The UK-US “special relationship” is purely a British construct: a post-imperial need to feel exceptional. Washington has only indulged the rhetoric out of politeness to date, but no longer.
At the most basic level of 'have some self-respect', Conservative MPs should not put forward someone who visibly is not intellectually equipped to be prime minister as their candidate to be prime minister.
The UK-US “special relationship” was always asymmetrical. Britain needed it to sustain the fiction of exceptionalism after empire. Washington mostly humoured the ritual, as adults politely humour an insecure toddler.
You do have a point: history will show the UK did the EU a favour by exiting.
Too true….. a case in point.
@andrewhesselden.bsky.social
Starmer isn’t in a position to demand anything of the EU. He can make proposals. The EU-27 will consider them on their own merits and decide whether they suit the Union.
That’s how negotiations work when you’re the outsider.
bsky.app/profile/andr...
But, where the UK differed was the object of the argument: rebate politics, opt-outs, and periodic attempts to reopen the Union’s foundations. Many governments contest rules; far fewer question the pillars of membership itself. That is where patience in the room thins.
You’re right that pushing the margins of EU law isn’t uniquely British. Irish vehicle taxes, Portuguese duties, state-aid battles etc… - these are the everyday cut & thrust of a legal order spanning 27 states.
Imperfect compliance is precisely why infringement procedures exist.
The finest take down of the institution of monarchy and "class" and the grasping, greedy, venal, entitled, and very stupid people it enables that you will read today or any day.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Not on our side old chap.
The EU tends to send extremely competent negotiators who understand the other side perfectly well.
The real friction appears when the other side arrives constrained by political promises that reality won’t honour.
One side wants a friends-with-benefits arrangement.
The other wants an actual relationship.
I’ll leave you to decide which is which...
Understand. Perhaps elephants we're the best example in the animal kingdom.....
The idea that professional diplomats and negotiators simply “don’t understand the other side” is charmingly naive.
Understanding isn’t the problem. Accepting the consequences of that understanding usually is.
15%? Surely that's a typo?
• European Union GDP: ~$18.5T
• United Kingdom GDP: ~$3.3T
• UK economy ≈ 18% of EU
• EU economy ≈ 5–6× larger than UK
Population context:
• EU ~448m
• UK ~67m (~15% of EU)
(2024 OECD figures)
The UK speaks of its Brexit red lines as immovable truths.
Yet still seems faintly surprised the EU has some too: protect the single market, defend its legal order, no cherry-picking.
Negotiations work better when both sides acknowledge reality.
The UK speaks of its Brexit red lines as immovable truths.
Yet still seems faintly surprised the EU has some too: protect the single market, defend its legal order, no cherry-picking.
Negotiations work better when both sides acknowledge reality.
No 'almost' about it.
PMSL. "I’ve won, you’ve lost, I’m blocking you for your own mental health."
A tidy way to avoid the argument.
What an elegant little trifecta: declare victory, feign concern, exit stage left.
Pushback? I must have missed that. It read more like manufactured outrage carefully packaged as principled restraint.
That is not our problem, that is yours. Elect better politicians is my advice.
Your feelings may be sincere. The outrage narrative built on top of them is the manufactured part.
The point concerned institutions and governing habits and not identity.
Manufactured outrage is a poor substitute for argument.
Nothing was said about people or race, only political culture and institutions. If you consciously choose to read insult into that, the performance tells us more about your sensitivities than about the point being made.
Because accuracy isn’t obliged to tiptoe around manufactured offence.
If a straightforward point about political culture can be derailed by misreading it as race, the problem isn’t the wording, it’s the reflex to look for insult where none was made.
That is already implicit.
Political culture refers to institutional habits and governing traditions and not race.
Clarifying “British political culture” may satisfy sensitivities, but it doesn’t change the substance of the argument.
When a man cuts himself with his own knife, only the fool asks who is to blame.
You keep refuting an argument no one made. Political culture is about institutions and governing habits, not race.
France, Germany, Britain: each has distinct legal and political traditions. Recognising that is comparative politics, not prejudice. Calling it racism is simply rhetorical evasion.
No one claimed Britons possess a different species of mind. The point was about political culture and institutional reflexes shaped over time not blood, not ethnicity.
Reducing that to “xenophobia” is convenient, but it avoids engaging the argument entirely.
If preferring Sam’s argument over mine makes one “racist,” then debate has truly died.
“Anglo-Saxon” in political discourse describes an institutional tradition, not a racial taxonomy. Disagree with me all you like just don’t pretend the vocabulary is a genealogy chart.
Now we arrive at the pivot: from historiography to semantics to finally the actual topic. Progress of a sort.
My point was about a governing mindset: legal culture shaping political reflexes. Whether you label it “Anglo-Saxon,” “common law,” or something else changes nothing about the phenomenon.
143 years is a blink in institutional history, Sam. The absence of early parchment doesn’t suspend reality until a clerk finally writes something down. That’s an archive, not Genesis.
And no “British” isn’t a substitute for a legal-institutional tradition. Try substance over etiquette.
