<nettime> Its a Language thing

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

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
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