First order of the day is to rejoin the European Union. Britain needs to be part of a powerful bloc in the absence of a reliable NATO alliance. Once that's done, the EU needs to form a more effective military alliance. America is yesterday's story.
It's not widely understood, but, right now, European NATO plus Canada, hugely outmatches Russia in conventional weapons. More of everything: modern equipment, numbers, and training. And NATO has never been all-for-one, one-for-all. Not every nation contributes to NATO operations, it is optional. NATO's support for a treaty member who has been attacked is not contingent on America's say-so. Clearly not, because Trump is never going to give that support, but it won't stop the rest of NATO. The UK is firmly inside NATO too. There are British troops in Estonia as part of a NATO trip line force. Germany also has an armoured brigade in Lithuania. There is a multi-national NATO brigade in Latvia. The bulk of NATO has made a clear commitment to defend those nations. So don't believe the clueless pundits with agendas. They don't know what they are talking about.
Nick, great piece with which I agree entirely. I think it is about time we redefined the terms "left" and "progressive". I am not sure they make much sense these days. I have no idea what to replace them with. I consider myself to be "social democrat left", but much of what passes for "progressive" and "left" is not something I would want to be associated with.
Our media do not help. Why do they report every bit of Hollywood gossip or school shooting in Utah? Why so much focus on AI in the US and not in China?
Because we are Anglophone countries overrun by US data tech.
Google infests everything. It owns YouTube which now commands greater audiences in the UK than the BBC or any streaming company: with a massive merger pending which protects Channel 5 only for a while.
Spytech Palantir has a £300m contract with the UK's NHS for its inefficient "Federated Data Platform" and with the UK's Met Police, that we need to get rid of--sign Foxglove's Petition to Parliament. And Palantir has contracts with ICE in the US, and with the IDF in Israel.
Know thine enemy
Plus the dominance in the UK of US social media platforms owned by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc), or X (formerly Twitter) which is driving rightwing politics and inciting racial hatred and race riots
Know thine enemy
Plus the UK's struggles (outside the EU with the heft of 27 countries and GDPR) to regulate US tech companies--for child safety against online and offline abuse--without inviting further punishment by Trump in trade tariffs
Know thine enemy
Plus AI is the scariest tech development since the nuclear bomb--if you've been paying any attention: eg to rogue "agentic" AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, with three recent breakouts, using hacking, malicious code and deception.
Not to mention the huge energy and water demands of a programme of hyperscale UK datacentres: at exactly the wrong time to combat climate change by a fast transition to clean energy, and with half of the UK now suffering drought.
Try sampling social media in the Middle East or Africa. The UK is nothing compared to the conspiracy raddled and hateful content you encounter there. This is a global problem.
It's not just the UK media. I've heard Brits talking about their First Amendment rights. Others who parrot whatever Musk says about the UK, even though their daily lives show how wrong he is. This is the fault of social media saturation and social media addiction.
Is it a reflection of the age and sensibilities of the people who run our media? These are people so stuck in the past that they still talk about the "special relationship" and the global significance of the British monarchy. They think a war that's been over for 80 years and a football match that finished 60 years ago are the most important things that ever happened (although you'd never know that the USSR lost around 27 million people in it (it was a helluva match) which may explain some of the Russian antipathy towards the West).
Broadcast news in particular runs on emotional impact. A picture of a weeping parent or a mass of police officers is easy to understand. It requires no effort to explain. Same with a celebrity court case. The other stuff only seems to matter if they can also say a really big number to indicate its significance.
Agree with every word Pongo. To paraphrase Trotsky, the US is also interested in us, though the level of brazen political interference is not on the level seen in Latin America. That aspects of the relationship is never reported.
The political interference point is an important one. Whether it's Musk telling people to prepare for civil war (and why the hell is the government still posting on X?) or Vance claiming free speech is threatened because anti abortionists want to intimidate women attending clinics or the US donating money to fund propaganda and call it education (echoes of Russia Today), we really do need to talk about it more. And bloody well reject it.
I wish we could forget about the USA, it's turning itself into a banana republic, and given how the US population is now behaving and voting, it's hard not to see that they've brought this entirely on themselves.
Unfortunately we can't for the simple reason that the US is also turning itself from an ally into an adversary and global disruptor to rival the Russians. It's actively trying to undermine Western democracies, particularly in Europe, through deceitful lying propaganda, funding of far right anti-democratic forces, and becoming friendly with our worst enemies, principally Russia.
