It’s a Language Thing
In a brilliant article in the FT, last September, Janen Ganesh correctly
predicted that as ever the US mid term elections would be obsessively
followed by the English political elite when many of the same people
would struggle to name a cabinet minister in Berlin or Paris. The EU,
Ganesh points out, is a regulatory superpower but our political class is
far more interested in Iowa. From the perspective of a UK citizen the
impact of this obsession is non-trivial. It is in fact the key to
understanding the trouble we are in. The UK's political elite is so
engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. And it has
led the nation to act as though they too were a superpower…
The question is why? Ganesh insists we do not invoke the usual bogyman
of imperial nostalgia (if it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands
and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Instead he suggests we blame
the distorting effect of language. Its because the UK’s governing class
can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They
elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that
Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city,
despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. You can see
why, from a London angle, the two nations are comparable…
Former Prime Minister Mad queen Liz and her Chancellor are not alone in
the modern Tory party in their conviction that a bracing dose of
deregulation would be enough to unchain Britania releasing US levels of
entrepreneurial dynamism. But of course it won't. As Ganesh pointed out
"The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and
Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of
millions of people…" it did once but we voted to leave…
David Garcia
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: