[Townhall] America and the United Kingdom have long had a special relationship, working closely as allies to protect the West from oppressive dictatorships that suppress their own people, arbitrarily jailing them and persecuting them for exercising their God-given right of free speech. Here’s the problem. The UK has become one of those oppressive dictatorships that suppress their own people, arbitrarily jailing them and persecuting them for exercising their God-given right of free speech. And I’m not particularly interested in having a special relationship with a country like that. Nor are many other Americans.
Great Britain has always had a fraught relationship with freedom, at least regarding people who aren’t British. In its glorious imperialist era, when its colonialism brought the light of civilization to a huge swath of the world, it presumed to tell us Americans what we could and could not do. At Lexington and Concord, 250 years ago this spring, a bunch of redcoats tried to take our guns. We shot them. And we kept shooting them until they went home. But no hard feelings — they even burned down much of Washington, DC, during the War of 1812 as a gesture of friendship to the American people.
Still, our special relationship was built upon a shared reverence for the basic tenets of freedom that the British themselves pioneered. From the Magna Carta to the rise of Parliament and the restraining of their inbred royal rulers, the British set the template for freedom, and we Americans took it to the next level. We wrote our Constitution with a Bill of Rights that addressed some of the presumptuous impositions the British had tried to inflict upon us Americans. The First Amendment was one of the key rights. So was the Second. The Brits had been jerks to us until we shot them and they went crying back to their godforsaken moist and frigid island, but they largely treated their own people well. You could speak freely. You could say things that offended the elite. The idea that you might be tossed into the stony lonesome for sounding off was completely alien to them. And that unique reverence for individual rights was why we could have a special relationship with people who have terrible teeth and food and insist on calling a car’s trunk a "boot." |
