Much is being made this week of the “Special Relationship” between America and Britain. At least it is in Britain, and then mostly by British Labour Party politicians with a sense of desperation in their voices. The relationship usually rears its battered head when a new administration is elected in America or when British Politicians visit the United States looking for a lift in their profiles..
Most of this over-vaunted relationship is, and always was, rubbish. It was a fiction dreamed up by the British establishment, standing in the ruins of a country broken by war, desperate to hold things together and trying to make the most of a very poor hand of cards. It was designed to win over a very sceptical British population who historically never really went a bundle on “the bloody Yanks”, and who by the end of the War had had quite enough, thank you. If it kidded anyone at all, Dullas did for it in the Suez debacle within ten years.
For those who are not aware what the “Special Relationship” is, it harks back, as so many things that have gone wrong for Britain in the last century do, to Winston S. Churchill. He invented the phrase, which he delivered in a speech in November 1945 at Fulton Missouri, to provide the British with a fictitious fig leaf to cover the fact that by the end of the Second War they stood bankrupted, and in hoc to the USA with their nation in ruins and the Empire either gone or handing in its dinner plate. The British hoped that they might cling onto influence through this relationship. They thought that they might speak wisdom to power and guide the fledgling superpower even as the Greeks had advised their barbarian Roman masters. The enduring picture of this relationship usually is that of the picture above with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. An image already being overwhelmed by events, even as it was being taken.
Power never needed wisdom, because let’s be honest, it already has the power.
It was a very British fiction designed to cover the wreckage of empire. I suspect the Americans gave the term little if any thought.
There was never much to base this special relationship on. Historically the British, as a people, had never been very trusting of the Yanks. At best they blow hot and cold about their country cousins made good. Historically there were the irritants of the 1812 to 1815 war where the British burned the Capitol and the White House, through border disputes on the Canadian Border with Polk and his “Fifty-four forty or fight”. Most supported the South in the Civil War.
They can nowadays, depending on age, cite any number of reasons not to trust the USA, from betrayal of the League of Nations, through war debts, Suez (a bad one was Suez) Granada, right up to The Falklands, when it is insisted the United States gave the United Kingdom every assistance short of actual help, and right through to today with its extradition treaties, International Courts, renditions and torture. Churchill was seeking to sugar what was, even then, a very bitter pill.
The surprise (well to the Liberati anyway) of Trump’s clear-cut board wiping victory of Electoral College, Popular vote, House of Representatives, Senate and Governors has left British Prime Minister Starmer’s Labour party in a bit of a bind. Confident in their own mind that Harris would win they engaged in unwise grandstanding against all things Trump for cheap support and easy laughs and have come a mighty cropper. Hence the Foreign Secretary David Lammy who was chosen despite comments in the past about Trump such as “a tyrant in a toupee” or “a woman hating, neo-nazi sympathising sociopath”.
It’s not any way to generate any kind of relationship, far less a special one. It just means that Britain and the US start with a serious deficit of trust.
And that lack of trust is bad, not just for any Special Relationship there may or may not be between Britain and America, it is bad for the whole democratic West.
Copyright The Oligarch Kings 2024
