Britain’s sinking reputation
The Anglo diaspora is horrified by the old country

ED WEST

Diaspora politics is a funny old thing, a form of loyalty that is often coloured by nostalgia and deeply unconnected with the reality back home. It can be especially prickly but also amusing. The growth of ‘cultural appropriation’ as a concept was often driven by third generation East Asians in North America who had assimilated and lost their ancestral culture and language, and were over-compensating. Their parents didn’t care about such perceived slights, and even welcomed outsiders attempting to mimic their clothes or cuisine, as most people would.

Thanks to globalisation, diaspora politics now plays a huge part in democracies almost everywhere, with protests in East London about Bangladeshi politics, Germany’s Turks animated by events back home and British elections fought over the status of Kashmir. Every couple of months there are fights somewhere in Europe between supporters and opponents of Eritrea’s regime, much to the bemusement of everyone, and of course the most prominent example of diaspora politics – of the ummah rather than old country – are the repeated protests in favour of the Palestinian cause.

Perhaps the two most historically influential diaspora political movements both have a home in the United States: Irish-Americans, who supported and funded the nationalist cause back home, and at one point even invaded Canada; and Jewish-American groups who form a bedrock for the support of Israel. These two countries remain America’s real ‘special relationships’ to this day, despite what deluded British Atlanticists might think. (Cuban-Americans are also very politically active, although smaller in number and less prominent.)

British-American identity has never had anything like the same resonance, in part because there was never a cause to fight for – except for a brief moment during 1939-1941, when British Hollywood stars actively used their influence to persuade their American friends to join the fight.

But most of all it is because ‘Anglo’ is the normative American identity, by definition making British-Americans the least ‘ethnic’. In The Good Shepherd, the mafiosi Joseph Palmi asks WASP CIA operative Edward Wilson: ‘We Italians, we got our families and we got the church. The Irish, they have their homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the n*****s, they got their music. What about you people, Mr Wilson? What do you have?’

‘The United States of America,’ he replies: ‘The rest of you are just visiting.’

British ancestry is underplayed in censuses because so many people, especially in areas like Appalachia, just call themselves ‘American’ by ancestry, even if many have their roots in northern Britain. Although there is no equivalent of St Patrick’s Day to commemorate it, huge swathes of the country have a great deal of British DNA, none more so than the Mormons.

British migration to the US was extensive, and did not end with the revolution but continued throughout the late 19th century, during the period when Australia and Canada were also being settled in large numbers. Perhaps we underplay how large this movement was, because we cannot fathom how fecund Great Britain was in the 19th century, with low infant mortality and fertility rates at one point twice that of France.

Yet perhaps the role of the British diaspora in the politics of the home country has never been greater than today. While President Trump is half-British and very fond of the Royal Family, his tech cheerleader Elon Musk is mostly of British descent, with one grandparent coming from Liverpool and most of his ancestry originally stemming from the island. That he is one of Albion’s Seed may at least explain part of his recent – dramatic and chaotic – intervention in our politics.

As the Daily Telegraph’s Sam Ashworth-Hayes put it, ‘people underappreciate the extent to which the British diaspora still feels connected to Britain, and that it actively pains many to see their homeland fail. To me, it’s apparent Elon Musk doesn’t just hate Starmer. He loves England, and that’s why he’s so furious.’

I think there is some truth in that, and although some question the authenticity of such an attachment, this is indeed the nature of Irish-American identity, which is often tenuous; President Joe Biden identifies as Irish and has made a great deal of political capital out of it, even though only two of his great-grandparents were born in Ireland.

Perhaps British-Americans, or in Musk’s case British-Canadian-South African-American, might play a similar role to the Irish-American diaspora in supporting Irish nationalism back home, right down to their sympathy for dubious so-called ‘political prisoners’ in British jails, in this case Tommy Robinson. Despite what Musk seems to believe, Robinson is not in prison for ‘speaking out’ against grooming gangs but for repeated contempt of court, a serious crime that in England warranted a jail sentence long before the Woke Terror began. (He also has a long record of violence, one reason why Nigel Farage – wisely – keeps him out of the Reform Party.)

It is true that diasporas often have a nostalgic and unrealistic idea about life back home, half-remembered through family folklore. They sometimes have a blind spot for extremists in the old country, so that Bostonians felt happy to support ‘the Cause’ while those members of the diaspora raised in London and Manchester had a far more realistic idea of what the Provisional IRA actually were.

