Barack Obama is already “looking forward” to Britain remaining within the European Union (and that’s even before David Cameron has finished his far-reaching, super-duper-fantastic renegotiations). While the USA won’t even join the International Criminal Court (for good reasons as it happens) the American president feels he can urge the people of another sovereign country to do something that even he, the most European of American presidents, would never consider.
There is no way America would allow any supranational body or court to control its immigration policies, decide which terrorists it can deport and which would be charged a $100 billion membership fee for the privilege (Britain’s £14 billion annual fee, very roughly adjusted for the population of the US). In wanting Britain to stay inside the EU Obama doesn’t even speak for the whole of America. The Republican party, in particular, has begun to notice how the single currency experiment has impoverished much of Europe. It increasingly sees the EU project as flawed. Rightly.
It is not, of course, the first time that Obama has waded into domestic UK politics. He also pleaded with Scotland to reject independence – an intervention that backfired, according to SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.
Last weekend America’s 44th president also urged Britain to spend more on defence. As it happens I think he’s right about the UK’s dangerously stretched armed forces but he does seem to be getting into the habit of sticking his nose where it’s not necessarily wanted.
Neither he nor America would like it if a British prime minister performed a Hugh Grant-style Love Actually moment and offered a running commentary on America’s affairs. But just in case any Americans wanted some advice from this side of the Atlantic I’ve drawn up ten thoughts.
I’m sure this advice is as welcome to Americans as a porcupine at a nudist colony (as they say in Texas) and I hope you’ve noticed a lot of it is tongue in cheek. As it happens I love America. I’m a patriotic Brit but regard America as the second best country on earth. For a bit of fun I helped make The World Without America video that went viral a few years ago.
America is far from a perfect superpower but if it’s the choice between Uncle Sam being the world’s policeman and any of the alternatives, tyrants would range freely if we relied on the EU or UN to get anything done; none of us would have any religious freedom if Iran was in charge; and let’s not even begin to think what life would be like if Beijing or Moscow ruled the global roost. I’m happy with what we’ve got. Very happy. More happy than Sepp Blatter, certainly, who must wish the FBI had never been invented. But, dear America, just ask your president to focus on getting the ObamaCare computer systems to work. We’ll decide if we want to be members of the EU – without his help.
In what could have been a comment on Scotland’s low-scoring, but nevertheless clean sheet-keeping win against Haiti in the World Cup, Adam Smith once remarked: ‘Defence is of much more importance than opulence’. But for too long now, Britain has had too little of either. The lack of capable military force has prompted (at the […]
In my new book, Inside the Sausage Factory, I examine four campaigns for ‘public health’ policies in the 2010s and examined all the evidence that was marshalled for and against them. It turns out that the evidence for them wasn’t very good and there wasn’t much evidence marshalled against them, but that isn’t really the […]
Britain has built a tribunal system so sprawling and risk-free that it now consumes the very people who should be running organisations, improving products and services and designing more productive companies. What was meant to be a quick, low-cost alternative to the courts has become a parallel bureaucracy that traps skilled workers in disclosure exercises […]
