By MICHAEL BLACKBURN.
THE SO-CALLED “SPECIAL relationship” between Britain and the US should really be called the “spectral relationship”. It doesn’t exist and has never existed except in the vanity-infused minds of British politicians and their media cronies. It’s the ghost of a long-dead dream, another zombie meme in the politicosphere. The media continue to pour its ectoplasm across the papers and tv screens occasionally, just to keep the illusion alive.
No one’s taken in. The Americans don’t believe in it. The British public know it’s nonsense. They don’t care. They know that America calls the shots, even under the watch of Obama, the prickly Prince of PC Cool and Incompetence. Maybe I should say especially so, given that Obama made his dislike of Britain clear from the moment he stepped into the White House and disposed of the bust of Churchill.
Obama seems to have forgotten how he abandoned his ambassador and others to their fate at the hands of Islamic terrorists in Benghazi when he got distracted by the need for a good night’s sleep.
He may get on better with Cameron than the hapless Brown but that hasn’t stopped him blaming Cameron for the post-liberation chaos of Libya. The PM, he said, became “distracted by a range of other things”. Although he seems to have forgotten how he abandoned his ambassador and others to their fate at the hands of Islamic terrorists in Benghazi when he got distracted by the need for a good night’s sleep before jetting off the following morning to a fundraising bash with his celebrity friends in Las Vegas.
Obama also said the spectral relationship was under threat if the UK didn’t commit to spending two percent of its GDP on defence, in accordance with NATO requirements. He didn’t specify what this threat was but the consternation caused among the political clerisy must have been acute, since it provoked Matthew Barzun, US ambassador to the UK, to try to heal the rift: “Our relationship is essential,” he tweeted, “It is special. True yesterday, true today & will be true tomorrow.”
It was kind of Mr Barzun to say so, but after the crippling events of the second World War, the Suez Crisis, the enforced loss of Empire, and the final surrendering of our sovereignty to the German empire in the form of the European Union, we’re used to our politicians selling us out while playing lickspittle to the biggest boy in the playground.
This is not to dismiss or demean the many personal, cultural and economic links between Britain and the US, it’s just that we need our politicians and media to stop pretending it makes us special. If they don’t we’re always going to be in the “Yo, Blair!” category. It’s embarrassing.
We should adopt the French model. Their special relationship is with themselves. France’s special friend is France. We could do that for ourselves, but even better, because we could do it without the rabid anti-American rancour of the French elite. Then we could exorcise the spectral relationship once and for all.
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Currente Calamo columnist, poet, writer and lecturer Michael Blackburn lives in Lincolnshire . From 2005–2008 he was the Royal Literary Fund fellow at the University of Lincoln where he now teaches English Literature and Creative Writing. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies over the years, including Being Alive (Bloodaxe) and Something Happens, Sometimes Here (Five Leaves Press). His most recent collection is Spyglass Over The Lagoon. A selection of his Fortnightly Currente Calamo columns, Sucks To Your Revolution: Annoying The Politically Correct (US), is available as a Kindle ebook.