But I imagine that there is truth in Musk’s affection for England, as he stated in his reply to Ashworth-Hayes. It could also be that he’s been driven mad by power and the influence he can wield in smaller countries like Britain or Germany – but it’s not as if megalomania and nationalism are odd bedfellows. Certainly, his tweeting does have a manic quality, and I also like the theory, which I think Marie Le Conte suggested, that he is an insomniac and has become more interested in British politics on account of spending so many waking hours on European time.

Musk’s family are a particular type of Anglo-Saxon, the most intrepid who populated the far-flung empire. The British diaspora were characterised by a sense of adventure, curiosity and independence, including a distrust of the overreaching state. I think it’s reasonable to say that these traits are far more commonly found in colonial Anglos than those who stayed behind; perhaps there is a selection effect, or that the two wars and the state intrusion they necessitated had a permanent effect on the British psyche.

Musk’s maternal grandfather Joshua Haldeman grew up in Minnesota before moving to Canada and then, well into his forties, relocating to South Africa. Musk’s uncle Scott Haldeman remembers helping his father dissemble the family’s Bellanca Cruisair and shipping it off before rebuilding in Pretoria. In 1952 Joshua Haldeman and his wife Wyn Haldeman made a 22,000-mile journey in their plane, flying from Africa to Scotland and Norway. Two years later, the couple flew 30,000 miles to Australia and back. You can see that Musk didn’t lick his thirst for discovery and adventurer off a stone. (Similarly, some critics have noted that some of Haldeman’s political views were quite, er, edgy.)

Many Americans with British ancestry take an interest in the land of their ancestors, and have a fondness for it. But even many Americans with no antecedents in Britain often feel an attachment to what they see as the Mother Country, the land of Magna Carta, habeas corpus and the foundational ideas of the constitution. They take a great interest in what’s happening back ‘home’ – and the glare of social media is showing it in a very dark light. It is thanks to Musk’s Twitter, in particular, that Americans are now far more aware of the problems facing the old country, in parts of England they probably didn’t visit, and find themselves horrified by what they read.

For many people, Britain is the place where people go to jail for posting offensive things online but where paedophiles are spared jail. This perception has been accelerated in the last week, with the delayed online eruption of anger about the grooming gang scandal.

This horror has been known about for many years, but as Ben Sixsmith put it, it hasn’t really become part of the national consciousness and the media coverage of it has been relatively limited, considering its gravity. Now it has acquired far greater prominence because many Americans – led by Elon Musk – are learning of the story, and find it hard to believe that Britain can be so dysfunctional. Although it should be pointed out that X is now full of slop accounts promoting wildly exaggerated depictions of how ‘Europe has fallen’, in this case – as unbelievable as the story sounds – it really is as bad as can be.

The irony is that British elites are obsessed with our ‘international reputation’; indeed it was one reason for the insane decision to hand over strategically important islands in the Indian Ocean. Their fear of losing face was also a factor in their horror at Brexit, which made them a laughing stock in contrast to sensible Germany.

Yet that obsession with Britain’s international reputation is one reason we’re unable to reverse the trends which make our country increasingly a source of sad fascination. Deporting foreign criminals, for example – including many of those involved in the grooming scandal – is hampered by our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet because leaving would put us in the same camp as Russia and Belarus, our ‘international reputation’ would suffer as a result. These problems don’t just affect our online reputation, but many visitor’s experience of London, which currently has a bad problem with muggings and pickpockets in the West End, scaring off wealthy foreigners. The presence of scammers on Westminster Bridge, for example, damages our reputation disproportionately to the crime, because so many visitors will witness an obvious signal of national dysfunction.

British liberals want to project the idea that the country is tolerant and open – good things indeed – but what foreigners actually like about Britain is its reputation for gentleness and eccentricity, a gentleness eroded by an excess of tolerance. For many people observing the Old Country, it feels less like the Harry Potter world of their dreams and more the land of Yookay Aesthetics, an absurd global souk ruled by inept stakeholders: ‘Our NHS’ murals beside piles of rubbish and adverts for sectarian Islamic politicians.

Many people feel defensive when foreigners criticise their country, especially when it is foreigners they feel entitled to dislike – rich, white Americans. Many also argue that as an outsider, Musk shouldn’t stick his nose into British politics, an argument often made by people who comment non-stop about American affairs, or from politicians who are happy to exploit foreign diaspora politics when it suits them electorally.

I agree that Musk’s uniquely powerful position, by owning a social media platform, makes it inappropriate or unwise for him to be overtly political; his language is inflammatory at times, and he doesn’t seem that meticulous about fact checking; his tweeting feels very erratic, even unhinged. But as one of Albion’s Seed, he has a right to speak up about what’s happening in the Old Country – and he’s right to notice how bad things have got.

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This article (Britain’s sinking reputation) was created and published by Ed West and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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