What makes a country great?

Great cities.

That is a lesson the United Kingdom once knew well. Britain reached its imperial heights in the late 19th century in part because its municipalities were growing into some of the world’s most productive cities.

None better symbolized British greatness than Birmingham, a manufacturing powerhouse in the West Midlands. In 1890, Harper’s Magazine called it the “best-governed city in the world,” and with good reason. Birmingham provided novel services for its people, including free libraries and museums, free education for all children, modern sanitation and affordable housing, street lighting, a municipal bank, and support for the poor.

The spirit of Birmingham was often expressed by the popular nonconformist preacher George Dawson, and two of his parishioners who became mayor—Joseph Chamberlain and his son Neville, who is better remembered for his later failures as a prime minister. The preacher and the Chamberlains evangelized for urban reform, advancing a philosophy called “The Civic Gospel,” the idea that great municipalities offer the best chance for human flourishing.

“A town,” Dawson once said, “is a solemn organism through which shall flow, and in which shall be shaped, all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man’s moral nature.”

Today, the Civic Gospel is preached by city leaders worldwide, especially in the globally ambitious metros of Vienna, Mexico City, Seoul, and Tokyo, where governments pride themselves on pursuing cutting-edge, humanity-advancing improvements in democratic participation, environmentalism, the arts, and social policy.

But these days you won’t hear the Civic Gospel in its home city—or home country. When you ask municipal experts what the world’s best governed cities are today, you’ll get an earful about Barcelona and Bogota, but you’ll hear nothing about Britain. U.K. cities are too busy struggling just to survive.

Birmingham, still the second most populous U.K. city, with more than 1.1 million people, now draws notice as a cautionary tale. In September 2023, it became yet another British city to declare fiscal insolvency—one of eight in the past six years. Birmingham’s bankruptcy is blamed on cuts in national budgets, economic struggles, and two massive governance mistakes: an IT project that went £80 million over budget, and a failure to respond to equal pay claims by female city workers now totaling more than £700m. Unable to pay its bills, Birmingham has suspended spending on arts, youth services, and assistance to families in crisis.

The sorry state of local self-governance is not often mentioned in reports about the upcoming July 4 elections in the U.K., which are widely expected to see the current Tory government replaced by Labour. But local stagnation is at the heart of the sense of frustration and crisis that prevails in Britain.

In the face of national failures—declining life expectancy, dropping real wages, and fiscal austerity—Britons are unable to turn to their local governments for solutions, because those local governments are too weak.

After the Second World War, Whitehall (the nickname for U.K.’s national government) stripped local governments of responsibilities, in areas from utilities to hospitals, and nationalized services in new ministries and institutions. Whitehall also repeatedly reorganized local governments and their jurisdiction, thus fragmenting local power and reducing local control in fiscal matters. The resulting centralization made London a global goliath, but diminished the wealth, influence, and public services of the country’s small and mid-size cities.

The imbalance has not gone unnoticed. Over the past 15 years, British governments have sought to boost regions and localities via various strategies—like “rebalancing the economy” and “Northern Powerhouse.” In 2019, the Tories running Britain announced a plan for “Levelling Up” weaker cities and regions and their people with greater aid, and even established a ministry to pursue it.

But these efforts have failed, because the approaches are top-down, directed by the national government. Indeed, the national “Levelling Up” department has dispensed cash for projects through a slow bidding process, orchestrated by consultants who charge local governments large fees for their assistance. The Economist, in calling the process “scattershot,” noted that 60 of the first 71 projects funded through Levelling Up were behind schedule.

Since “Levelling Up” became policy five years ago, economic disparities between rich and poor regions have actually widened. British cities and counties, have become beggars, asking for bailouts for in-demand services like homeless programs, child care, and adult care that they no longer can afford.

The challenge will get worse for the new government post-election. Of the 300-plus local governments in England alone, more than half say they will be in severe financial distress by next year. It’s not clear that any help is on the way. Labour has made vague promises to “Level Up” better than the Tories.

For now, Birmingham and other insolvent cities feel stuck.

The most promising path forward is for the national government to restore the local autonomy that once made Birmingham and other U.K. cities great. There have been small moves in this direction, with so-called “trailblazer” deals that allow some metro regions to establish their own elected chief executives.

But such devolution deals are full of limits on local control that are nutty as anything in the classic British government comedy, “Yes, Minister.” Among the ludicrous documents of so-called devolution are a “scrutiny protocol” listing all the ways the national government will watch over cities, and a 2022 Levelling Up White Paper laying out a complex four-tier regime for devolving power to cities.

What’s really needed, but so far not on offer, is a restoration of the fiscal autonomy and local freedom that allowed Birmingham to build a city so great it had its own gospel.

The post Why the U.K. Can’t ‘Level Up’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Although the empire’s successor states, India and Pakistan, had been born amid the confusion and tragedy of Partition, the British relationship with both countries remained good. Most of the British departed, peaceably, marching to their ships in Bombay harbor, but a sizeable minority “stayed on,” as the phrase went, more than 2,000 of them remaining in the armies and administrations of the new states.

