The New York Times’ hatred of Britain has gone too far

AThe paper’s animus against our country appears partly driven by its decision to recruit hard-left journalists from the UK

t times of sorrow, you learn who your friends are. You can also learn who they are not. The outpouring of grief and affection for the late Queen is everywhere in America. On the news of her death, the president and speaker of the House ordered flags on federal buildings to be lowered to half-mast. Television networks have sombre wall-to-wall coverage. And every living president has paid magnificent tribute to a monarch they admired, revered and clearly loved.

But there are exceptions. One is the newspaper that used to be called the US “paper of record”: The New York Times.

In the last six years, the NYT has developed a strange and intense loathing of Britain. There is no writer so obscure that they cannot be drafted in so long as they are going to bash Britain.

In 2018, the paper brought in an author to claim (on the basis of a brief trip to Lancashire) that Britain was an austerity-reduced wasteland in the process of shutting down. It was filled with so many factual inaccuracies that it should ordinarily never have been published, or if published should have been withdrawn. But the paper of record did not mind. The author ended up saying that although his facts may be wrong his “perception” was correct.

That same year, the paper ran a culinary review which claimed that the people of Britain until recently survived on boiled mutton and oatmeal. By December of 2018, the NYT was asking people to submit stories to the paper if they had “experienced a petty crime in London”. Given the crime rates – not least the murder rates – in New York, it seemed an odd obsession to have.

But the fact is that ever since 2016 the NYT has seen our country as the enemy of its own brand of liberal internationalism. Its understanding of the UK is so paper-thin that it connected the Brexit vote with the election that same year of Donald Trump.

In 2019 it recruited a little known novelist to write a piece titled “Britain is drowning itself in nostalgia”. The author claimed that the country was “poisoned” with “colonial arrogance” and “dreamy jingoism”. Another piece accused Britain of having a “racist heart”. Earlier this week, it used Liz Truss’s arrival in No 10 to attack both her and Margaret Thatcher. And it also published a bizarre new video from an unfunny satirist it has employed whose previous employer was Russia Today.

And now, on the death of the Queen, how did the NYT choose to respond? By immediately going to a grievance studies professor to write a piece attacking her. The author – one Maya Jasanoff – said: “We should not romanticize her era” and claimed that “the Queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged”. Because, of course, within hours of the news of the death of the monarch, who does not want to bang on about decolonisation?

Funnily enough, the NYT and a few other poisonous rags show their own ignorance at such moments. The Queen did not “obscure” anything. She was a benevolent presence during difficult times. The reverence that is felt for her in former colonies can be seen in the warmth of the tributes to her from those countries and across the world. If anyone wondered what the attitude towards her in former colonies really is, they can see it in the great success of the Commonwealth, an institution that owes its existence to her support.

The NYT has an animus against Britain. It seems partly driven by the paper’s decision to recruit otherwise unemployable hard-left journalists from Britain. But while it is incapable of saying anything pleasant about Britain, this says more about the paper than it ever could about the nation. The fact that the NYT cannot restrain itself from attacking the monarch within hours of her passing is evidence that hatred really can destroy institutions. Just as love and devotion – of the kind the Queen manifested throughout her life – is what is required to build them.