Patrice Claude, London correspondent of Le Monde at the turn of the century, told me that he had no problem forecasting future events in Britain “because whatever happens in the US, happens here five years later”.
He was not sneering at British imitativeness, but was disappointed that so many aspects of life in Britain – political, economic, cultural and psychological – mirrored, often in a distorted form, what had already happened in the US. This distortion was inevitable simply because what worked in the US seldom did so in a very different country like the UK.
Mindless apeing of American models has not lapsed in the years since Claude made the remark. Such is the strength of American political culture in Britain that those who talked tough about restoring British sovereignty post Brexit draw largely on Maga Republican shibboleths for their rhetoric. Reform and Conservative Party prescriptions largely concern the Trumpian take on the culture wars, crudely edited for British consumption.
For instance, Nigel Farage plans to save money by sacking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff on impoverished or bankrupt local councils, telling them “to seek alternative careers”. American culture clashes, for the most part about race, do not automatically resonate here, though the 1 May elections results show that this may be changing.
I wonder if it is too late to stop the Trumpian wave sweeping into Britain. Hostility to mass immigration is the common factor in the rise of the far right in the US and Western Europe. Different though the UK is from the US, this issue seems to cut through everywhere. I remember how, after the Brexit referendum in 2016, a local trade unionist in Dover told me that the vote in the town was about “immigration, immigration, and immigration – and nothing else”.
After the general election last year, I wrote that the new Government might have a few years to show that they could change voters’ lives for the better, but, if they failed, voters might not give the traditional parties another chance. In the event, Labour has managed to discredit itself in a few months. Sir Keir Starmer and Labour are now being blamed for their bungled tactics and strategy.
Inept Starmer certainly is, but this tends to mask a far deeper crisis: the neoliberal economic model introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US has failed spectacularly. This has become obvious to most people since the financial crisis of 2008.
The economic failure today may not be as great as in the Great Depression in the 1930s, but in one important respect the situation is graver because – unlike the 1930s when there was a Keynesian alternative economic model – nobody today knows what to put in the place of the old system. This is true of governments, but it is also true of populists of both left and right.
The psychological impact of this forever crisis may be particularly severe in Britain because the state has hitherto been unused to failure. The 19th century is often portrayed as Britain’s glory days when it ruled the waves, was the workshop of the world, and the sun never set on its Empire. Somewhat against the odds, it was also successful in the 20th century, victorious in two World Wars and withdrawing from its giant Empire largely unscathed.
The cost of these successes was progressively greater reliance on Washington which in realpolitik terms was the only sensible policy. After the debacle of the British and French attack on Egypt in the Suez Crisis in 1956, the British were determined to get closer to the US, and the French looked to the rest of Europe.
The essential factor in Britain’s survival
Alliance with the US was the essential factor in Britain’s survival in the 20th century. Somebody asked former German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1898 what the most important development in the next hundred years would be. He replied that “the most significant event of the 20th century will be the fact that the North Americans speak English”. He may not have foreseen that the US would replace the UK as the greatest Anglo-Saxon power, but he understood that they would be the leading force in global politics, even if the UK was to become very much the junior partner.
Riding on the coat-tails of American hegemony worked out well for Britain until the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Wishful thinkers in London could still dismiss the President as a blip in US history whose importance should not be exaggerated.
Nobody thinks that anymore after the first five explosive months of Trump’s second term in the White House. He may not be an isolationist, but he is a unilateralist. Britain’s future is more uncertain than at any time since 1945, and it is peculiarly ill-equipped to cope with this vicious new world so similar to that of 1914.
Since 1700, Britain has had a powerful state machine enabling it to compete successfully with its continental rivals. Thatcher believed in a small state whose essential utilities were sold off and state functions privatised. There was a systematic Americanisation of the British system of government that has now become a recipe for long-term decline.
National self-confidence in Britain has long depended on tethering itself politically and culturally to the US as the great liberal democracy. Brought up on a diet of American movies and popular music, the British identity has consciously or subconsciously meshed with that of Americans, though the feeling is scarcely reciprocated.