When Pakistan’s leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, appointed new governors for his country’s four provinces, three of his choices were Britons. He even lured Sir George Cunningham out of retirement as rector of St. Andrews University to become governor of the North-West Frontier Province; when Cunningham retired, Pakistan appointed another Scot to replace him.

Independence was not, therefore, like the end of empire in other places, with the colonialists expelled and their collaborators rounded up.

While many Britons in the 1950s and 1960s forgot about their empire or were perhaps too embarrassed to remember they had ever had one, others were keen to remind listeners that British rule had benefited Indians in numerous ways, “giving” them certain things and “teaching” them others. These “gifts” usually included cricket, liberalism, the rule of law, incipient democracy, the English language, an incorruptible civil service, and (before Partition) the unity of the subcontinent—the welding together of hundreds of little states that has enabled India to become the vast united country that it is today.

Naturally, there were many people, usually Indian nationalists and British intellectuals of the Left, who contested this view. Britain’s legacy, they claimed, was exploitation, oppression, and division. The British governed India by employing the Roman policy of divide et impera—“divide and rule.” In any case, the British rule was ephemeral and ultimately irrelevant: The future would regard it as an unimportant interlude in India’s millennial history.

No one can dispute the claim that in the 18th century the East India Company made its profits from corruption and exploitation. Nor can one deny that British soldiers were sometimes very violent, especially during the Indian Rebellion of 1857-8. A further charge against the Raj would be the mismanagement of various famines, especially the devastating one in Bengal in 1943.

Yet some of the accusations do not stand up. “Divide and rule” was never British policy; nor was the creation of Pakistan. It was the inability of Hindu and Muslim politicians to agree upon the nature of an independent India that led to Partition. As for the physical legacy, it will surely take a long time to expunge the visible traces of British rule, especially as many of its places are still used and inhabited by Indians today: the high courts, the government buildings, the splendors of New Delhi, and the wonderful examples of Gothic architecture (library, university, law courts among them) that survive in Mumbai. And then there are the railways, the focus of much British investment, which continue to knit together India’s vast economy as well as its territory.

Still, the traditional, self-congratulatory view of Britain’s legacy to India should undoubtedly be modified today. The British did not do much to teach Indians how to practice democracy or even how to play cricket. It would be truer to say that the colonial subjects taught themselves how to imitate their colonialists. As the academic Sunil Khilnani has written, democracy was not “a gift of the departing British”; but “a concept of the state” was such a gift, and so was “the principle of representative politics.”

Indians learned to use British ways and institutions to transform their lives and to create and fashion their new nations. As the Indian sociologist André Béteille has written, the universities established by the Raj “opened new horizons both intellectually and institutionally in a society that had stood still in a conservative and hierarchical mold for centuries.” These “open and secular institutions” allowed Indians at last to question, among other things, “the age-old restrictions of gender and caste.”

As for liberalism, one could not claim that the British “taught” it to the Indians, but in the 19th century the British took certain decisions on matters of law, education and the English language which made it almost inevitable that an Indian version of it would be adopted on the subcontinent. As the historian C. A. Bayly wrote, “Britain helped liberalism take root in India by institutionalizing it through schools and colleges, newspapers and colonial law courts, and thereby converted an entire generation of Indians to a way of thinking about their own future that led to today’s Indian democracy.”

A great early leader of the Indian National Congress, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was a liberal as a result of his education at Elphinstone College in Bombay. The views of Mohandas Gandhi owed much to British institutional influences, his years at the Inner Temple in London, his knowledge of Indian law, as well as his friendship with British liberals. Jawaharlal Nehru, a liberal both in his political sensibility and in his practice of secular democracy, had been a pupil at Harrow School and Cambridge. Nehru and his colleagues guided Indian nationalism toward that rare phenomenon, an essentially liberal revolution: not communist, not fascist, not military, not even British, but liberal in an Indian fashion.

In other fields, the legacy is clearer and also enduring, a reflection of the continuing close ties between Britain and the subcontinent. As the historian Ramachandra Guha has pointed out, “of all relations between the former colony and erstwhile empire, this one is the least acrimonious.” Both India and Pakistan adopted the imperial law codes as well as the civil service with few changes after independence. The government of Pakistan even used to boast that its own civil service was “the successor to the finest civil service in the world.”

Perhaps the wisest assessment of the legacy was made in 2005 by the then Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh:

Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian prime minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, or a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories, have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization of India met the dominant Empire of the day. These are all elements which we still value and cherish. Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy, and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration, and they have served our country exceedingly well.

The setting of the speech reinforced the point: Singh was speaking at Oxford University, where he had earned his doctorate in 1962.

