Any Brits reading will know that, until recently, we had a good thing going in the United States. We were widely held to be smarter, politer, and more refined than we really were. In truth, British people are earthy and Hogarthian, more prone to drunkenness and profanity than Americans. But, for whatever reason, our American cousins insisted on seeing us as the epitome of courtliness.
Well, not anymore. The upper-middle-class accent, which Americans once found clever and, if we were lucky, sexy, now elicits pity. I visit the U.S. perhaps seven or eight times a year and, at some point in late 2024, I noticed a change in how people were reacting to what is, I suppose, my fairly posh pronunciation.
These days, instead of being complimented, I am advised to get the hell out before Sharia law is imposed on my country. The United Kingdom is circling the drain as I’m told that crime is out of control, white people are a minority, Brits are being put in the slammer for posting online, and it is all their own fault for having surrendered their firearms.
What changed? Well, some of these things are, sadly, true. It is the case that people can be visited by the police for posting on X. In a handful of cases, they have ended up being convicted. And, yes, there have been terrorist attacks, some by immigrants and some by children of immigrants. It is even true that handguns were banned 30 years ago, though most other firearms are legal, as I myself own a gun.
The real change, though, is that Elon Musk bought Twitter, possibly the single most significant political shift of the twenty-first century. Voices that were once repressed online are now amplified out of all proportion. I sometimes see images of streets in South Asia presented as British cities and reposted millions of times. For the record, the Muslims comprised 6.5% of the British population.
London’s crime rates are lower, often a lot lower, than in comparable U.S. cities. Violent crimes are vanishingly rare, which is why they get so much coverage when they happen. There is typically one homicide per 100,000 Londoners per year. In New York, that figure is 5; in Chicago, 25; in Detroit, 40; in Baltimore, 55. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is no Islamist. He’s an irritating, self-righteous buffoon, but he has never expressed the slightest sympathy for religious extremists.
Why the mismatch between what I see on X and what I see in real life? I think it goes back to something that happened just after Labour won the election in 2024. Three little girls at a dance class in Southport were stabbed to death by the son of Rwandan immigrants, provoking days of rioting. Perhaps seeking to move the conversation on from immigration, Starmer threatened social media platforms with legal action if they allowed hate speech. In doing so, he picked an unwinnable fight with Musk.
British Leftists now accuse Musk of being anti-British, but the opposite is the case. He has, as many Americans have, a notion of Britain as the place that originally nurtured free speech, and he is pained to see liberty in retreat in his grandmother’s homeland.
The negative portrayal of Britain in the US has swung about 180 degrees. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, the New York Times became demented in its dislike of the UK, running a series of features about run-down towns and racism, and natives living on (it seriously said this in a 2018 feature) boiled mutton and porridge.
In those days, the disdain for Britain was largely expressed by educated urban liberals. Now it comes from waiters, receptionists, and taxi drivers. On a recent visit to North Carolina, a Mexican chambermaid who spoke no English commiserated with me about the Mayor of London.
AMERICANS SHOULD HAVE NO TRUCK WITH EUROPEAN ETHNO-NATIONALISM
In both cases, Britain had become a foil in an essentially domestic argument. The New York Times associated the Leave vote with Trump’s near-contemporaneous election, and railed against Brexit as a proxy for what it perceived as rising authoritarianism and isolationism at home. The anti-Muslim agitators on X similarly press Britain into an essentially internal argument, this time about immigration and culture.
In both cases, the appeal of the U.K. seems to be that it is close enough to serve as a warning, but distant enough to make claims that would not stand scrutiny if they were made about Texas or Pennsylvania. The rather pedestrian truth is that, while we have our problems, things are not nearly as bad as they are made out to be. That, indeed, is why we have so many immigrants in the first place.