“It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill”
Our obsession with America and all things American isn’t a new phenomenon. After all they (more-or-less) speak the same language and our popular culture – film and music especially – has been dominated by American content since the days of Rudolf Valentino, Whispering Jack Smith and Bix Beiderbecke. But America and things American are now a problem and we should probably start ignoring them. But we aren’t.
Where once it was just Hollywood, Nashville and Broadway that filled our eyes and ears, influenced the chatter with our mates, it’s now the whole American package. And this means American politics as well as American culture, dress and idiom. The problem with importing of US political debate (if that’s the right word for it, which it probably isn’t) is that it really doesn’t have much connection to the social and cultural realities of British peoples’ lives, just a narrow media elite that likes to pretend they live in Hollywood.
What we don’t appreciate in our adopting of US political mores is that the Americans really don’t care. Other than a vague awareness of our existence and a sort of visceral appreciation of our role in creating America, the folk over there have zero interest in Britain and zero interest in what we do politically, economically or socially. The USA is, in every aspect, an isolationist place – every discussion of every subject is considered by comparing different parts or aspect of America. For Americans, a “world series” is a contest in America between Americans.
Yet we are obsessed, dangerously obsessed. Social media is filled with British people shouting about bad things done by US police officers and then trying to visit the same badness onto UK police. Even our language has been warped: just look at how people are now using the term ‘liberal’ to describe left-of-centre, progressive politics rather than a sort of inconsistent centrist political party that makes dodgy bar charts. Or how once sleepy academic disciplines and innocent pastimes are churned up by “critical” race and gender theories.
The USA has been in a tizzy over a bunch of ‘cultural’ issues for the best part of 40 years. It probably started with abortion as Christian groups faced off with women’s rights campaigners creating an irresolvable polemic in a matter that, if you think about it, is one of intense personal and familial sensitivity. This debate is now heard on British university campuses, in the media and even in parliament, despite the UK having legalised abortion in 1968 with a system that has worked well ever since. Yet at the last election the Labour Party put in its manifesto proposals that might have been lifted directly from US pro-choice campaigners, proposals that weren’t the consequence of popular pressure but rather the translation of an irrelevant US debate into a UK context.
The same goes with the debate about race. Britain still has plenty of racism but, compared to most other places, we’re doing a decent job. Surveys reveal that the British are less racist and more tolerant, yet we import the tense racial politics of the USA and reignite division and the idea of separatism. Britain didn't need a murderous, horrible civil war to end its slavery. This thing that more than anything is how ‘critical race theory’ has come to define racism. Since our race relations laws and practice are based on a liberal (in the historic rather than American meaning of the word) understanding of race and racism, ideas like ‘white privilege’ with its presumption than non-whites can’t be racist clash with the reality of these laws.
To appreciate just how much of a problem this redefining of racism becomes, just look at how California’s politicians voted to remove from their constitution the words “…(t)he state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group, on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin…”. The UK has laws that match, in far more detail, this constitutional requirement. The very basis of British race relations and equalities legislation is that we do not give a person preferential treatment because they are from a specific group.
Yet large organisations, especially those close to government and the institutions of government, are now developing policies that ape that US idea of race and racism – that it’s structural or systematic and that organisations need to adopt policies that reflect this “fact”.
Organisations like universities are embracing concepts lifted directly from this warped idea of racism, ripped from far-fetched theories of white privilege – ‘how to be an ally’, ‘white fragility’, and a host of similarly divisive and unhelpful programmes. Then we watch with horror, or at least incredulity, as white young Americans – all, I’m sure, considering themselves ‘allies’ - mob diners in a restaurant or hound senators walking along a street. Yet this is the logic of America and American ideas, a logic that is corrupting good government and sensible management and will act only to create copycat mobs or campaigns forcing the same nonsense onto British institutions. Our human resources departments are training people how to be a mob and are 'excited' by it.
All this ought to stop. Britain doesn’t have the great social divides that have been created in America and reverse-engineering US political campaigns into UK politics will only serve to make us less not more. We do not need an illiberal creed based on segregation and division, on creating a new ‘other’ in the white person. We do not need demands for abortion up to birth just because US ‘liberals’ want to get one over US evangelicals. And we do not need a politics based on removing protections from prejudice. What we need to do is ignore America, let it stew in its own divisions. We need to face down the attacks on institutions, symbols, flags and songs, to say this is not how we behave, we are better then that. We are not American.
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1 comment:
«Britain doesn’t have the great social divides that have been created in America»
From the point of view of the many people living 4-8 to a room in doss houses and earning minimum wage working casual gigs and paying 30-50% of it in rent and not being able to save for a pension this may seem a very optimistic statement. Perhaps not everybody knows that quite a few people are not yet enjoying a modestly (or not-so-modestly) comfortable lifestyle in a 3 bed semi in a "Middle England" leafy suburb. Perhaps reading "This is London" (2016) by Ben Judah might help realize that social divides have been returning to the level of the dickensian ones describe by B Mayhew in "London labour" (1851).
«yet we import the tense racial politics of the USA»
Racial politics are being imported by the "whig" media for a "tory" purpose: to displace and obscure the increasingly dickensian social divisions, and in a way that conveniently makes a scapegoat of working class "bigots" ("Divide and impera" is not a new idea) for the poor social outcomes of non-whites, instead of extractive upper-middle or upper class rentiers.
The same purpose as in the USA, where every time the focus is on police brutality against blacks (undeniable, as police brutality against the poor of any colour and in general) there is less focus on black poverty (or poverty in general); a lot more space for example is spent on that than on the homeless, the tent cities, the slums/favelas in USA (and increasingly in the UK) cities.
Even better when the focus in the UK is racial politics in the USA, because all the time spent focusing on race divisions in the USA is less time spent realizing how big are the social divides in the UK itself. Another effect of racial politics is that it helps to support the immigration of many more very cheap third world workers (to replace the expensive ones from the EU) with huge benefits for business and property owners; the very minor "Windrush scandal" was hugely exaggerated probably for the same effect. So conservatives should be quite content with the prominence of racial politics, it is better for them than the alternative.
It is not just using racial issues to displace social issues, a number of right-wing political strategies have been imported in the UK from the USA, and Australia, as Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives share political consultants and their think-tanks often collaborate. Arguably it was original thatcherism itself that was exported to the USA in 1979, but several elements of thatcherism were already part of USA republican politics.
As to the race question itself, while only 12% of the total UK population is darker-skinned, around 40% (in 2011, so now probably higher) of the population of London is non-white. That makes it more relevant. Of course nearly all of that 40% is economically disadvantaged too, like most of the white 60%, but the point of racial politics is to obfuscate that fact.
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