The post How Modern India Was Built on the Legacy of British Institutions appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many Americans today think of their colonial history as a purely British affair. But it was Spain that established the earliest European settlement in America in 1508, a century before the English arrived at Jamestown. By 1535, Spain had created the Viceroyalty of New Spain, which would encompass Florida, much of the American Southwest, and Mexico. France established its own American colonies in Canada and Louisiana at about the same time. Over the next two centuries, the global clashes between the three European imperial powers resulted in France and Spain losing a substantial part of their holdings. So in 1776, when the American colonists rebelled, Spain and France saw an opportunity to regain lost ground.

Both nations had fared poorly against the ascendant British Empire (aided by its North American colonists) in the Seven Years’ War two decades earlier. That conflict had cost France its Canadian territory, and cost Spain Florida (though the French conceded Louisiana to Spain as part of the peace settlement).

On the eve of American independence, the two Catholic monarchies were allied by the Bourbon Family Compact—Spanish King Carlos III and French King Louis XVI were cousins—and together they secretly began rebuilding their navies to create a single, united fleet that could defeat the British and recapture lost domains. The Spanish governor of Louisiana, Luis de Unzaga, sent a steady stream of observers and spies from his capital at New Orleans to New York and Philadelphia to learn whether the British mismanagement of the colonists would lead to war. They soon found that the answer was “yes.”

Spanish diplomat Diego de Gardoqui.

Even before fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in 1775, Spain was providing arms and munitions to the American insurgents. The Bilbao merchant Diego de Gardoqui, who had a long relationship with cod brokers in Marblehead and Salem, smuggled shiploads of muskets, shoes, uniforms, blankets, and gunpowder to New England. From New Orleans, Unzaga sent 10,000 pounds of much-needed gunpowder to the colonial troops at Fort Pitt (today’s Pittsburgh) to fend off British threats in the Western Theater. Madrid also sent today’s equivalent of a half-billion dollars to France in order to fund another arms smuggling operation to the United States. Americans desperately needed this materiel aid, for they had begun the war stunningly incapable of fending for itself. They had no navy, little in the way of artillery, and a ragtag army and militia that were bereft of guns and even of gunpowder. The colonists knew that without the help of France and Spain, they could not hope to prevail against the superior British army and navy.

When the Continental Congress assigned to him the task of writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson understood he was inviting France and Spain to join America in the fight against Great Britain. The Americans knew that neither France nor Spain would take sides in a British civil war. Even John Adams admitted that “foreign powers could not be expected to acknowledge us, till we had acknowledged ourselves … as an independent nation.” When the Declaration arrived in Europe in late 1776, France and Spain were still rebuilding their navies and could not yet go to war. It was not until after the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777 that the French fleet was ready.

When France signed its treaty of alliance with the Americans in February 1778, Spain was still not prepared for the ensuing fight. It had a treasure fleet from Peru at sea carrying the equivalent of $50 billion in silver, and until those ships were safely in port they could not risk open war with Britain. While Spain waited for its treasure fleet to return, the King’s chief minister, the Conde de Floridablanca, offered to mediate a peace between France and Britain, which would have kept Spain out of the war. His main condition was that Britain should return to Spain the strategic fortification of Gibraltar, but the British king refused, leading later historians to note caustically that Britain sacrificed America for Gibraltar (which it still controls). With the Spanish treasure fleet home by the end of the year, in early 1779 Spain joined France in the fight. Their combined navies—the Bourbon Armada—outnumbered the British and challenged them everywhere in the world.

The entry of Spain alongside France fundamentally changed the war from a regional clash to a global conflict. Although Spain never formally allied with the United States as France did, it made American independence a condition for Britain’s surrender. The British navy and army were now spread ever thinner to face an escalating number of threats. The first action by the Bourbon Armada was an attempted invasion of Britain itself, which in the end was called off because a deadly dysentery epidemic decimated the crews. Still, it required the British admirals to beef up the Channel Fleet at the expense of more ships for America. Next, Spain laid siege to Gibraltar and threatened the British hold on the Mediterranean island of Minorca, further depleting Royal Navy resources.

Spanish statesman and soldier Bernardo de Gálvez.

Back in New Orleans, the new governor of Louisiana, the young but battle-hardened Bernardo de Gálvez, put his troops on a war footing to drive the British from Florida. With a multinational army that included several American soldiers, Gálvez struck quickly, capturing Baton Rouge and Natchez in less than a month during the summer of 1779. The following spring he captured Mobile in just three days. However, the prize he sought—the capture of the British capital at Pensacola—was placed temporarily out of reach when a massive hurricane scattered the invasion fleet under José Solano. But the damage was quickly repaired and from February to May 1781, Gálvez and Solano, at the head of almost 20,000 soldiers and sailors, besieged Pensacola. When a fortuitous shot from a Spanish howitzer detonated a British ammunition magazine, Gálvez’s forces quickly overran the British stronghold and forced its commander to surrender all of West Florida.

