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1 July, 2023

Celebrating Britain: the Spice Girls in the 1990s. Ray Burmiston/Avalon/Getty

Bring back our “prickly scepticism” towards America

As America ascended to “geopolitical pre-eminence” last century, says James Marriott in The Times, we Brits reassured ourselves that although we were an “inferior power”, we were “wiser and more civilised” than the brash upstarts across the Atlantic. For all the “excitement of blue jeans and rock’n’roll”, students surveyed in the 1960s described Americans as “adolescent, materialistic and slightly hysterical”. As a child in the 1990s and 2000s, I remember a general perception of Americans as “overweight consumerists”, addicted to guns and susceptible to wacko religious enthusiasms. We laughed at headlines about them not being able to “find anywhere outside the US on the map”, and at sitcoms starring moronic tourists “ordering obscene quantities of food”.

But now the “British tradition of anti-Americanism” has almost entirely disappeared. Scepticism about US culture has given way to “credulous acceptance”, particularly among progressives. The NHS warns of prejudice against BIPOC people, even though the “I” stands for indigenous and therefore makes no sense in the UK. Manchester has a George Floyd mural, and I regularly walk past anti-Trump graffiti on the way to work. Americanisms have infested our politics, and thanks to the internet, the “cultural membrane” between our two countries has worn to almost nothing. “If you live online, you live mainly in America.” Our cringing deference to US progressive ideas is especially humiliating because many American progressives hold Britain in contempt, with The New York Times portraying us as barbarians, “flag-bedraggled, drunk and delirious”. We badly need a “revival of a certain prickly scepticism” towards America: it might help “inoculate us to its madder ideas”. 

Lily-Rose Depp quite enjoying herself in HBO’s The Idol.

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Lily-Rose Depp, who says she finds filming sex scenes quite fun. The 24-year-old actress (and daughter of Johnny Depp) has a lead role in The Idol, a high-profile HBO drama which features a lot of sex, says Rebecca Reid in the I newspaper. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying that kind of work,” she said of the programme’s endless bonking. Most actors and actresses feel duty-bound to describe this kind of thing as “awkward and unsexy”, so it’s refreshing to hear someone admit that acting “isn’t exactly coal mining”.

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A teacher who has been named Italy’s worst employee – no mean feat, given stereotypes about the country’s work ethic. Cinzia Paolina De Lio used sick days, holiday time and allowances to attend conferences and to get out of teaching literature and philosophy lessons at a secondary school near Venice. Overall, she was only present for about four years of her 24-year teaching career. When contacted by La Repubblica about her attendance record, she declined to talk, saying: “Sorry, but right now I’m at the beach.”

Ryan Pierse/Getty

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Jonny Bairstow, who brisky dealt with a Just Stop Oil activist at Lord’s by picking him up and carrying him off the pitch. The England cricketer has “earned his place in history”, whatever happens in the Ashes, says Tom Slater in The Spectator. Give the man a knighthood.

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Mhairi Black, who takes a rather selective view of Scotland’s role in the British Empire. The SNP MP recently made a speech in parliament declaring that since 1939, “62 countries have gained independence from Westminster”, implying Scotland is next in line. The only problem, says Micheal Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, is that Scotland “played a major part in both establishing and ruling” the Empire. In fact, the pro-independence Scottish newspaper The National ran a piece just a few years ago entitled: “The British Empire – and the story of how Scots helped to start it.”

THE HISTORIC HOUSE This seven-bedroom property in west London, described by the director of Savills as the “best house in Chiswick”, was the inspiration for Miss Pinkerton’s academy in Vanity Fair. With parts dating back to the Tudor period, the home is Grade I listed and has almost 9,000 sq ft of airy living space. But the highlight is the location: nestled directly on the bank of the Thames, there are stunning river views from both the house and the extensive garden. Turnham Green Tube station is a 15-minute walk. £16.5m.

The encrypted messaging app Telegram has become the platform of choice for everyone from terrorists and drug dealers to Chinese anti-government protestors, says Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic. Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has 1.3 million followers on his Telegram channel. When he uploaded an 11-minute voice memo on Monday, reflecting on his “brief revolt against the Russian government”, it received an instant barrage of emoji reactions. The clip got mixed reviews: 155,600 🔥 emojis, and 131,900 🤡.

