Status Anxiety | 15 March 2008

For the past 200 years or so, Englishmen who aren’t faring too well in the home country have had the option of moving to the States. Thanks to their inferiority complex, our American cousins labour under the illusion that we are more intelligent and better educated than them. You only have to deign to notice them and they are pathetically grateful, something particularly true when it comes to the fairer sex. Men who would not attract a second glance in the nightclubs of Mayfair are treated like movie stars across the Atlantic simply by virtue of having a British accent.

Unfortunately, it looks as if the well has run dry. In the current issue of Reason, an influential American monthly, there is a ‘rant’ by journalist Michael C. Moynihan about ‘the feral packs of lager louts’ arriving on American soil by the jumbo jet-load, thanks to the falling dollar. ‘Take a look around New York, Boston or Los Angeles and spot the omnipresent gaggle of chavs, waddling through the Adidas shop, shouting drunken insults in local Irish pubs, converting the currency on every product within reach,’ he writes.