The British surrender of West Florida in May 1781 came at the most opportune moment. At just that time, a major French expedition under the Comte de Grasse had arrived in the West Indies, where he received word from General Rochambeau in New York that he and George Washington urgently needed his support in a campaign against Lord Cornwallis around the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. De Grasse had no time to waste, but he could not leave the important French sugar colonies in the West Indies unguarded. Fortunately, with Britain out of West Florida, the Gulf of Mexico was now firmly under Spanish control. So, the Spanish navy spared a few ships to guard the French islands while the French sortied the entire fleet north to meet the British.

When the British fleet arrived off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay just days later, de Grasse’s larger fleet was able to drive them off and prevent them from reinforcing or evacuating Cornwallis at Yorktown; had de Grasse left some ships back in the West Indies, he might not have been so successful. Within a month, French and American troops had besieged Yorktown and forced Cornwallis to surrender on October 19, 1781.

When the peace treaties were finally signed in 1783, the British acknowledged American independence while ceding to Spain almost all of the territory it wanted – Florida and Minorca in particular – though Gibraltar continued to elude its grasp.

And for the new American republic, having a friendly Spain on its southern border instead of a potentially hostile Britain meant that its hold on the region was now secure.

The post The American Revolution Story Has a Hole the Size of Spain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is true even in the capital of the old empire. When I visited London last week, the newspapers were full of stories about the United Kingdom pulling the plug on its global ambitions and voting to leave the European Union in a June referendum. But what caught my eye as I walked and took public transportation around London were the garrisons of the Golden State.

“London Has Fallen,” a dumb new Hollywood thriller, might as well have been the city’s new slogan, given the ubiquity of its advertising. Within blocks of where I was staying, I encountered two different Hollywood production studios and testing space for films and TV that would play overseas. And on the telly, our TV shows—“The Muppets,” “Last Man on Earth,” “American Horror Story”—were everywhere. Adrian Woolridge, an editor at The Economist who used to live in California, lamented at a Zócalo event that it’s no longer true that the British are funnier and make better TV than we do. “All the best television—you know, Breaking Bad—it all comes from the United States,” he said.

When I wanted a bite, I stopped at Tortilla, which served me “real California burritos” as I scrolled through my iPhone. And for most of one day, I wandered around Tech City, a cluster of technology companies in Central and East London, which also is touted as “Silicon Roundabout” in a nod to Silicon Valley.

British Airways had blanketed Underground stations with ads for its new direct flights to San Jose. I talked with people at six different technology firms; all seemed focused not on building a transformational company but on selling their start-ups to some tech giant back in California. (And in those conversations about high-tech mercantilism, I realized that Silicon Valley jargon is the exception to the rule that everything sounds better when spoken with an English accent.)

Then an old friend took me around the perimeter of the property near King’s Cross where Google has planned to build its giant new U.K. headquarters. He also filled me in on the drama involving proud British architects prostrating themselves before the men from Mountain View to earn this commission.

The building of such a bold public monument to United Googledom would be a reminder that the California Empire is something different than the timid American Empire, which the British historian Niall Ferguson described in his book Empire as “an empire in denial” because it “lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security.”

The California Empire is thus more like the British one, unapologetic in its conviction that it represents a better way of thinking. And the cult of California technical “disruption” bespeaks a confidence that we can do whatever your work is better than you, no matter how long or expertly you might have been doing it.

Hollywood has prospered by making big, nasty pictures designed to obliterate the senses of people around the world. California companies and people are busy colonizing the world with inventions and reinventions in social media, food, bioscience, and energy. While the American government is withdrawing from space travel, Hawthorne-based Space X is leading a renewed global push for cheaper space exploration.

One could argue that California-based tech executives have assumed some of the “leader of the free world” space once occupied in Washington. While the lame-duck Illinois president leads from behind, Golden State CEOs—most notably Apple’s Tim Cook—practice foreign diplomacy and wage cyber-war against everyone from American intelligence agencies to European regulators to censors and hackers in the employ of the Peoples Liberation Army. Heck, Steve Jobs, even from the grave, has more juice than any American elected official, and just last year got the worshipful if weird biopic genuflection from a group of British film worthies that included Kate Winslet, Michael Fassbender, and Danny Boyle.

Just as 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli launched imperialist expansion to seize new markets and grab raw materials, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page set up shop around the world to command tech markets in every country possible, and to harvest today’s essential materials: the brains of the young and educated.

This is not the empire of governance that the U.K. maintained; California will never amass all the colonies and protectorates and mandates and territories that the British military and civil servants once made their own. But the reach of the Californians is far greater. At its height, the British Empire held sway over only one-fifth of the world’s people, while California firms have convinced the world to carry phones that allows us to track the movements, choices, and behaviors of more than one-half of the planet’s population. California’s virtual empire controls the hearts and minds of more people than any previous empire in history.

