CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The UK, Repackaged for US Culture Wars  

Photograph Source: Shayan Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn – CC BY-SA 4.0

Tiresome though it may be for some of us over here on Airstrip One, it seems domestic political argument in the United Kingdom is still being regularly repackaged for an American audience. As Motihari-born Eric Blair, later celebrated as George Orwell, once observed, “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

An odd patchwork of British figures—among them Liz Truss, Tommy Robinson, and Nigel Farage, continue, in varying forms, to present the United Kingdom to US audiences as a cautionary tale. Nor is this confined to the most recognisable names. When off-shoot figures such as Rupert Lowe appear on platforms with Tucker Carlson, the framing is much the same. The UK is cast as a scuttled country in sinking decline, awash with either liberal or technocratic elites, depending on the mood of the drowning that day. It is like watching all day long the radicalised in hot pursuit of the radicalised. One day the serpent will eat its tail and we will all be able to go home.

Truss, for instance, strutted into Dallas last week for the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, warning of “deep state” forces and advancing seriously contested claims about parallel legal systems in the UK. It seemed most unusual—when not in the US, she saunters around her neighbourhood here, close to where I am writing from, and always seems happy with her lot.

Robinson, meanwhile, has long gorged on the sprats of sympathetic US media ecosystems and donors, presenting the UK as best he can as an object lesson in the supposed dangers of immigration and the perils of restrictions on speech. Even when a complaint has a modicum of truth to it, why play so feverishly to a foreign gallery? It is as though our........

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