10/31/2004|||109922094990531441||||||

ANTI-AMERICANISM IN BRITAIN (OR IS IT ANTI-BUSHISM?)

Pro-American Sunday Telegraph columnist, Nigel Farndale (reg required) gauges the mood in SW1:

"The extent to which the mood here has changed during Bush's time in office was brought home to me the other day when, as a tribute to Alistair Cooke, a Stars and Stripes was flown above Westminster Abbey. It was a moving sight, yet passers-by were looking up at it and shaking their heads. And it was only three years ago that the playing of the Star Spangled Banner by the Coldstream Guards outside Buckingham Palace reduced us all to tears. An attack on America was an attack on us, we all seemed to feel then. Now?"

I'm not convinced, to be honest, that the post-9/11 sympathy really went that deep. It was only a day or two afterwards that I began to hear people saying "Yes, the attacks were terrible, but...." And that all-important "But" would unleash a shrill and predictable list of complaints about US foreign policy. How different would it have been if Al Gore had been in the White House? True, Bush's transatlantic PR has been abysmal. True, Gore might have won a couple of weeks' extra goodwill. But I still have my doubts. Middle England is a very strange place at the moment.

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/10/anti-americanism-in-britain-or-is-it.html|||10/31/2004 11:03:00 am|||||||||

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