California is a worthy successor to imperial Britain in other ways. California’s empire, like the British one, builds on previous empires (ours the American one, while the Brits followed Portugal and Spain of the 15th and 16th centuries). The British ruled by the seas; we rule through underwater cables. Britain’s rise was accelerated by the industrial revolution; California’s empire is fueled by digital revolution. As the British before them, our imperialists say they are making not merely profits but making the world a better and more peaceful place. Call it the Pax California.

Both empires have been delivered big blows by Washington. In the British case, it was George Washington, and the revolution he led, that robbed Britain of a crucial piece of the empire. In California, it is Washington, D.C.—and its gridlock on energy and immigration policies, not to mention the intrusive hacking of its intelligence agencies—that have slowed the state’s progress and threaten the credibility of Silicon Valley around the world. European continentals whose ancestors once slowed the British via warfare now fight the California empire with European courts and commissions and anti-trust regulations.

The California empire, like when Elizabeth I authorized British raids against Spanish ports and shipping, is not above hacking and piracy in the service of power and economic growth. And the California empire is finding it difficult to relate to the former jewel of the older empire: India. Recently, the Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen, angry at a decision by India’s telecommunications regulatory board that went against Facebook, started a firestorm by tweeting that India was better off as a colony. (To his credit, he apologized more quickly than the British did.)

Just as their British forebears did, California’s imperial set, for all their hard work and passion, make a great show of their commitment to their hobbies (George Orwell wrote that his was a nation of flower-lovers, stamp-collectors, amateur carpenters, and many other things). Zuckerberg has made an annual tradition of taking on new outside projects, such as learning Mandarin, as successful would-be colonizers do.

There are many books offering many reasons why the British lost their empire: arrogance, overreach, too many wars, financial mismanagement, and doubts back home in the U.K. about the wisdom and justice of possessing colonies. It remains to be seen if California’s empire can learn from those mistakes, or whether its days too are numbered, on account of its hubris.

The post The Sun Always Shines on the California Empire appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post America Is Still Fundamentally a British Colony appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In this one, the characters are all drawn from real life. There is a fabulously wealthy heiress, a beautiful actress, a boyish cad married to a woman almost twice his age, an American-born duchess, and a polo-playing future prime minister.

The bad news is that young Winston Churchill is the future prime minister, and the star of this proposed new series, which, if the powers of British broadcasting give the green light, will be called Young Titan.

But, hold on, how can Churchill’s place in the drama be anything but good news? Isn’t he one of the undisputed giants of modern history? Wasn’t he also a surprisingly dashing, slender, and athletic figure (blue eyes, full head of hair) in his early days—and a celebrated soldier, war correspondent, and the wittiest politician in England?

Yes, he was all of those things, and much more, with a romantic streak that led him to pursue several of the most desirable beauties in Edwardian London. But if you’re in charge of programming at one of the big British networks, you have a problem with Winston.

Never mind that the accomplished producers at Carnival Films—the makers of Downton Abbey—want to do the series, and have in hand a great script from one of England’s finest novelists, William Boyd, whose Any Human Heart was Carnival’s biggest hit before Downton. The only thing that really matters in Britain today is that this Churchill fellow is a bit of an embarrassment. He was too upper-class, too old-fashioned, too patriotic, too militaristic, and—worst of all—too highbrow.

For so many Americans, an evening of watching the British aristocracy at play in costume dramas is a harmless pastime. For some of us, it’s downright addictive, which is why the Masterpiece series on PBS is still going strong after almost 50 years.

We can tolerate the vices of the British upper classes because their social dominance over there has no relevance here. For us, they are fantasy figures, but for many in Britain they are all too real. Class is one of their obsessions, not ours. All those posh accents don’t grate on our ears the way they do with so many people in England, where—as George Orwell once observed—most people go through life with an accent so defining that it’s as if they were “branded on the tongue.”

British resentment of Churchill may seem incomprehensible to us. Even an old socialist like Bernie Sanders recently named the wartime prime minister as one of the historical figures he admires most. But, in Britain, half a century of ridicule has rained down on Churchill’s name, disparaging him as a privileged snob who cared more for the aristocracy and the Empire than for the common people.

He waged war so ruthlessly and recklessly, the criticism goes, that he caused far too many innocent lives to be lost, and wasn’t much better in the end than the fascists he was fighting. In some quarters of British society, a drama featuring a romantic young Winston is likely to be greeted with howls of outrage against the “warmonger” whose name can’t even be mentioned without a grimace of disgust.

It probably doesn’t matter to such critics that young Churchill was a leader of the Liberal Party in his Edwardian days, a devoted social reformer widely attacked by the upper classes for his eagerness to help the poor. Or that he was a man who refused at every stage of his life to accept an aristocratic title, when scores of his more left-leaning colleagues were easily seduced into becoming earls and barons. Only reluctantly, in old age, did he accept a knighthood, and then because he considered it a reward for actual achievement.

