I think THIS is what the special relationship the US/UK has.

[buster2209]

I'm placing this OPINION piece in The Lounge as I can't really justify sticking it in the 'flame' rooms (National, General, etc)

Plus, my flame retardant suit is growing thin today....

I have highlighted the parts that I share the sentiments of. Obviously due to my geographical location, the entire article doesn't pertain to me as I'm now a 'turn coat'....

Why I wouldn't emigrate to America

By Daniel Hannan - Last updated: April 5th, 2009

Larry Elder wants Barack Obama to sign an executive order granting me immediate US citizenship. Many Britons, of course, have gratefully made the journey. Even that great patriot Oliver Cromwell toyed constantly with the idea of emigration. Thomas Jefferson confidently boasted that, while many Europeans would take themselves across the Atlantic, few Americans would return – a prediction that came spectacularly true.

Believe me, Larry, when I say that I’m flattered. Your founders were men of matchless vision. The constitution they agreed was the most sublime political accord ever drafted. Its precepts made you happy, prosperous and free. Its promise drove your fathers to bring liberty to other continents.

Like many Brits, I have American relatives: a troop of kind, warm, generous (if mainly Democrat-leaning) cousins in Philadelphia. But I have no plans to join them, Larry, and to explain why, let me tell you about the weekend I’ve just had.

My old and dear friends, James and Rowena, had asked my family to their cottage in Shropshire. Now Shropshire, by English standards, is a sprawling, untamed county. But, like all English counties, it has been sculpted tenderly for centuries. This was the landscape that inspired A E Housman, and the situation of my friends’ cottage, beneath the Wrekin’s forest fleece, has to be seen to be believed. (Go and see it. Seriously. You can rent the cottage on very fair terms.)

Yesterday, under my wife’s direction, we plucked nettles and wild garlic for the kitchen, the children splashing in a brook while their mothers combed the bank like Palaeolithic gatherers. I kept thinking, not of Housman, but of the greatest poet of all, and of mad Lear “crowned with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds, with hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow in our sustaining corn.”

This morning, for Palm Sunday, we went to the tiny church attached to the estate, its walls hung with the crests of once powerful local dynasties, its congregation so sparse that it holds a service only every fourth week. On our way home, we paused at the site of the battlefield at Shrewsbury (”How bloodily the sun begins to peer above yon busky hill. The day looks pale at his distemperature…”) The point I’m trying to make, Larry, is that it’s difficult to be in the English countryside in April and seriously want to be somewhere else.

Heaven knows my country has its problems. Our Parliament has been vitiated, our local councils scorned. Our public services are increasingly run by and for their employees. Britain is almost the last place in the Western world where you’d want to fall ill. (Labour politicians are trying to fabricate a row about the fact that I made this point on Sean Hannity’s programme, but everyone knows it to be true.) Our people are governed, not by their elected representatives, but by quangoes, human rights judges and Eurocrats.

Then again, each of these problems has its solution. Indeed, several solutions could usefully be imported from your country: dispersed jurisdiction, states’ rights, the separation of power, open primaries, regionalised welfare, elected sheriffs, a local sales tax. I’ve even co-written a book showing how all this could be done in just one 12-month parliamentary session: it’s called The Plan.

And where did the ideology that actuated the American Revolution originate? Who first came up with the idea that laws should be passed only by elected legislators? We did. That idea was Britain’s greatest export, our supreme contribution to the happiness of mankind.

Forget subsequent flag-waving histories of the War of Independence, and go back to what the colonist leaders were arguing at the time. They saw themselves, not as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their eyes, they were standing up for what they had assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen. It was Great Britain, they believed, that was abandoning its ancient liberties.

And here, my friends, is Britain’s tragedy. The things those colonists feared – the levying of illegal taxes, the passing of laws without popular consent, the sidelining of Parliament – have indeed come about. They have come about, not as the result of Hanoverian tyranny, but in our own age, driven by rise of the quangocracy and the EU.

To put it another way, British freedoms thrive best in America, and British patriots should be campaigning to bring them home. I’ll be staying here, Larry, working to repatriate our revolution.

I think THIS is what the special relationship the US/UK has, not the Bush/Blair love fest!

[Derek]

That sounds about right, honestly if I didn't know any better I would say that was written by my uncle. Spot on, even down to the Democrat leaning Philly relatives.

~ Derek

[Bmaninmifco]

The problem with that though is while it was a British idea they weren't exactly implementing the idea while they were in the UK. It wasn't until they got to a different land and got sick of the rule of the King they decided "You know what this shit just ain't working out".

[ProTool]

Thanks for that post. Theres a few UK residents in the office and they constantly talk about how this and that originated from the UK and patriots blah blah. This is a nice little 2 cents to add!

[buster2209]

The problem with that though is while it was a British idea they weren't exactly implementing the idea while they were in the UK. It wasn't until they got to a different land and got sick of the rule of the King they decided "You know what this shit just ain't working out".

From the OP;

Forget subsequent flag-waving histories of the War of Independence, and go back to what the colonist leaders were arguing at the time. They saw themselves, not as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their eyes, they were standing up for what they had assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen. It was Great Britain, they believed, that was abandoning its ancient liberties.