Britain is now worse than an international laughing stock

More than once while talking to friends in the United States recently, I have encountered chuckling, head-shaking and a comment along the lines of: “What’s goin’ on with you guys? You guys are crazy!” And then more chuckling, tapering into a slightly bored pause, then a change of subject.

They’re referring, of course, to the constant stream of strange, worrying news emanating from our sceptred isle – news that, as the world heaves against the era of woke and political correctness, puts us awkwardly and very clearly at odds with the direction of travel in the United States, as well as other parts of the free world.

With its anti-woke backlash in full swing, America is detoxing from the poisonous brew of diversity, inclusion, social justice, and identitarian rubbish that it cooked up and exported all over the Western world in recent decades, with Britain one of the most willing takers.

Those that aren’t detoxing out of choice are doing so out of fear. Donald Trump has vowed to cut federal funding to America’s DEI-obsessed universities if they boycott Israel and fail to stamp out what he called the “anti-Semitic propaganda” that has flourished on their campuses since October 7.

Perhaps the even bigger change is evident in corporate America which, previously up to its eyeballs in woke, has also got wise to the way the wind is blowing. Walmart, McDonalds, Boeing, booze company Moors-Colson, Harley-Davidson, tractor-maker John Deere, and Lowe’s, the home improvement retailer, have all said they will scale back – and in some cases entirely eliminate – DEI programmes in recent months.

Now even Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta empire appears to be following suit. Its axing of DEI programmes came in the same week that it announced it was getting rid of fact-checkers or policing of content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads in a victory for free speech die-hards. Meta’s is a submissive move towards the incoming Trump administration. The former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has also been replaced as president of global affairs by a Republican, Joel Kaplan.

The winds of change have, in part, been fanned by one Robby Starbuck, a former music video director turned activist. Starbuck is credited with getting Walmart, Harley-Davidson, John Deere and Lowe’s to abandon woke policies. Elsewhere, consumer pressure has been instrumental in forcing companies to shift course. When Bud Light ran an ad campaign with Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer, sales of the beer tanked. It was a shock and a wake-up call, of a magnitude that seems only possible in America.

There have also been massive changes in the world of net zero. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is the latest on Wall Street to leave the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative. Britain’s highly ideological and punitive approach to environmentalism may soon leave it even more of an international outlier.

Of course, the apparent madness of Britain – and the growing image crisis facing the country under Labour’s leadership – has come to a head in the outrage over the grooming gangs. Our Government does not seem able to get a grip on the scandals and the coverups that have horrified the world. Indeed, Starmer’s main take-away from the global reaction of shock and disgust, including the almost obsessive interference by Elon Musk, seems to be that we must not give in to the “far-Right”.

Starmer appears to be constitutionally resistant to broaching any kind of national conversation at all about improperly controlled migration, or the specific social problems associated with immigration from countries with very different values to our own. In Britain today, as my head-shaking friends in America have easily perceived, the evils of sounding or being accused of racism seem to outweigh the urgency of thoroughly addressing the actual evils that have taken place.

Then there is Labour’s governing agenda, including a schools policy actively hostile to educational excellence and an economic policy that appears determined to push Britain into bankruptcy. It is hard to disagree with the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch when she said last week that: “what we have is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party fronted by Keir Starmer. This is all the Corbynite stuff, but Keir Starmer is fronting it… This is Jeremy Corbyn’s dream.”

Jeremy Corbyn’s dream is most decent people’s nightmare – especially economically. While the US economy goes gangbusters, and with the US stock market quivering in anticipation of Trump’s arrival back at the White House, we in Britain are contracting where we aren’t stagnating, with fewer people getting or even looking for jobs. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is a laughing stock.

It’s odd to recall that, just a few years ago, we were looked on admiringly by many of our American friends for standing up against the worst of the trans madness. Some even dubbed us Terf Island for these efforts, turning a slur used against “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” into a light-hearted nod to British pluck.

Now we are just Starmer’s grim union-run, somnambulant and yes, still hopelessly woke, island. If we don’t wake up from our confusion soon, we are going to be nothing more than a declinist relic chasing its tail, fighting battles that only have losers, shadow-boxing away our immense value and resources till we have none.