I know a little about Churchill because I wrote the book that Boyd has turned into a script for Carnival Films. Three years ago, when my Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill was published, I thought—in my American innocence—that the story had cinematic potential as a sweeping tale of a young man’s rise to prominence in an imperial age when London was widely seen as the capital of the world. My Winston wasn’t towing around the baggage of his controversial history in the 1930s and 1940s. He was just a handsome lad trying to climb the greasy pole of political power in a glamorous world full of fascinating men and women, not least of whom was Churchill’s American mother Jennie, whose many lovers included King Edward himself.

A staff member at Carnival Films told me that Young Titan was a “no-brainer” after Downton Abbey. Within a few months, a script had been commissioned for the first episode of a six-part drama, and in early 2014 Boyd completed not only that script but also a detailed outline of the other five episodes.

Over the next few months, two major British networks were given the chance to let Carnival produce a quality series, with the potential of adding more awards and cash to the haul already created by Downton. A production budget wasn’t an insurmountable problem. Most of the story could be filmed on location in London and in the studio.

But after long delays and intense discussions, the project—like so many in the highly competitive world of television—ran into trouble with fickle network executives, and now the whole series is in limbo. As any number of disappointed authors will tell you, the networks and large studios will rarely give you a clear reason for their decisions. The email messages just stop coming. No one has actually said what is now obvious to me—that fussy old Lord Grantham and his lovable servants at are easier to sell to the British public than the outspoken Winston and an Edwardian world filled almost entirely with stylish upper-class ladies and gentlemen. A critical docudrama of Prime Minister Churchill is always possible, but even a modestly admiring treatment of the younger man is politically suspect and inherently controversial.

Young Titan is the opposite of that perennial formula of the classic series Upstairs, Downstairs. With all the focus on politics, fame, fortune, and love among the well-to-do, my story has too much upstairs, and very little downstairs.

But an even greater problem with Young Titan, I suspect, is one that bedevils the cultural scene on both sides of the Atlantic. Wherever you are, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to present the life of a major historical figure as simply a human story of its time. Instead, we all want to see history through the lens of our own time. That’s often a good thing, but it threatens to rob history of much of its special appeal—the pleasure of immersing ourselves in a world not our own.

I don’t want the Victorians or the Edwardians to be like us. I want them to be exactly as they were, warts and all, and I want to be free to see them in the context of their time, not mine. Unfortunately, too many of us live in an eternal present where last year is ancient history, and we are too easily shocked by the manners and attitudes of that great gulf of time often dismissed now as “back in the day.” It is a joyless study of the past that keeps score of whether this figure or that measures up to the expectations of our world.

I couldn’t invent a better, more complex character for the stage than young Winston, but in offering his unabashedly romantic story, I didn’t foresee that the stage was, apparently, no longer ready for such a man.

The post Would Brits Really Rather Watch Fussy Old Lord Grantham Than a Dashing Winston Churchill? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In front of a full auditorium, a panel of experts challenged, interrupted, and joked with one another in a wide-ranging conversation that covered McDonald’s, gun control, President Obama, and English philosopher John Locke. There was no doubt that America owed a great deal to Britain, but the question of the night was how much it remained influenced by its former overlord.

Panelist Adrian Wooldridge, of The Economist, staked out the position that America remains fundamentally British. But panelists Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science; author Erin Moore; and moderator Brooke Masters of the Financial Times—who were all born in America but live now in the U.K.—pointed out the ways that America has forged a very distinctive path since those early British days. Panelist Loyd Grossman, a broadcaster and entrepreneur who was born in America but also has the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was somewhere in the middle—and often defused the tension with wry humor.

“I’m making the case that America is fundamentally a British colony,” Wooldridge said. “… The DNA are British and about the relationship with the British. And everything else is of secondary importance,”

He noted that the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, represented a twist on Locke’s argument that political society exists to protect a person’s life, liberty, and estate. America also inherited Britain’s Protestant religion and common law that set the blueprint for American laws. And when the 13 colonies rejected monarchs, titles, and aristocrats, it was a reaction to the King of England’s rule.

Wooldridge pointed out that when Queen Elizabeth II visited America in 1976 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Revolution, politicians were still falling all over each other to wrangle an invitation to the dinner President Ford was hosting for her. Ford, he noted, thought he’d lose more friends over the queen’s dinner than anything else he’d ever done.

Moore, author of That’s Not English: Britishisms, Americanisms, and What Our English Says About Us, said characterizing America as still a British colony was unfair. “What we have is really more like a long-term, long distance relationship,” Moore said. “Over our history, we have had moments of falling in love and moments where the tides just went out on the relationship.”

Calhoun said that the influence Britain has over America is much weaker than it used to be. For one thing, there’s a sense that America embraces its identity as an “immigrant country” more strongly than Britain does. “With the migrant crisis here [in Britain], you get people saying, ‘I don’t know why other people want to move,’” he said. “They should just stay [where they came from] and fight for a better country like my ancestors did.’”