Outside of Europe it is continuing the threatened Canada, and in Greenland, part of Denmark which Trump still wants to annex, a Texas oil company with ties to Donald Trump just landed a dozen shipping containers of drilling equipment on Greenland's remote eastern coast, entirely without permission. And elsewhere in the America's the Trump regime seems to be treating Venezuela as a vassal state, that they can plunder for its oil at will, ‘To the victor belong the spoils’ as Trump put it.
And in the wider world, the war with Iran, (or is it still unironically, a 'Special Military Operation'), will have huge repercussions for the world economy, not to mention strengthening the Iranian regime, one of the worst in the world, and undermining all the gulf states.
We should certainly forget the USA as an ally, trading partner (trade deals with Trump's USA aren't worth the paper they're written on), or source of economic or military salvation. Instead we need to prepare to stand up to them, and create replacements for anything we still rely on them for, starting with moving towards the Euro as a reserve currency, and creating a Nato 2.0 excluding the US. Because things are never going to return to the way things were pre 2016. I hope Robert Mueller thinks his intervention over Clinton emails was worth it.
You're right on when you say that this attention to the USA (why call it America? asks this Canadian) is a reflection of the US empire - wwe have all been colonised by its power and so defer and aspire...
"I am here to tell you that there is no normal America to go back to."
Very true, regardless of which political faction gains power in the US. It is a fractured country, a long time in the making. The world is unlikely to trust whatever regime follows Trump. If the American voter can install this cretin a second time, after an attempted coup d'etat. then they are highly suspect. Frankly, Trump has done the democratic world a huge favour by showing how fast an ostensibly democratic government can be captured. He has managed to unite the rest of the world's democracies in a way that has rarely been done, outside of war. A humbled and less powerful US is in the best interests of everyone...including America.
It’s interesting that these people choose to call themselves democratic socialists. If they called themselves social democrats, they would be associating with a long-standing political current in Europe and elsewhere, whose ideas it’s reasonable to think the US could benefit from. In calling themselves democratic socialists they are associating with something that has arguably never existed. As far as I can see, those who have favoured the label in the past have either been social democrats or have not been democrats. I doubt whether the latest democratic socialists can be any different.
I think the DSA has been co-opted from the founding principles of that organization. Still, I resist falling for the labels being applied to “the other side.” There are more sides in the Democratic Party than the old guard. The two party system means that anything not Republican is therefore Democrat.
The Democrats are more of a coalition of new ideas and new faces than the cheesy egoists of yore. I never really liked the current leadership class of the Democrats. It is a classist hierarchy that has been patronizing and self serving for decades. At least they didn’t hate “the people” and did not work to tear down our system of government.
There is change in the air in year 250. It has to be sustained and carefully managed. Hanging on for dear life to the right to vote is first priority. That means breaking out of left v right thinking. Right v Wrong (pedo-rapist-mob boss mentality) and defense of the rule of law are the crucial issues.
The US should become a signatory to the ICC when the ship of state has been righted.
He hasn't traced the thousands of small steps away from an analysis of society that was ‘appoximately true’ 100 years ago to one that is ‘completly untrue’ today. But Paul Mason’s book History of Communism's is due out soon so maybe that will fill the gap.
Very good piece! But what does this little end of sentence at the beginning mean, '...show that they and other politicians associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have created genuine left'?
Unfortunately our defence and (to a lesser extent) our trade are both so connected to the US that we cannot yet afford not to care about the US.
If Andy Burnham is looking for a mission to give UK citizens as inspiration for our own national renewal perhaps he could co-opt the cries of the Brexiters and talk about UK freedom from dependence - particularly with regard to food, defence and manufacturing. Of course we will probably never be completely independent on any of those but we could be doing a lot better than we are currently.
Not sure about this given the "contagion" of these views across the pond. And if you have family and friends in the US, which I do, it's v hard to stop caring. But I get the sentiment.
I wonder if the terms left and right have much meaning left in them. About the only dimension on which they still make some sense is wealth inequality. Nor is this necessarily all new. A century ago there was a Marxist syndicalist outfit ‘Workers of the World (‘Wobblies’) for a White South Africa’.
