This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Americans have expectations of England. We are a variegated and fissiparous people but we understand ourselves, however dimly, to have a source. It is over there, across the ocean, the place that sent forth the Mayflower and the Virginia Company and the idea of liberty, the nation against whom we rebelled and whose noblest self we fulfilled. It is what gave us our language, our political order, our belligerency and our ungovernability. We order ourselves after its ways. Every American suburb grasps toward an English town. Every American countryside is measured against the green and pleasant land.
The higher you go in the American societal strata, the larger England looms. Conservative parents of a certain type send their children to classical schools run along English models. The subculture of urban Catholic converts in the northeastern axis is more likely to invoke English saints than American.
Leftist parents draw their politics and their aesthetics from English templates. English cultural power means that a generation of American millennials think the house system in educational institutions is normative and that boarding schools are good, and a critical mass of them are determined to seek both for their own children.
Amongst a certain set along the east coast, a graduate degree from an English (or at least a British) school is a commonplace: they are simultaneously more prestigious and easier to get. The argot of the young and educated in New York City and Washington, D.C. is peppered with English phrases. Absolutely. Quite.
England moves us. Our idea of it propels us toward sentiment and action alike. The fate of England moved us into the Second World War. Some of the English will say we sat it out until the Japanese forced us in. Tell that to the 115 sailors of the USS Reuben James who went to the bottom of the cold Atlantic. When a British expedition struggled to defeat the Taku forts in 1859, a passing vessel under the command of an American commodore rendered assistance. “Blood is thicker than water,” said the American.
Or as John Jay put it in Federalist No.2, “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government.” No one needed to ask who the ancestors were: everyone knew. Two centuries later Alice Duer Miller observed, “And were they not English, our forefathers, never more / English than when they shook the dust of her sod / From their feet forever … / The tree of Liberty grew and changed and spread, / But the seed was English.”
The sentiment is current. England is not.
Americans have expectations of England, but those of us who come to England now find something other than what we expect.
On the one hand, this is ordinary. England is under no obligation to meet an American standard. On the other hand it is deeply out of the ordinary, because the England we find is increasingly alien even to the English. There have always been differences, but they were always explicable by reference to the thing itself. England was unlike us because it was so English. Now it is unlike us because it is less and less English each year. These are no longer differences of degree. They are differences of kind. The American sees it and, unlike the English, he remains free enough to fully name it.
The American sees that England and its sister nations of the United Kingdom lie under the dead hand of a ruling class that has neither loyalty toward nor regard for them. The points of reference for His Majesty’s Government and Opposition alike are usually abstractions beloved of the SW1 class, rather than the specific good of the nation itself.
Even identifying the nation is a species of crimethink. Asserting that a native of Kent may be more properly English than a native of Kashmir brings social opprobrium. The media and cultural apparatus labours to assert that Africans were meaningfully present in the Wars of the Roses, or that Punjabis were numerous in the Georgian Court. The indigenous peoples of the islands are managed like colonial subjects, denied free speech and free information lest they do something terrible, like demand their rights.
The American sees that the glorious metropolis of the English, London, is no longer particularly English. We see it because we walk its streets and witness the newcomers, visibly alien, who dominate some of its neighbourhoods and much of its politics. Both the authors of this piece had an eminent British academic tell us, weeks ago, that in our pessimism over his country we missed positive developments, like the fact that London is now majority non-English for the first time in well over one thousand years.
This does not strike the American as a cause for celebration, but perhaps we love England more than its academics do. It isn’t just London of course: the change has descended upon so much of the country now.
We are Americans and so this does not immediately strike us as evidence of crisis — we are especially accustomed to the alien and the newcomer alike — until we learn that the social mechanisms of assimilation that we take for granted are simply not in evidence in the United Kingdom. The realm is not one people. The things English society used to cheer for and applaud — for slavery abolition, perhaps, or the relief of Mafeking or the Monarchy — are slowly replaced by the things the successor society cheers for and applauds. For example: jihad or the slaughter of the Jews. Football at least remains something of a commonality.
The American sees that the Vice President of the United States was not entirely joking when he referred to Britain as an Islamic power with nuclear weapons. We also see that the rise of Islam in England is a symptom, not a cause; a consequence of a prior loss of confidence and vigor, a result of every major institution utterly failing to conserve the nation. The Church of England, bearer of a proud tradition, relinquishes its hold, not just upon the minds and souls of the nation, but upon its own inheritance.
The British Army, heir to a mighty and unparalleled tradition with victories and valour from Goose Green to the Imjin to Arnhem to the Somme, is reduced to a shadow of its former self. The Royal Navy, shield of freedom for both Britain and America — although the Americans don’t acknowledge it nearly enough — is for the first time in centuries incapable of securing the home seas.
The Parliament that mothered all the others, the crucible of a particular sort of liberty in which we Americans yet repose, is now an arena for the advancement of petty interventions and a sort of bland managerial tyranny. We could blame Starmerism, but like Islamism, he too is a symptom.
The American sees all this, and we see something else besides: we see us. We see the essential tragedy of the plight of England, our ancestral mother, as incepted in no small part by an American spirit. We see the decline of England in the world, the abandonment of its mission, as conceived and imposed in no small part by ourselves. We sided with a squalid tyranny at Suez against our own faithful wartime ally and bade the United Kingdom tie itself to us. We demanded Britain follow us into Iraq and Afghanistan. It did, and we mismanaged the one and lost the other. We nearly even betrayed Britain entirely over the Falklands in 1982, although thank the God who watches over nations that we were spared that dishonour.
Most fatefully, we have watched the government of the United Kingdom, across the past generation, reform itself along explicitly American lines. America has states, and so too does Britain now have devolution. America has a Supreme Court, and now so too does Britain. America has a constitutional separation of powers, and now so too does Britain — haphazard and scattered to the quango sector as it is. America has a pretence to the universal rights of man, and now so too does Britain. America has an aspiration to an egalitarian society, and now so does Britain, and there is nothing that the SW1 won’t do to the House of Lords, or to fox hunting, to achieve it.
The American corrosion is not all structural: American ideas, nurtured in a republic of letters amongst that set of people entirely at home in both Brooklyn and Chelsea, leap the Atlantic and find their full flourishing on English soil. The LGBTQIA+ agenda is vastly more aggressively advanced in London than in Washington, DC. Racial obsessions under DEI are far more in evidence in England than America. Fixation upon race as a morality play grips Britain much more tightly than America. It is one thing for Americans to affirm that fellow citizens of African descent were fundamental to the original constitution of our nation, because it is true. It is another for the British regime to affirm the same for its nation, because it is not.
Yet we see the propaganda over Windrush and the declaration that Britain would never have been rebuilt after the war without that boatload of worthies, and we see an earnest desire to be as American as possible. We see in Britain the perfection of a managerial and distributed sort of tyranny, that curbs speech and conscience and worship, in the name of a progressive eschaton that was defined mostly in American academia and politics. It is a burden, if not of guilt, then of responsibility.
Set within this, Labour’s efforts every four years to elect the Democratic nominee for president of the United States — an intervention we would accept from nowhere else — become comprehensible. Investing in the American president is investing in their own futures.
Americans have expectations of England, and the problem is that the English strive to meet the American expectation in all the wrong ways. We yearn for the Deep England that made us. The regime ruling England yearns for the progressive America that made it. The two yearnings are irreconcilable. The American must be removed from the equation, for England’s sake, except as an admirer and a friend. A century and a half ago, an American president told his countrymen that “[w]e must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country”. The sentiment is current. What is required is to disenthrall the spirit of the kingdom from the example of the republic.
If England wishes to imitate America, let it be in this.