He pointed to religion as another point of difference—there are higher rates of church participation in the U.S. than in British society, which values secularism much more highly. Calhoun also pointed out that America has a more decentralized form of government compared to the very centralized form of government that characterizes Britain right now. Schools don’t close when there is a federal shutdown, he said. Healthcare is run by the private sector. The American federal government “is not the go-to institution in most cases,” he said.

In higher education, Calhoun said he has witnessed some particular differences. For one thing, while he had to study British history when he was younger, there is almost no market for people earning doctorates in British history now. And, at least in the area of college admissions, there’s a clear distinction in what is considered just. There’s a sense in Britain that standardized tests and taking people out of their contexts will make admission fair. But in America, what is fair is whether a university class is representative of the population.

“It’s not that one of them is egalitarian and the other is inegalitarian,” Calhoun said. “They are both in many ways are inegalitarian. … There are inequalities [in Britain] but they’re organized differently.”

Grossman added: “You could say that both societies are extremely elite and the major difference is the extent to which they pretend not to be.”

Said Moore: “The thing I think of when I think of America, that makes you proud to be American, is the idea is you really believe you can be, do, or have anything, if you’re willing to work for it. That’s something I think is that frontier spirit, the can-do spirit of optimism … I don’t get that here [in Britain].”

Masters agreed, pointing out that this difference in spirit is illustrated every time she walks into a McDonald’s. When you walk into a McDonald’s in America, everyone is really friendly—or disgruntled because they want better for themselves, she said. “Here, everyone at McDonald’s is really grouchy, but not because they’re working at McDonald’s. They’re just like, ‘That’s my lot in life. I work at McDonald’s.’”

Masters pointed out that Americans’ experience with the frontier has led to great differences when it comes to gun control—with Americans feeling as if the freedom to bear arms is an absolute right.

But Grossman said that Britain also had a “frontier” with which to contend: “The British did have this thing called the British Empire, which involved people who were very ambitious and going out and taking over other countries, just as we did in the United States.”

Wooldridge took issue with many of the other arguments. He noted that he once visited a National Rifle Association exhibit in Nashville where one pro-gun participant was selling piles of books by the Oxford historian Christopher Hill; he said that figures on social mobility show that the U.K. and the U.S. are the two least socially mobile societies so the McDonald’s employee’s lot was probably fairly similar in both countries; he pointed out that Social Security is a very centralized system of government entitlement; and if America is getting more diverse in its population, the U.K. is as well.

As he saw skepticism in his fellow panelists’ eyes, he remarked, “I’m trying to defend this indefensible proposition.”

“And it’s very British of you,” Calhoun quipped back.

But there were concessions on both ends. Moore said some of the biggest “influencers” of American culture are British—the heads of Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, and American Idol, for example.

And Wooldridge said that the idea that the British are really funny and American are really serious has faded away as much as the idea that England is really good at making television, while America is terrible at it. “Both those things have been completely reversed in the last few years,” he said. “You can put on Radio 4 and comedy is abysmal and all the best television—you know, Breaking Bad—it all comes from the United States.”

The post Are the Best Parts of America British? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In November 1990, Margaret Thatcher had been the Conservative Party’s leader for 15 years and had never lost a general election. Indeed, as her strongest supporters never tired of pointing out, she’d won three of them on the trot since her first victory in 1979. Getting rid of the Iron Lady half way through the parliament, they argued, was madness. There must, therefore, be an ulterior motive. That motive, as they saw it, was Europe.

The Tories had always been ambivalent about the U.K.’s participation in the European integration project. It was their government, reflecting centuries of British imperial thinking about not getting mired in continental affairs, which had shown no interest in joining the original six member states when they created the European Economic Community back in 1957. And although it was a Conservative government that belatedly signed the U.K. up to the project in 1973—mainly to gain greater access to growing European markets—many MPs and activists remained unconvinced. To them, the economic gains could never compensate for the inevitable sacrifice of the country’s sovereignty and the loss of its cultural identity as an English-speaking island nation.

Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party two years after the U.K. joined the EEC, in 1975—a year in which the country held its first referendum on membership and one in which she played an active part in persuading the country to vote yes to Europe, believing like most of her colleagues and the vast majority of businesses (especially big businesses) that the U.K. would otherwise kiss goodbye to a continent’s worth of economic opportunities. She was a powerful advocate in part because she herself hailed from precisely the kind of provincial, “middle-England,” “Main Street” middle class which, with its belief in Britain’s innate superiority and its hatred of anything which smacked of waste, was innately suspicious of a project that involved increased cooperation with foreigners and was already a byword for boondoggles.

As the U.K.’s prime minister after 1979, her initial doubts about Europe, however, seemed to be confined to what she regarded as Britain’s outsized contribution to the European Community’s budget. The result became the substantial (and symbolic) rebate which she—half Boudica, half Britannia—famously forced out of her fellow heads of government in 1984.