What is new is the common willingness of both left and right to sacrifice facts to virtue signalling. It’s easier to make a crude easily digested theory appealing if you claim it makes perfect sense of everything.
I suspect that much illiberal and fact free thinking has its roots in university social science and humanities departments. You learn to put “facts” in scare quotes, that all knowledge is relative and liberalism is just a camouflage for power.
Forty years ago graduates would shake off this infantile posturing when they encountered the real world. Now the internet allows them to keep recycling such nonsense.
In the contemporary world the most radical action is probably just to insist, repeatedly, in respect for facts.
I'm maybe not engaging with your central argument to stop being interested in the US, Nick. But I was reminded of Thomas Paine's words, ’..the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire...'.
Maybe time for someone / somewhere else to pick up the coals of the Enlightenment ideals of the US revolution and plant them elsewhere. Europe perhaps. If we're willing.
I have to believe Nick is far too bleak here. I have good American friends as agonized as we are about some of the current craziness - on both sides. For good or ill, the world will never go back to the (not so simple!) lives we lived before the quartet of mega MAGA dictator/tyrants crashing & trashing the lives of so many - when we could have the best lives of millions of "normals"
Admitted, then to face real problems of climate, population distortions, trade, economics...
We need to work with the many decent people who exist in Russia, America, Iran.
China, some ME factions and N Korea may never join in, but IMHO, are manageable.
I'm sure I'm not the the first to say it but I do have a sense that spending too much time reading about Trump's and the USA's latest excesses is a bit like going back to an abusive relationship. And I don't even mean Trump or the USA, I mean the stories and opinion pieces about them. If I'm not careful I can be like the prude looking at pornography. "Disgusting. Outrageous. How dare they?" I will say to myself, and then look for another article describing the same event in different words.
There's certainly something to be said for limiting one's exposure to the news.
First order of the day is to rejoin the European Union. Britain needs to be part of a powerful bloc in the absence of a reliable NATO alliance. Once that's done, the EU needs to form a more effective military alliance. America is yesterday's story.
I think so too. Brexit was a huge bet on the American alliance holding up and that bet has failed
It's not widely understood, but, right now, European NATO plus Canada, hugely outmatches Russia in conventional weapons. More of everything: modern equipment, numbers, and training. And NATO has never been all-for-one, one-for-all. Not every nation contributes to NATO operations, it is optional. NATO's support for a treaty member who has been attacked is not contingent on America's say-so. Clearly not, because Trump is never going to give that support, but it won't stop the rest of NATO. The UK is firmly inside NATO too. There are British troops in Estonia as part of a NATO trip line force. Germany also has an armoured brigade in Lithuania. There is a multi-national NATO brigade in Latvia. The bulk of NATO has made a clear commitment to defend those nations. So don't believe the clueless pundits with agendas. They don't know what they are talking about.
Nick, great piece with which I agree entirely. I think it is about time we redefined the terms "left" and "progressive". I am not sure they make much sense these days. I have no idea what to replace them with. I consider myself to be "social democrat left", but much of what passes for "progressive" and "left" is not something I would want to be associated with.
Thanks Tom
Our media do not help. Why do they report every bit of Hollywood gossip or school shooting in Utah? Why so much focus on AI in the US and not in China?
it's absurd
Because we are Anglophone countries overrun by US data tech.
Google infests everything. It owns YouTube which now commands greater audiences in the UK than the BBC or any streaming company: with a massive merger pending which protects Channel 5 only for a while.
Spytech Palantir has a £300m contract with the UK's NHS for its inefficient "Federated Data Platform" and with the UK's Met Police, that we need to get rid of--sign Foxglove's Petition to Parliament. And Palantir has contracts with ICE in the US, and with the IDF in Israel.
Know thine enemy
Plus the dominance in the UK of US social media platforms owned by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc), or X (formerly Twitter) which is driving rightwing politics and inciting racial hatred and race riots
Know thine enemy
Plus the UK's struggles (outside the EU with the heft of 27 countries and GDPR) to regulate US tech companies--for child safety against online and offline abuse--without inviting further punishment by Trump in trade tariffs
Know thine enemy
Plus AI is the scariest tech development since the nuclear bomb--if you've been paying any attention: eg to rogue "agentic" AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, with three recent breakouts, using hacking, malicious code and deception.
Not to mention the huge energy and water demands of a programme of hyperscale UK datacentres: at exactly the wrong time to combat climate change by a fast transition to clean energy, and with half of the UK now suffering drought.
