Two of the most memorable scenes from the film Love Actually, now more than 20 years old for anyone frightened of their advancing age, speak fundamentally about UK-US relations. One is when a fictional US president, obviously a close analogue for George Bush, makes a pass on the love interest of Hugh Grant’s Tony Blair stand-in prime minister. Prime Minister Grant then delivers a speech admonishing his counterpart in front of a press conference.

The second comes near the end, when a loser-of-the-friend-group type character tries his luck in America. He lands in frigidly cold Minnesota. There he walks into a random bar, and finds a number of attractive women who are enamoured with his accent.

Love Actually came out in 2003, at a time when the UK was one of the faster-growing economies in the developed world. That year, the UK’s GDP was just above $30,000 in current international dollars, whilst the US’s was just below $40,000. Twenty years later, in 2023, it was around $58,000 versus $83,000. It was easy to see the two countries as, if not equals, then near-peers. It has become more difficult since.

This sort of reverse-power fantasy plays out in other ways too. As Noah Smith has noted, British media outlets, like the Economist or the FT, are fond of frequently criticising US economic policy. Neither publication shies away from criticising the UK’s own economy either. But to the Americans, when wage and productivity growth have long been stagnant in the UK, being lectured by people who write as if they have a cut-glass accent can seem a bit rich.

Recently, we have seen another example. Despite a much-vaunted re-set with the EU, the British government is still more Atlanticist on security and geopolitical policy. Keir Starmer’s government still wants to be the so-called bridge between Europe and the US. Starmer was also one of the first to say, publicly, that the US would need to back-stop any future peacekeeping force in Ukraine.

One perspective on this is that Starmer is simply telling it like it is. It’s hard to conceive of a successful mission in Ukraine without the US’s intelligence or air defence capabilities, for instance. Another is that he is trying to drag the US in, on British terms. Being the messenger means you have control over the message.

There are two rather obvious problems with this. The first is that the Americans clearly don’t want or need a messenger. They are happy to go over and tell the Europeans what they think of them themselves now. Outside of the EU, the UK also has no institutional relationship it can use to further this role either. All it can do is repeat a slightly different version of whatever the US says.  

The other is that the Trump administration probably does not care what the UK thinks. Donald Trump seems to be fond of Starmer personally, for some reason. The UK might also get an easier ride on trade. But there is little indication that the UK can be, as Harold Macmillan once put it, the Greece to the US’s Rome.

Shaking this urge will be difficult, however, because the UK genuinely does have a split identity. It is an English-speaking country, and as such is heavily exposed to the US’s political and cultural discourse, and way of doing things. This is true, to a certain extent, of almost everywhere in the world. But even more so for anglophone countries.

Duncan Robinson, who writes for the Economist, pointed out that virtually every British political obsessive has a copy of various American political literature touchstones on their bookshelves. These range from Robert Caro’s The Powerbroker, a biography of New York political giant Robert Moses, to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s more recent The Coddling of the American Mind. He expressed disdain for this, claiming that the British political class’s obsessions with the US distorted policy discussions in very different contexts. He has a point. But the counterargument might be that this is inevitable: there are simply far more books in English on American politics than on British politics.

At the same time, the UK is a genuinely different country, in a different geographic position. Its ability to act on the world stage and its interests will necessarily differ, thanks to different histories, political systems, and the ocean between the UK and US. Not to mention the fact that the UK is considerably smaller, both in population and as an economy.

A recent poll from Ipsos also showed that Britons are much more likely to agree that Europe is most important to the UK compared to the US, at 47% versus 21%. Those polled were also more likely to agree that the UK’s interests aligned with Europe than with the US. Although some cultural fascination with the US is a general phenomenon, the obsession might not lie much deeper than in Westminster.

That, perhaps, points to the fundamental reason why the UK cannot quit the US: being a window to America means being a window to power. Being able to understand, or influence, US politics, or at least role-play it, is a way to act out that power vicariously. For those who feel they already hold less of it, however, this is not likely to mean, or accomplish, much.

One explanation for why Brexit has failed to provoke much enthusiasm after it happened, or banish British populists, lies in the Leave campaign’s slogan: take back control. The reality is that if anyone did take back control, it was MPs and governments in Westminster. From anyone else’s perspective, very little changed. British politicians who insist on cosying up to the US, rather than finding a way out of the country’s dependence on it, would do well to remember this.