Steerpike Steerpike

The New York Times gets Britain wrong (again)

Mario Tama/Getty Images

BREAKING: Britain is plunging into autocracy. Well, according to the New York Times at least. Steerpike has grown used to the witterings from America’s least reliable news source in recent years, as it seeks to portray the UK as a plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole on the verge of democratic collapse but where the trains don’t run on time and swamp-dwelling locals feast on legs of mutton. As a pastiche of foreign news coverage, it’s up there among the best – like Scoop without the fiction disclaimer.

The latest dispatch from Perfidious Albion is an opinion column published by a little-known left-wing hack, splashed across the front page of the paper’s international edition. According to Moya Lothian-McLean Boris Johnson is comparable to Erdogan or Putin, a brutal despot who seeks to ‘transcend the constraints of democracy’ by ‘effectively banning protest in England and Wales.’

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