As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mum. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices so that you exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking.
On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammone. No one wants to be that guy. And to avoid it, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings.
So it is with American attitudes to the Mother Country. The USA had many midwives, but the mother of America was unquestionably Britain/England. It was England that seeded the first colonies in Virginia and England that gave America her mighty language. It was largely Englishmen who drafted the US Constitution – indeed the Founding Fathers saw themselves as more English than the English, more honourably in love with English freedoms.
It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that Americans have an Oedipally schizoid relationship with Britain/England, even today. On one side you have that entire Downton Abbey strand of American desires. English accents are adored, English poshness is weirdly revered, an idealised concept of echt Englishness – from manners to furniture to clothes (Ralph Lauren built a billion-buck biz on this) – is admired and aped, or created ex nihilo. The 2025 White House is probably the most pro-British in several generations. J.D. Vance holidays in the Cotswolds. Winston Churchill is back in the Oval Office. And in a few weeks’ time, Donald Trump will be hosted by the King at Windsor Castle – much to the US President’s delight.
At the same time, America has often scorned the UK, mocked her, bossed her, and generally treated Mum something terrible. And right now, and from the same Trumpite wing of US politics, the UK is facing a lot of this pitiless scorn. Across conservative social media we Brits are seen as decrepit, weak, cucked, lame, broke, snaggletoothed losers who are utterly doomed to extinction.
We’re ‘a laughable caricature of what the government would be like if run by your neurotic mother-in-law’
You’ll find this discourse everywhere – from Tucker Carlson lamenting that Britons are now ‘slaves’ who ‘go to jail’ for dissent to Elon Musk calling us a ‘tyrannical police state’ to internet mega-pundit Charlie Kirk describing us as ‘a husk’ and soon to be ‘a conquered country’. Whatever the provenance of these critiques – and plenty come from a place of grief or regret, not mere contempt – they hit home. They can make you, a Brit, wince. And the one that has made me wince the most came from a much less-well-known voice: a Substack called MrStarStack, created by – as far as I can see – a firmly right-wing but not crazy Republican, known on X as Mr Star.
The particular essay about the impending doom of the YooKay (and he uses this demeaning nickname quite deliberately) is entitled ‘Mind the gap’, but the subhead gives the gist: ‘A powerful set of systemic factors are threatening to bring chaos unseen in centuries to the shores of the United Kingdom.’ I advise you to read the entire essay yourself. It is articulate, considered, perceptive and, if you are British, quite harrowing. He has given us the gift to see ourselves as others see us. And, my God, it is a dismal portrait.
The author attacks us from all sides. Not with pointless venom, but with outright astonishment at our grotesque and self-harming stupidity. Britain is ‘a laughable caricature of what the government would be like if it were run by your neurotic mother-in-law’. Parts of the North resemble ‘a collapsing civilisation’. The NHS is ‘a black-hole money pit with some of the worst dollar-per-dollar outcomes’. We also have ‘some of the nuttiest benefits handouts in the entire world’ (he is particularly gobsmacked by the Motability scandal). He notes that our Chancellor wept in parliament. He says the economy is ‘effectively stagnant, and there is little or no plan to resolve underlying systemic factors’.
He adds that Britain is a country ‘where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of white girls were systematically sexually exploited by gangs of Mirpuri Pakistanis’ – a fact which was then covered up. Meanwhile, we are also a nation that ‘received well in excess of 1 per cent of its population for several years straight during the “Boriswave”’. Mr Star does not see this as a good thing.
Then he really gets going. I’ll spare you the gory fiscal details but it’s when the essay turns to our growing debt crisis – some gilt yields soaring over 5 per cent – that the apocalypse promised by the subhead begins to loom. It is not pretty.
Naturally, as a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t. I have been through the essay, insult by insult, and I’ve found only two arguable errors. Firstly, the UK does not – thank God – suffer weekly or daily terror attacks. Secondly, Britain does not have a ‘uniquely violent street gang culture’.
Apart from that, I cannot find major flaws. Which makes it all the more depressing, and leaves me wondering whether the author’s prognosis is correct, and Britain is ‘rapidly heading towards a grand and brutal reckoning’ and ‘the United Kingdom is undergoing severe stress-testing that now threatens to sink the entire enterprise entirely’.
To make it worse, the author does not see a saviour anywhere, not in Reform, Labour or the Conservatives, because we have ‘one of the most clownish and intolerable political castes that presently exist anywhere on the planet’. Ouch.
However, he does offer the motherland one brief filial hug at the end. The author states that, despite all the above, the British have somehow managed to keep a functional country together, so far. And on that basis, he predicts that, after the inevitable revolution, our innate virtues should prevail and we will rebound.
Nonetheless, as things stand, let’s just say, from a certain American perspective, Mom has drenched herself in gasoline. And is about to light a fag.
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