Tech, woke, Meghan – the menacing influence of modern American culture is growing ever stronger in Britain

The notion of the United States and Britain being countries divided by a common language, English, is usually credited to George Bernard Shaw. In September 1942 Mallory Browne, the Christian Science Monitor reporter in London at the time, travelled to interview the playwright and credited the great man saying: “England and America are two countries separated by the same language!”

In the next few years, other American journalists looking to illustrate a point about the peculiarity of the Anglo-American relationship used slightly different versions of the quote until it became fixed as a great saying, a perfect witticism.

Thanks to the wonders of Quote Investigator, a site dedicated to tracking down references and attributing famous sayings, we now know the origin of the phrase was more complicated than Browne and the journalists of the 1940s made it appear.

In 1923, Stanley Baldwin, then Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, had made a similar joke at a dinner of the Pilgrims in London. This was reported at the time by the New York Times. This was back in the days when the NYT appreciated and permitted jokes and wasn’t the world’s worst newspaper with a newsroom so maniacal in the pursuit of wokeness that it has taken on a Maoist mien.

“Mr. Baldwin remarked that the fact that we speak a common language is really sometimes a hindrance to good relations between Great Britain and America.”

But had Baldwin based this on half-remembering an earlier line from George Bernard Shaw who in 1906 said something witty about the English language causing transatlantic cultural confusion? Possibly, but George Bernard Shaw may himself have pilfered or adapted it.

Did he pick up the idea from a joke by Oscar Wilde? Perhaps, suggests the team from Quote Investigator. In 1887 the Irish playwright wrote in The Canterville Ghost: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

I know this, and I can see it tracked through meticulous referencing and links on Quote Investigator, thanks to American inventiveness. I know this, can read it in a few minutes rather than spending several days in a range of libraries on different continents, thanks to the invention of the internet, Google and the staggering development of the digital universe that made it feasible. This development took place primarily in America, initially at universities on the east coast in the 1940s during the race to do the sums and calculations that made building the bomb possible, and then later on America’s west coast as Silicon Valley developed ever faster computers and software.

We can all list the upsides of the revolution in human behaviour this spawned. In the pandemic, the internet kept us connected. You are probably reading this on your smartphone, the small, powerful computer that allows you to access your record collection or just about any music you want, although not all of it because there are rare tracks missing, and the mainstream apps cannot handle or correctly order classical music and composers, conductors and players. The compressed sound quality is also substantially worse than on the CD players and vinyl we relied upon in the pre-internet world.

My favourite tech upside? Anyone who writes non-fiction books from time to time will tell you that the web and its search capacity has been a blessing. It doesn’t eliminate the importance of primary sources and interviews, but it is a spur to research, an endlessly intriguing way of assembling sources to study later that also throws up beguiling details at great speed. If, like me, you are obsessed with the notion of “lost history” – historical quirks, fashion fading away and the tricks memory plays – the web is a writer’s dream.

Here’s an example. Researching a book on the City of the Big Bang era, and rooting around online, I found a brief glimpse of story quoted from The Times in 1987 that illustrated the point perfectly about the symmetry between fast cars and new money. Yuppies were supposedly using the then new M25, opened in 1986, as a race track for their Ferraris. It sounded too good to be true. I checked the archive. It had been published, though the quotes included in the story from plod, the police, promising tough action were suspiciously too much like parody, like bad cop show dialogue. Had there ever really been fast car races between City traders in their braces on the M25 in 1987? It had the feeling of a “shaggy dog” story – an exaggerated tale – designed to tickle the newsdesk and readers.

Who was the reporter who wrote that Times story in 1987? Graduate trainee Boris Johnson.

Exaggerated – or even fake – news is hardly unique to the web, but like everything else that digital touches it has amplified the effects with disorientating results. This process is so discombobulating perhaps because we sense that it has only just started and it will change how we interact, live and consume information in ways we can barely imagine.

America did this. Not exclusively, of course, but it was mainly America. It is an American force.

Yet we often talk of America being in decline. For most of my adult life, the US has been deemed to be in the advanced stages of one type of decay or another – political, moral, economic, criminal, cultural, musical, diplomatic. Yet that turns out to be wrong. Here it is, the originator of the digital revolution that is reshaping humankind.

It is said that totalitarian China will now beat the US at Artificial Intelligence, perhaps the key to the future, but the advantage America has is that it is – or has been until now – defined by dissent. The freedom to disagree is what drives true innovation rather than mere replication and imitation. It is there that wokery could eventually do most damage by killing American capitalism, if it kills the culture of dissent that makes regeneration and invention possible.

For now, America’s cultural hegemony is most obviously apparent in that quasi-religious woke revolution, with its relentless attempt to divide and reclassify, with its high priests on campus and in newsrooms hunting down and expelling non-believers.

Progressive American campaigners delivering lectures on race and equality to those of us in other countries, considering America’s distant and near history, is quite something to see. The way in which the imagery and rhetoric of American campaigners was adopted wholesale by British campaigners last year, when Britain and America are not the same, was disturbing.

Britain has its own particular problems on race and the legacy of our history, although as Clive Davis wrote this week for The Times, it is perverse not to acknowledge how much improvement has been made in Britain since the 1950s. Not enough, but a lot of improvement. This has not prevented the spread of wokery. It is becoming rife in corporate life, with compulsory re-education courses and a travelling crew of woke external experts and assorted chancers being paid to go from institution, to school, to government agency, to preach the sermon on critical race theory and much else. Few institutions or big businesses with a public profile dare refuse to take part. It’s a woke protection racket. This is the importation of an American virus.

Worrying in Europe about such excessive American influence is not a new concept. It existed in a milder form in the 1950s with concerns about trends in film and music. The French have long simultaneously loved and resented aspects of America.

For the British there is an added piquancy. Many of us like and respect America. I worship its best music. But the relationship is founded on rejection. The Americans threw us out, rightly. The revolutionary war of the 18th century was a response to arrogant British behaviour and colonial entitlement. Yet eventually we ended up friends and allies, mostly.

In the 19th century, grand but sometimes confused Britons visited to give the rising Americans the benefit of our supposed wisdom. It didn’t go well for Charles Dickens in 1842 when he tried to discuss the concept of a copyright law and most Americans read him in cheap pamphlets for which he earned not a dime. Greeted initially as a superstar, he tired of the adulation and accused Americans of trying to make too much money out of him. The American press denounced him; in return he was rude about America in subsequent books. It was a quarter of a century before he visited again.

Oscar Wilde approached his two trips to America early in his career in the style of a cultural missionary looking for converts. His public lectures on aesthetics in 1882 – on the Decorative Arts, the House Beautiful and the English Renaissance (we should be so lucky now) – were wildly popular. Wilde first tasted celebrity in America, had his photograph taken, and loved the attention.

The lecture he gave on his return – Impressions of America – is there to be read on the Oscar Wilde in America site, developed by fans. The lecture contains many good lines.

“America is the noisiest country that ever existed,” he wrote. “One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.”

Wilde’s British audiences in the 1880s wanted to know what this strange, thrusting, acquisitive new power was really like. Americans loved inventors and money, Wilde said, and shiny machinery.

He described a trip to Niagara: “I was disappointed with Niagara – most people must be disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.”

In the early decades of the 20th century, British politicians, commentators, historians wondered how America would behave when it graduated via its industrial clout into great power status. Would it be our friend and to what extent? Would it become the leading economy and the locus of the financial system? Yes. That happened during the First World War when Europe decided to commit suicide and American loans part-funded the destruction. Global financial leadership passed from the City of London to New York as America went from debtor nation to creditor during the War.

Winston Churchill was particularly interested in the phenomenon of a rising America and the potential of what he called “this kindred nation.” Family, via his mother, was a point of connection. In 1929 he was there for the Wall Street Crash and almost lost everything. In 1931 he was nearly killed in New York when struck by a car. He was looking the wrong way crossing Fifth Avenue. After the Second World War he toured America as a hero, and in a speech at Fulton described the Iron Curtain of the coming Cold War.

Churchill’s pro-American sentiments may have influenced him unduly into backing the wrong side in the Abdication crisis in 1936. Edward VIII was his friend. Edward’s decision to marry a divorced American – an American! – did for him.

The Royal family and the American entertainment industry simply don’t mix well, as we were reminded last week. They are from different planets. The Queen sees her duty in terms of obligation to country and to God. Meghan – “service is universal” – Markle is a product of the feelings-driven American fame machine. That machine has elevated the obligation to emote on demand into a powerful, cultural force amplified, again, by American social media.

I won’t dwell on that interview – other than to marvel that Oprah didn’t seem very inquisitive about pinning down the detail of the grave but vague charges. In several of the allegations against the Queen’s family there were obvious flaws in Meghan’s stories. She and Harry were married three days before the big wedding? Nope, wrong.

A few days later, Piers Morgan, tabloid leader of the anti-Meghan resistance, walked out of his job as a host of GMB in the aftermath of his critical comments about the Duchess of Spotify. Two thoughts there: I’m no trade unionist but do wonder if we might not be better going back to a situation when Britons hear the letters GMB they think first of the General, Municipal, Boilermakers’ and Allied Trade Union rather than a TV show and Piers Morgan’s features. And Piers, I’m told, still fancies another run out in American TV, with unfinished business to defeat CNN after his stint on the channel ended badly. So the transatlantic entertainment feedback loop goes on.

This is quite an intense American cocktail – the tech revolution, the march of wokery and intense celebrity narcissism – that we’re ingesting in Britain. No act of parliament can stop it; I’m not sure what acts of resistance are possible. Even joining the National Trust, increasingly woke, offers no respite.

There will be American friends reading this, subscribers to Reaction, saying this is not America in its entirety, and I know that. There are many Americans equally frightened by what these three powerful forces – technology, political correctness and emoting celebrity – are doing to their own country. But it is happening here too.