Spot I. This is why MAGA was so kern on Brexit Small weak countries are easier to bully
Try sampling social media in the Middle East or Africa. The UK is nothing compared to the conspiracy raddled and hateful content you encounter there. This is a global problem.
Habit? Laziness? Language?
It's not just the UK media. I've heard Brits talking about their First Amendment rights. Others who parrot whatever Musk says about the UK, even though their daily lives show how wrong he is. This is the fault of social media saturation and social media addiction.
Is it a reflection of the age and sensibilities of the people who run our media? These are people so stuck in the past that they still talk about the "special relationship" and the global significance of the British monarchy. They think a war that's been over for 80 years and a football match that finished 60 years ago are the most important things that ever happened (although you'd never know that the USSR lost around 27 million people in it (it was a helluva match) which may explain some of the Russian antipathy towards the West).
Broadcast news in particular runs on emotional impact. A picture of a weeping parent or a mass of police officers is easy to understand. It requires no effort to explain. Same with a celebrity court case. The other stuff only seems to matter if they can also say a really big number to indicate its significance.
Agree with every word Pongo. To paraphrase Trotsky, the US is also interested in us, though the level of brazen political interference is not on the level seen in Latin America. That aspects of the relationship is never reported.
The political interference point is an important one. Whether it's Musk telling people to prepare for civil war (and why the hell is the government still posting on X?) or Vance claiming free speech is threatened because anti abortionists want to intimidate women attending clinics or the US donating money to fund propaganda and call it education (echoes of Russia Today), we really do need to talk about it more. And bloody well reject it.
I think a lot of British journalists yearn to be big names in America
Follow the money.....
But I also think a lot of the media can only see and report the world from a 20th century, western, English speaking perspective.
Depends what you read. The FT covers Chinese tech.
I wish we could forget about the USA, it's turning itself into a banana republic, and given how the US population is now behaving and voting, it's hard not to see that they've brought this entirely on themselves.
Unfortunately we can't for the simple reason that the US is also turning itself from an ally into an adversary and global disruptor to rival the Russians. It's actively trying to undermine Western democracies, particularly in Europe, through deceitful lying propaganda, funding of far right anti-democratic forces, and becoming friendly with our worst enemies, principally Russia.
Outside of Europe it is continuing the threatened Canada, and in Greenland, part of Denmark which Trump still wants to annex, a Texas oil company with ties to Donald Trump just landed a dozen shipping containers of drilling equipment on Greenland's remote eastern coast, entirely without permission. And elsewhere in the America's the Trump regime seems to be treating Venezuela as a vassal state, that they can plunder for its oil at will, ‘To the victor belong the spoils’ as Trump put it.
And in the wider world, the war with Iran, (or is it still unironically, a 'Special Military Operation'), will have huge repercussions for the world economy, not to mention strengthening the Iranian regime, one of the worst in the world, and undermining all the gulf states.
We should certainly forget the USA as an ally, trading partner (trade deals with Trump's USA aren't worth the paper they're written on), or source of economic or military salvation. Instead we need to prepare to stand up to them, and create replacements for anything we still rely on them for, starting with moving towards the Euro as a reserve currency, and creating a Nato 2.0 excluding the US. Because things are never going to return to the way things were pre 2016. I hope Robert Mueller thinks his intervention over Clinton emails was worth it.
You're right on when you say that this attention to the USA (why call it America? asks this Canadian) is a reflection of the US empire - wwe have all been colonised by its power and so defer and aspire...
Do you, a Canadian want to be called "American" too? Leave that to the fools south of your border. :)
"I am here to tell you that there is no normal America to go back to."
Very true, regardless of which political faction gains power in the US. It is a fractured country, a long time in the making. The world is unlikely to trust whatever regime follows Trump. If the American voter can install this cretin a second time, after an attempted coup d'etat. then they are highly suspect. Frankly, Trump has done the democratic world a huge favour by showing how fast an ostensibly democratic government can be captured. He has managed to unite the rest of the world's democracies in a way that has rarely been done, outside of war. A humbled and less powerful US is in the best interests of everyone...including America.
