this time from the Labour MP Stella Creasy: “To every one of our American sisters, we are with you. We will not rest until your rights are restored… You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here? Then you don’t understand who is organising in UK politics.”...
What is it, I wonder, that blinds so many ostensibly intelligent people to the fact that the United States and Great Britain are two different countries? “Where the Republicans go the Tories follow,” says Richard Murphy. But that just isn’t true. There are some similarities, of course; but if you’re hoping to win selection for a safe Tory seat by talking about ending abortion, outlawing socialised medicine and encouraging the high-street sales of automatic weapons, then I’ve got a nice padded cell for you. “We will not rest until your rights are restored,” Stella Creasy tells her American sisters. But what does that mean? How much influence does the Labour MP for Walthamstow have over the American judiciary? Can you truly measure something so small?
“You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here?” asks Ms Creasy. Well, I suppose it’s just possible that in the next few years we could completely change our political system, radically reshape the relationship between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, adopt a version of the US Constitution, develop a deeply religious political culture and set up a fervent anti-abortion movement — all of which would be the cue for our own Supreme Court to hand down a judgement allowing individual counties (Dorset? Wiltshire?) to outlaw abortion. Yes, I suppose it’s possible. It’s certainly no more implausible than a major British political party campaigning to throw out the 1967 Abortion Act — another thing that is clearly never going to happen.
Britain is not America. According to the most recent YouGov survey, just two in a hundred people — two! — think abortion should be illegal. What’s more, only 6% of people think access to abortions is too easy, compared with 8% who think it’s too hard, 47% who think it’s about right, and 36% who don’t know or don’t care. To repeat, Britain is not America.
We’ve been here before, of course. When a Minneapolis policeman killed George Floyd in May 2020, thousands of people defied Covid regulations to demonstrate in British cities, while The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch insisted that “the racism that killed George Floyd was built in Britain”. But in their racial politics and attitudes, as Tomiwa Owolade wrote last month, the two countries are completely different. The plain fact is that if you’re black and you’re British, your chances of being shot by the police are vanishingly small.
To point this out in progressive circles, though, is to identify yourself as the enemy. America’s struggles are Britain’s struggles, and only a fascist would deny it. “The prejudice that black people in America face is the same prejudice we face here. When one is hurt, we’re all hurt, because it could have been us,” a demonstrator told the BBC in the summer of 2020. You’d never guess that the two countries’ histories have been utterly different — or that most of our police are unarmed, so that actually it probably couldn’t have been us. Nor would you guess that there are, in fact, more than two countries on earth....
Does all this matter? I think it does. Obviously we can’t live in a national bubble: our public discourse has always been influenced by trends and events overseas, from Lutheranism in the early 16th century to Jacobinism in the 1790s. But the intense and growing obsession with America isn’t just a curious Anglophone quirk. It’s a poison infecting our public life.
Almost everything about political life in the US today strikes me as deeply unhealthy. The general tone, perfectly reflected in that Richard Murphy tweet after the Roe v. Wade judgement, is relentlessly hysterical. The stakes are always sky-high; every setback is a shattering defeat. Death and despair stalk the land; the very existence of the Republic hangs by a thread, and the world of The Handmaid’s Tale may be only a few years away. And your political opponents are not merely misguided, they are positively wicked. Evil conspirators — militiamen, abortionists, gunowners, critical race theorists — are plotting subversion and civil war. How can you compromise with such people? How can there be a common ground? ...
But Britain isn’t America. Why would we want to import their hysterical tone? We have plenty of issues of our own, of course; but they’re ours, not theirs. Our race relations aren’t perfect, but they’re among the very best in Europe, not that you’d know it from much of the media. Boris Johnson really, really isn’t a fascist, and the worst thing you can say about Keir Starmer is that he’s incredibly boring. And yes, we do take “the right to abortion, contraception, gay rights and same-sex marriage” for granted. But why wouldn’t we? Who’s threatening them? Does anybody seriously think Boris Johnson, of all people, is going to abolish contraception?
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t think the Roe v. Wade judgement matters. It does, but it matters for Americans. Sometimes things just aren’t about us. “You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here?” Yes, I do, actually. Let’s see who’s right.
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