Much as we hate quoting the Daily Wail on any subject, we have to admit that in this article Peter Hitchens has struck exactly the note we would have chosen ourselves (if we could have been arsed to write about it at all, that is ...)
For those of you who say I never have a good word for David Cameron, here’s one. He’s pretty much right about 1940, even if it was by accident. When a politician is accused of committing a ‘gaffe’, it almost always means he has told the truth. And 1940 was in fact the year that Britain became America’s very junior partner, a sad role we have followed ever since.
I know, I know, the USA didn’t enter the war against Germany until 1941 (and then only when Hitler declared war on them). But Franklin Roosevelt took great advantage of our desperate position in 1940. As the Germans advanced through France in early summer that year, he offered one of the most unfair bargains in the history of diplomacy – 50 worn-out, ancient destroyers in return for nine rent-free US military bases in British colonies.
He had already insisted on hard cash for war supplies, which rapidly depleted Britain’s gold and currency reserves. And Britain only finished paying for ‘lend-lease’ wartime aid – down to the uttermost farthing, plus interest charged for late payment – on December 29, 2006.
Post-war loans and Marshall Aid came at the cost of pledges to relinquish what remained of the empire, not least the bits we had just fought so hard to get back from the Japanese, and to open up colonial markets to US competition – plus unrelenting pressure to join the European Union, which still goes on. These weren’t the acts of besotted friends, but of a hard, wise, calculating politician who wanted the best for his own country, not for ours.
It seems to me that we have sentimentalised this for far too long. I don’t blame the Americans for using our weakness and desperation to displace us as Top Nation. This is how great powers behave (and how we used to behave ourselves when we still could). And I think that, when China becomes the supreme world power, many people who now sneer at America will yearn for the happy days when the globe was run from Washington.
But every time I hear the words ‘Special Relationship’, I feel faintly sick. And I yearn for a British Prime Minister with the self-confidence of Charles de Gaulle, who could tell the Americans to get lost from time to time, especially when they want us to join in their crazier military ventures. They would respect us more, and treat us better, if we weren’t constantly snuffling round their shoes with our tongues lolling out, like a pack of servile spaniels.
Of course this is familiar ground for Hitchens. It's only a month ago that he was writing this ...
The USA is my favourite foreign country – but I never forget that it is foreign, and has often been our enemy and our rival. So I am rather pleased that President Barack Obama has openly shown hostility to this country over the BP oil spill, unlike several of his forerunners, who smiled at us while doing us down.
It may help us all grow up and stop fawning on Washington. Far too many people – many of them academics, many politicians – continue to jabber about a supposed ‘special relationship’ between our two countries.
I used to think that no such thing existed. Recently, I have become convinced that it does, and that it is in fact a Specially Bad Relationship.
Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding ‘like Princess Di’) but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.
And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots’ anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.
Words such as ‘arrogant’ and ‘snobbish’ occur – and the ceaseless use of English actors in Hollywood movies to portray haughty, cruel villains is not accidental. Sometimes it bursts out into the open. Mel Gibson’s atrocious anti-English propaganda film The Patriot pretty much equated the Redcoats with the Nazi SS. And it played to full and enthusiastic houses.
Some of this is deep-buried. The American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, is a description of a British naval bombardment of Baltimore. It refers to the presence of British troops on American soil as ‘their foul footsteps’ pollution’. There’s always been a rough, republican anti-English spirit, well expressed by the Mayor of Chicago, Big Bill Thompson, who threatened to punch King George V ‘in the snoot’ if he ever came that way. His Majesty didn’t.
Apart from the war of 1812 to 1814, the two countries have almost come to blows many times. It was American pressure that forced us out of the first rank of naval powers in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which led to our defeat at Singapore 20 years later. The last physical clash was in 1956 when the US Sixth Fleet harassed the Royal Navy on its way to Suez, deliberately steering destroyers dangerously close to our battle line. But by then Washington had learned money spoke louder than guns, and Dwight Eisenhower forced us to abort the operation by threatening to bankrupt us.
During an assignment in Washington I watched Bill Clinton fawn over the grisly IRA apologist Gerry Adams. I learned that White House officials regarded us as on a level with, say, Yugoslavia – an annoying, backward European nation to be ordered about and forbidden to control its internal affairs.
That’s how it really stands. I would like a British Government to behave as if it understood this, instead of mouthing outdated and meaningless fake Churchillian ‘Finest Hour’ rubbish.
The GOS says: Hear, hear. And all this without even mentioning (a) Gary McKinnon or (b) the colossal cheek of the US Senate, thinking they could click their fingers and summon Jack Straw, a former British government minister, to answer questions about the release of the alleged Lockerbie bomber.
On that subject, incidentally, the most sense this week came from the mouth of comedian Hugh Dennis when he pointed out, between jokes on "Mock the Week", that the man was released because the alternative was an appeal which would have brought all the evidence (or lack of it) into the open. I've read the court judgement in this case, and frankly it stinks. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi may have been in cahoots with the bombers or he may not - how the hell would I know? - but even I could tell that in a normal court of law on British soil the evidence was too flimsy for a conviction.
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