St Leonards in the pre-Ryanair era. Print Collector/Getty

Climate change could save the British seaside

People from chillier northern climes have been yearning for hot summers since at least 1923, says Simon Kuper in the FT, “when the American socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy invented sunbathing on the French Riviera”. Since then, a consensus has gradually converged on the climatic sweet spot: “a beach, sunny skies and temperatures around 25C”. But since the heatwaves of 2019, warm weather has morphed from something to crave into “something to fear”. Last summer was Europe’s hottest ever, beating the record set… one year earlier. This year, we have the delights of the hotter El Niño climate cycle to contend with. “No beach is fun at 40C.” 

For many of the world’s better off, this will be the first tangible effect of global warming: changing where we choose to go on holiday. As the pandemic years give way to a record era for tourism, a new “global holiday map” is emerging fast. With the Med becoming “unbearably hot”, we will see a trend towards cooler spots in northern Spain, Normandy and the UK. There’s a certain pleasing symmetry to it. Thirty years ago, I spent a long summer in St Leonards-on-Sea, a fading town of “elegant former hotels” on Britain’s south coast. It had been a high-end bathing resort from the 1820s until cheap flights to the Med killed off British seaside holidays. In the new climate, St Leonards and the nearby Sussex vineyards may well revive, and Spain’s boiling Costa del Sol will “inherit the crown of abandoned ex-holiday destination”.

Disaffected youth in Beijing. Guang Niu/Getty

Chinese kids are losing faith in Xi Jinping

Lu Xun, a giant of modern Chinese literature, wrote a short story in 1919 “about a down-on-his-luck Confucian scholar named Kong Yiji”, says Michael Schuman in The Atlantic. Kong fails the imperial civil service exams but is unwilling to get a regular job, so he “sinks into poverty”. The other villagers can barely understand his elaborate, classical diction; they taunt him and eventually break his legs for stealing. At the story’s end, Kong drags himself out of a tavern with his hands, “never to be seen again”. Today, China’s educated youth “have found a special affinity” for the character. One in five of them are unemployed, the highest level on record.

The “go-go” growth of China’s reform era has given way to a spluttering economy, a bout of harsh zero-Covid controls, and Xi Jinping’s policy of “ideological and social conformity”. Since 2014, the proportion of Chinese adults starting new businesses has fallen from 15.5% to 6%; the number of babies in the country has plunged by almost half in six years; and ten times more citizens are seeking asylum overseas than a decade ago. All this speaks to how the “boundless optimism” of the recent past has been replaced with a “mood of disenchantment”. One online essay, quickly scrubbed from the internet, laid the blame at Xi’s door. “Rather than make Kong Yiji take off his scholar’s gown,” it read, “how about stripping the Emperor of his new clothes?”

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Cops and flags at Hamtramck City Hall. Bill Pugliano/Getty 

“I’m with Allah on this one”

Funnily enough, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator, amid all the coverage about how every British institution from the Metropolitan Police to the English Cricket Board is “institutionally racist”, the BBC has completely missed “my favourite story of the year”. It’s about the city of Hamtramck in Michigan, where white left-wingers are “terribly upset”. They weren’t upset at first, you understand: “they were delighted”. Hamtramck was the first US city to elect an all-Muslim council, and Michigan progressives were naturally smug about this “symbolic act against, y’know, oppression”. Imagine their chagrin when this council later banned the flying of the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag from any public building, and some Muslims – “cheering this decision to the rafters” – tweeted their jubilation about living in a “fagless” city.

Only now are these white liberals realising that a city council previously hailed for its “beautiful gender diversity” has become one in which every member is a straight male (“called Mohammed, most likely”). The former mayor summed up the “edgy” mood: “There’s a sense of betrayal… our rights are threatened… We all deserve respect.” “You sad sap” – you don’t deserve respect, you deserve to be laughed at for failing to realise any “self-respecting Muslim council” was always going to fight against progressive sexuality. That’s the problem with “intersectional politics” – the entire ideology is based on the falsehood that all “oppressed” people have the same over-arching liberal goals. “I’m with Allah on this one”: that flag has been “getting on my goat for a long while”. Public buildings should be politically neutral.

“The best way to get most husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they’re too old to do it.” 

Anne Bancroft 

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