Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman
Our final hope? Become part of America
Forgive the lightning raid on our Prime Minister’s home terrain of mindless optimism – but, at this uniquely dismal moment in national life, I’m on the hunt for what Ian Dury knew as Reasons to Be Cheerful.
A second Dury, it would appear, I am not. In his 1979 single, that glorious lyricist found cause for good cheer in a startlingly eclectic range of things.
Woody Allen was a safe choice back then, albeit the mainstream perspective on him has altered since. Health-service glasses are an even more distant memory than the universal love for that neurotic auteur.
Time has been gentler to the eradication of smallpox. These days, it’s blessedly impossible to imagine living under the threat of a lethal virus.
As for ‘round or skinny bottoms’, another Dury spirit-lifter, one admires the devotion to inclusivity that informed his oeuvre.
Were Dury alive now, and commissioned to update the song for this age, you assume its running time would be reduced from almost five minutes to somewhere between seven and nine seconds.
I write at the most uncertain and perilous fork in the road this country has approached since Winston Churchill just about dissuaded his Cabinet from parlaying with Hitler to save the Empire.
As confirmed by their efforts to control the pandemic, Boris Johnson’s Cabinet might most succinctly be described by the first line of another Dury number. Anyone unfamiliar with Plaistow Patricia is ill advised to google it if their appetite for profanity is easily sated.
While the plague rages anew, the self-styled Churchill manqué who leads Her Maj’s government may locate a reason to be cheerful in another minor challenge.
With the deadline for doing, or not doing, a trade deal with the EU upon him, at the time of writing (shortly before the US election) the central influence on what we might dignify as his thinking lies not in Whitehall but in Washington.
Could there be a stronger testament to Brexit’s success in ‘getting our sovereignty back’ than undenied reports about Johnson nervily awaiting the result of the US presidential election before deciding what to do?
Whatever the outcome, Johnson’s terror of a Joe Biden presidency scuppering his tragicomic faith in a generous US trade deal retells an overfamiliar story.
The ceding of British sovereignty was always to America rather than to Europe. We have been at the US’S mercy ever since an ailing John Maynard Keynes took his begging bowl to the US Federal Reserve just after the war and, month after month, was savagely rebuffed.
Despite the giant merkin of the ‘independent’ nuclear-missile system under effective Pentagon control, for all the fig leaf of that anachronistic UN Security Council permanent seat, Britain has become an international castrato.
And listen to us now, squealing about reclaiming sovereignty at a pitch only dogs can register, under the Prime Minister who bet the farm on the legendarily charitable instincts of Donald J Trump.
Whether or not that bet has paid off, the tacit but luminous confession that the entirety of British foreign policy rests in American hands underscores the truth from which we have been understandably eager to shield the eyes.
This country, on its current trajectory, is finished. It may not be finished eternally. In a century or two, who knows, it may revive. For now, however, it is done as an international power of even the third or fourth rank.
Assuming the election is decided, and isn’t being litigated towards another judicial coup à la 2000, we will for several days have been treated by now to the mandatory drivel about that ‘special relationship’.
In fairness, the relationship is special, if not precisely in the way peddled by faux patriots of the Faragean ilk. It is the relationship a befuddled grandparent enjoys with a spoiled and selfish grandchild, craving visits that almost never happen, idolising the odious adolescent regardless of the misbehaviour.
If we want a miraculous rejuvenation, in the style of those old timers in Cocoon, there is a quick and easy fix.
Being a US dependency with no shred of influence on US policy – a kind of North Atlantic Puerto Rico – is a house of bondage from which there is only one escape route. Marching to the rousing rebel cry of ‘No Domination Without Representation’, we should apply to become the 51st State of the Union.
We aren’t that much further from the US mainland than Honolulu. But where Hawaii has three electoral votes, our population would give us close to 100. The future of the US, and of the planet, would be shaped by the voters of Dundee, St David’s, Antrim and Blandford Forum.
In an instant, Britain would slip the ever-tightening shackles of isolation and irrelevance and burst free as much the most powerful not-quite-country in human history.
If the thought of this renaissance isn’t a reason to be cheerful, all I have left is the prospect of washing down the chlorinated Christmas turkey with a tankard of hemlock.
‘This country, on its current trajectory, is finished. In a century or two, it may revive’