The United Kingdom shamelessly prostrated itself at the feet of Donald Trump on Wednesday, throwing a lavish welcoming party for his state visit to Windsor that resembled less diplomacy and more fealty.
In doing so, the U.K. has revealed something deeply unflattering about itself—in the scramble to keep America close, it will debase itself and its values completely.
It will silence dissent, empty out its traditions, and rent out its monarch like a sex worker, deployed to flatter the ego of a man who has spent much of his political life suggesting he should be treated like one, a monarch, not a sex worker, that is.
As stage props go, the monarchy is unbeatable. But if this is what the “special relationship” between the U.S and the U.K. now means, it looks to many in Britain less like a partnership and more like groveling, feudal servitude.
archive article: https://archive.is/DxOAv
Britain has some very particular quirks in their Fascism that America doesn’t have, most notably huge and centuries old class stratification well entrenched in its culture (“people should know their place” style), reflected in things such as the very high land ownership concentration in Britain.
Also the elites in Britain go to special schools (known as “public schools” even though they’re private, a detail which itself should hint at how deceit is commonly used in Britain to present one impression of something which is something else) were they get taught amonsgt other things techniques to deceive others (plus some weird sociopathic shit in how to related to others, that for example means that pointing out to somebody with that upbringing that they “look a bit down” is actually taken as a gloating that “I’m not”).
Further, the country has long had subtle power control mechanisms in place, such as how over 90% of high court judges attended those expensive “public schools” which only the scions of the upper middle and upper class can afford to attend - something which gets reflected in very different legal outcomes depending on which social class one comes from - or how over 70% of people who enter Oxford or Cambridge also went to “public schools” even though only 11% of children attend those (the entrance criteria for those universities is an interview rather than a purely meritocratic one like a test or grades, and I know of people who were literally told “you went to the wrong school” as reason to reject them). Essentially and except for a short period after WWII (back when Social Security and the National Health Service were created) the various levers of power have always been in the hands of the upper middle and upper class and access to opportunities for social mobility have always been highly restricted - a dumb, lazy scion of the upper class will get a degree from a top university and maybe a judgeship on a high court, whilst a smart and hard-working working class lad or lass can pretty much forget about either and this is just on class discrimination even without taking in account the actual wealth discrimination.
Fascism in Britain has a different expression and is anchored of a vast foundation of image-managed authoritarianism that tends to control by constraining people’s options, and a subtler use of the Law for suppression under the cover of Lawfulness, rather than overtly the jackboot (though, as you see right now and was also on display at certain points during Thatcher’s days, they sometimes use the jackboot overtly), whilst American Fascism is loud and brash, on top of a tradition of self-reliance and independence: basically at its most naked and overt, British Fascism looks like the way Occupy Wall Street was suppressed in the US, though that expression is but the tip of a very large iceberg.
All this to say that it’s very hard to pin down just how bad Fascism in Britain is compared to America.