Have you heard of the 'special relationship'?

As a transatlantic migrant, I have one foot in the UK and another in the US. That's why I find articles like this one by the Economist so amusing.

Brown's visit to the US this week was barely noticed by the US media, but obsessed about by the UK press. Every UK political commentary, from the high brow Today program on BBC Radio Four to the ever-so-slightly less intellectual tabloid newspapers was dissecting the Brown-Bush meeting for the slightest sign of deviation from Blair's sycophantic relationship with the Pres.

You see, the British politerati continues to believe in the existence of a 'special relationship' between the US and UK that implies some kind of influence on US foreign policy. This shows blissful ignorance of the fact that the UK is actually 'slightly smaller than Oregon' (according to the CIA World Factbook) with a population of 60,776,238 (US population 301,139,947) and a GDP of $1.93 trillion ppp ($13.13 trillion in the US). The US has 166,000 troops in Iraq. The UK has 5,500 (and another 1,600 will leave by the beginning of 2008). The 'two countries divided by a foreign language' turn out to be divided by quite a few other things as well.

Talk of a special relationship started after world war II, when Winston Churchill referred in his Iron Curtain speech of 1946 to a 'fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples', in other words, a 'special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States'. Despite the fact that there is some doubt as to whether the relationship ever existed, many subsequent British political leaders have attempted to maintain strong ties with the US. In the UK, history tends to stick around like that.

That said, my distain for my home country (a very typical English trait, but not necessarily a Scottish, Welsh or Irish one - there's a big difference) has limits. We have got some things right. The UK's National Health System is one. While not quite as rosy as the picture portrayed in Michael Moore's Sicko, the NHS provides mostly good quality care that is free at the point of use. The publicly funded BBC is another success story. We are becoming more aware of the effects of climate change, and making bigger commitments to policies that promote overseas development. We introduced civil partnerships for gay couples in 2005 without too much fuss, and (with the exception of Northern Ireland) issues such as abortion don't dominate the political agenda. We may only have had a minimum wage since 1999, but it rose by 27% between 2002 and 2007. Tuition fees for my four year undergraduate degree cost me a grand total of GBP 900, that's $1800 dollars. While it's increasing, gun crime is still only 0.5% of all crime recorded by the police. Crime as reported by the British Crime Survey fell by 44% between 1995 and 2005.

So despite how much the English grumble about their home, it's not all bad. It's about time we admitted it!