The UN’s American obsession

Under other circumstances I wouldn’t mind living in the American empire here in Britain. The tithes are reasonable and the legal structures hardly onerous. If Washington were content to simply dispatch its governors, collect its money, and crush the occasional revolt in the Celtic provinces I don’t think I’d have any complaints to make. The missionaries, though, I could do without.

It says something about the pace of change that I barely raised an eyebrow at Sadiq Khan’s Pride tweet choosing to reference the Stonewall riots – a series of demonstrations in New York – rather than select an episode from British history. How assimilated by another country are you when its history is better known to you than your own?

This conversion is sped up by the internet – where Americans form the largest contingent of first-language English speaking users, and accordingly set many norms and topics of discourse – but does not happen entirely organically.