As a correspondent in Washington, I noticed that incoming British journalists, who would certainly have studied Russian history had they been posted to Moscow, felt no need to do so before arriving in the US because they instinctively felt that Americans were much like themselves.
Many of these journalists from Britain were smart people, and by no means starry-eyed about the US being a beacon for liberty and democracy. But cynical though they might be about its failings, they would still have been astonished to find the US, the fabled “city on a hill” established by English colonists, taken over by a proto-fascist leader like Trump.
Scapegoats for failure
The US may have the human and material resources to survive the greatest challenge to its existence as a liberal democracy since the US Civil War. Many of the same social and economic forces that propelled the rise of Trump have already produced Brexit in Britain.
The Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK have ruled themselves out as vehicles for the transformative changes demanded by voters, leaving a vacuum to be filled by a radical right. The latter have no solutions to national ills, but are expert in finding scapegoats, notably immigrants, to divert attention away from their inevitable failure.
My first job in journalism was working in a very junior capacity for the great investigative journalist Paul Foot at Private Eye. I had just left school in Scotland and floundered, since Paul cheerfully took it for granted that I was capable of investigating the dodgy doings of people whom I had previously never heard of before.
Paul died in 2004, but I go almost every year to the Paul Foot Awards, organised by Private Eye, for the best investigative journalism over the previous 12 months. At a time when journalism is in a bad way with publications cutting back or closing down on every side, I find it morale boosting to discover so many journalists still out there exposing scandalous wrongdoings.
A further reason for going to the awards is that all the finalists have carried out important investigations, many of which I have never heard of. Since I follow the news carefully, I am always rather taken aback by important stories that I have somehow managed to miss, as well as real scoops that the rest of the media is ignoring.
I blame myself for these oversights, but it is becoming easy for revelations to be swallowed up in the great ocean of information available on the internet.
All the finalists for the Paul Foot Awards in 2025 had done significant work, but the one that gripped me most is the extraordinary story of how the UK government has ignored overwhelming evidence of mass lead poisoning, in much the same way that it once downplayed asbestosis as a threat.
Laura Hughes of the Financial Times has discovered through exhaustive investigation that some 200,000 children may have risky levels of lead in their blood, which could seriously damage their mental and physical health.
Those under the age of six are particularly vulnerable as they ingest more of the lead than adults. The symptoms are often unrecognised because the health authorities in the UK – unlike the US and many other countries – make little effort to warn people about the danger posed by lead and to carry out widespread testing.
I knew that lead had once been present in petrol, paint and other commonly used products, but I previously had a vague impression that this had been dealt with a long time ago.
Hughes found, on the contrary, that water leaches out of some 6,500 abandoned lead mines all over the UK, poisoning water sources and soil, affecting farm animals and poultry – so eggs are often dangerously contaminated. In a country with an old housing stock, buildings often have paint with lead in it on the walls which produces toxic, lead-laced dust.
The extent of lead poisoning in the UK is unknown because official testing is minimal, though academic studies have long identified the dangers. This story has so far failed to catch fire – possibly in part because the Financial Times is behind a paywall and has a specialised readership. But Hughes gave a lucid overview of her findings in an interview with Private Eye.
Under the Radar
A friend from West Belfast surprised me by saying that she was certain that sectarian hatred between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland is greater today than it was during The Troubles. When I asked her why this was, she attributed it primarily to enduring Protestant anger at losing their former supremacy.
People in the rest of the UK pay little or no attention to Northern Ireland until it explodes into a full-blown crisis, as it has done repeatedly over the past half-century. But this animosity simmering below the surface has the potential to erupt in future if the Reform party wins the next UK general election or is part of a governing coalition.
The main Protestant parties in Northern Ireland are not so different from Reform. As with Brexit, radical policies that rock the political boat in the rest of the UK may well capsize it in Northern Ireland.
Cockburn’s Pick
The most cogent account of the chances of an end to the Ukraine war is an interview by UnHerd with George Beebe, former head of Russian analysis at the CIA and now at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
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