It’s interesting that these people choose to call themselves democratic socialists. If they called themselves social democrats, they would be associating with a long-standing political current in Europe and elsewhere, whose ideas it’s reasonable to think the US could benefit from. In calling themselves democratic socialists they are associating with something that has arguably never existed. As far as I can see, those who have favoured the label in the past have either been social democrats or have not been democrats. I doubt whether the latest democratic socialists can be any different.
How about a timely article entitled,
'Have the Left and progressives strayed too far from the lives and experiences of ordinary people to be effective against the resurgent Right?'
I think the DSA has been co-opted from the founding principles of that organization. Still, I resist falling for the labels being applied to “the other side.” There are more sides in the Democratic Party than the old guard. The two party system means that anything not Republican is therefore Democrat.
The Democrats are more of a coalition of new ideas and new faces than the cheesy egoists of yore. I never really liked the current leadership class of the Democrats. It is a classist hierarchy that has been patronizing and self serving for decades. At least they didn’t hate “the people” and did not work to tear down our system of government.
There is change in the air in year 250. It has to be sustained and carefully managed. Hanging on for dear life to the right to vote is first priority. That means breaking out of left v right thinking. Right v Wrong (pedo-rapist-mob boss mentality) and defense of the rule of law are the crucial issues.
The US should become a signatory to the ICC when the ship of state has been righted.
Fair point Mary I am going to get an old DSA hand on my podcast
Isn't that every second article Nick writes?
He hasn't traced the thousands of small steps away from an analysis of society that was ‘appoximately true’ 100 years ago to one that is ‘completly untrue’ today. But Paul Mason’s book History of Communism's is due out soon so maybe that will fill the gap.
Very good piece! But what does this little end of sentence at the beginning mean, '...show that they and other politicians associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have created genuine left'?
thank you I have sorted it
you speak the truth
Unfortunately our defence and (to a lesser extent) our trade are both so connected to the US that we cannot yet afford not to care about the US.
If Andy Burnham is looking for a mission to give UK citizens as inspiration for our own national renewal perhaps he could co-opt the cries of the Brexiters and talk about UK freedom from dependence - particularly with regard to food, defence and manufacturing. Of course we will probably never be completely independent on any of those but we could be doing a lot better than we are currently.
Not sure about this given the "contagion" of these views across the pond. And if you have family and friends in the US, which I do, it's v hard to stop caring. But I get the sentiment.
I wonder if the terms left and right have much meaning left in them. About the only dimension on which they still make some sense is wealth inequality. Nor is this necessarily all new. A century ago there was a Marxist syndicalist outfit ‘Workers of the World (‘Wobblies’) for a White South Africa’.
What is new is the common willingness of both left and right to sacrifice facts to virtue signalling. It’s easier to make a crude easily digested theory appealing if you claim it makes perfect sense of everything.
I suspect that much illiberal and fact free thinking has its roots in university social science and humanities departments. You learn to put “facts” in scare quotes, that all knowledge is relative and liberalism is just a camouflage for power.
Forty years ago graduates would shake off this infantile posturing when they encountered the real world. Now the internet allows them to keep recycling such nonsense.
In the contemporary world the most radical action is probably just to insist, repeatedly, in respect for facts.
I'm maybe not engaging with your central argument to stop being interested in the US, Nick. But I was reminded of Thomas Paine's words, ’..the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire...'.
Maybe time for someone / somewhere else to pick up the coals of the Enlightenment ideals of the US revolution and plant them elsewhere. Europe perhaps. If we're willing.
I have to believe Nick is far too bleak here. I have good American friends as agonized as we are about some of the current craziness - on both sides. For good or ill, the world will never go back to the (not so simple!) lives we lived before the quartet of mega MAGA dictator/tyrants crashing & trashing the lives of so many - when we could have the best lives of millions of "normals"
Admitted, then to face real problems of climate, population distortions, trade, economics...
We need to work with the many decent people who exist in Russia, America, Iran.
China, some ME factions and N Korea may never join in, but IMHO, are manageable.
Peace.
I'm sure I'm not the the first to say it but I do have a sense that spending too much time reading about Trump's and the USA's latest excesses is a bit like going back to an abusive relationship. And I don't even mean Trump or the USA, I mean the stories and opinion pieces about them. If I'm not careful I can be like the prude looking at pornography. "Disgusting. Outrageous. How dare they?" I will say to myself, and then look for another article describing the same event in different words.
There's certainly something to be said for limiting one's exposure to the news.