Two years after that, however, Thatcher signed the Single European Act—a treaty which made serious moves towards a truly free market in the EC. As such, it was very much in keeping with her economic philosophy. But there was a price to pay: The U.K., like other member states, surrendered its right to veto any European legislation it didn’t like in favor of a complicated system of qualified majority voting. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, regret soon set in, particularly when it became obvious to Thatcher that other countries wanted to move much further than she was prepared to contemplate towards a federal multinational entity, complete with supposedly progressive social and labor market policies (such as the setting of maximum hours for workers). These struck Thatcher as nothing less than an attempt to reintroduce socialism into Britain by the back door. Worse, Thatcher considered these same countries’ clamor for a single currency as completely out of the question—the loss of the pound sterling would amount to a surrender, a negation of national sovereignty.

It was at that point, at least according to her diehard supporters in the Conservative Party, that her less “Euroskeptic” Cabinet colleagues chose to stab her in the back. They had previously strong-armed her, despite her doubts, into locking the pound sterling into what amounted to a nascent currency union, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM); but she insisted that there was no going further.

Supposedly convinced that they could no longer work with a prime minister only barely on-board and bad-mouthing her own government’s economic and foreign policy, her Cabinet colleagues took advantage of Tory MPs’ mounting panic about the party’s dire opinion poll ratings to ditch her in favor of a less fervently “Euroskeptic” leader. From that moment on, the Conservatives’ long-standing ambivalence about Europe—an ambivalence Thatcher had in some ways always embodied—became a full-blown schism. It has continued to destabilize the party since.

Promising to keep the country “at the very heart of Europe,” Thatcher’s less strident successor as both party leader and prime minister, John Major, helped negotiate the 1991 Maastricht Treaty which, notwithstanding the opt-out he secured allowing the U.K. to avoid signing up to the single currency, turned the European Community (EC) into the European Union (EU)—a step on the road, according to skeptics, to a “federal superstate.” Thatcher, free from the constraints of office, shared their analysis but kept her powder dry—until the 1992 general election, when Major managed to win an unprecedented fourth consecutive term for the Conservatives. That was when his luck, and her patience, finally ran out.

Within months of the 1992 election, the pound sterling, which had come under pressure from speculators convinced (quite rightly) that it was overpriced relative to other currencies in the ERM, was forced out of the system, resulting in a humiliating devaluation, economic dislocation, and the sudden loss of the Tories’ lead over the opposition Labor Party. Thatcher (now in the House of Lords) then chose to make it increasingly obvious that she was deeply disappointed in her successor, and that she herself would never have signed Maastricht. Those Tory MPs who considered themselves keepers of the Thatcherite flame immediately took their icon at her word and made the Treaty’s ratification process, and many other parliamentary votes on matters European, an absolute misery for Major.

After the 1997 election, during which Major’s Conservatives were roundly beaten by Labor’s Tony Blair, they needed to choose a new leader. Thatcher eventually made her support for one of several Euroskeptic candidates public, not least because she was determined, like all of her ardent fans in the parliamentary party, to do whatever she could to prevent a “Europhile” candidate carrying on from where Major left off. She, and they, got what they wanted, and although the winner, William Hague, proved a huge disappointment in electoral terms, he (and the two equally Thatcherite and equally unsuccessful Tories who succeeded him) moved the party farther and farther in a Euroskeptic direction. By the time the current Conservative leader, David Cameron, took over in 2005, the die was well and truly cast.

Cameron wanted to bring the Tories back into the center ground of British politics but at the same time he needed to keep the Thatcherites on board. The obvious way to do this was to maintain the party’s antipathy towards Brussels and all its works. The party went into the 2010 election promising that any further transfer of power to Brussels would automatically trigger a referendum, and that he would see how the U.K. might “repatriate” some of the powers that had previously been transferred to the EU.

Once in government after May 2010, Cameron hoped that the honoring of these promises would be enough to enable him to “turn down the volume” on Europe. How wrong he was. Appeasement rarely succeeds—as, ironically enough, Thatcher herself could have told him. Euroskeptics now made up the vast bulk of the parliamentary Conservative Party and wanted more of the kind of Brussels-bashing the Iron Lady had provided back in the day, not least because they were worried about losing support to the increasingly popular, ultra-skeptical United Kingdom Independence Party. Accordingly, a couple of months before Thatcher died in April 2013, Cameron finally promised his party and the country an in-out referendum on the U.K.’s membership in the EU.

And now Cameron is stuck trying to pull off the tricky balancing act, which Thatcher only managed at the height of her powers, of being simultaneously critical and supportive of the U.K.’s membership of the EU. Thatcher, having cast her long shadow on the Tories’ handling of the European issue for decades, would doubtless have been pleased at the arrival of a milestone vote. Whether her acolytes will get the result they firmly believe she would have wanted remains to be seen.

The post How the Iron Lady Fell Down the European Rabbit Hole appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.