Gavin Esler: The danger of this infantile anti-Americanism

Every day I hear the same tedious stereotypes about loud and stupid American gunslinging bullies

Maybe I should declare a bias. I like Americans. Always have. Always will. Some readers will already be disgusted. In recent weeks while I was researching a Radio 4 series on Britain's relationships with Europe and with the United States, I have come across plenty of British haters of America: those, such as the anti-war protesters demonstrating outside the Commons, who view George Bush's policy towards Iraq as "genocide," as if Mr Bush were no better than another Hitler and the country that elected him were some kind of Nazi nation.

But I grew up with American friends, lived in the US for years, visit North America as often as I can and am the father of two small American passport-holders. I cannot think of one American friend who wants to create an American empire, who thirsts for Iraqi oil, who is obsessed with gun culture, who is grotesquely fat and lazy, who is arrogant and loud or who is seeking to dominate the world.

Yet every day in British newspapers, on television and on the radio, I hear the same tedious stereotypes about loud and stupid American gunslinging bullies. For weeks, radio phone-in shows have been full of people describing George Bush and the US military as being morally as bad as Saddam Hussein. Others suggest that the United States government – after the disputed election of November 2000 – is itself a tinpot dictatorship, again not much better than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Racial stereotypes about black or Irish or Jewish people are unacceptable in Britain today, yet white Americans remain a legitimate target, modern-day Nazis with cowboy boots instead of jackboots.

Americans, apparently, either do nothing about the world's problems, in which case they are ignorant and isolationist, selfish and gutless, or they try to do something about the world's problems, in which case they are arrogant and naive, greedy and bullying.

From the Prime Minister to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the top elements of the British bureaucracy are very worried by this trend. George Robertson, the Nato Secretary General, told me that anti-American rage in Britain and Europe has moved far beyond being "criticism of individual policies or even an individual president".

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, says that he is worried by something he described as "trite anti-Americanism in this country", which has become fashionable and which promotes "a convenient parody" of the real America.

While such attitudes rise and fall depending on the vagaries of politics, the pollster Bob Worcester of Mori suggests that from last year to the middle of the Iraq crisis in March, the number of British people who view the United States positively halved from 75 per cent to 37 per cent.

Now – before my own views are caricatured -– let me insist that it is, of course, perfectly reasonable to oppose the policies of George Bush or any American president. Many of my American friends are Democrats and would say it is even imperative to oppose the policies of George Bush. But what is not reasonable is to allow creeping anti-Americanism to increase, coupled with a profound British ignorance and intellectual arrogance towards the United States. There is a common British delusion that we "understand" America. We don't. Watching Friends listening to Bruce Springsteen, eating at McDonald's and visiting Disneyland does not do it.

Some British journalists, politicians, commentators and diplomats, and many British people, often completely misunderstand the phenomenon of George W Bush. When there is a Democrat in the White House – someone like Bill Clinton, who could so easily be a British politician – we do understand America well enough. Clinton, like Al Gore, drew his support from the coasts, New York and Hollywood. But when Americans elect a conservative Republican like Bush or Reagan or Nixon, men who draw support from that Other America of the Bible Belt, conservative mountain states and the mid-West, the British are baffled.

"Who is this cowboy?" British newspapers say with arch condescension. "This dimwit who cannot speak the Queen's English? This actor repeating someone else's lines? This Texan fool?"

Such a catastrophic failure of understanding of the most powerful democracy in the world and a key ally, accompanied by the usual patronising British attitude towards those poor benighted dimwitted Yanks, is extremely dangerous. So what can be done? One of Britain's most distinguished diplomats, Sir Christopher Meyer, suggests a major change within the Foreign Office. He has recently retired as ambassador to Washington, and told me that the Foreign Office is skewed against understanding the United States because it is far too focussed on Europe. Sir Christopher, who was also ambassador to Berlin, is careful not to draw any conclusions about the euro.

But he complains that over the past 25 years since the UK joined the Common Market, "the British bureaucracy has made vast efforts to get to grips with membership of the European Union... to a degree this has distorted the prism of British bureaucracy and of the Foreign Office". The result is that relations with America have suffered "benign neglect".

The Foreign Office imagines that the so-called special relationship with the United States "trundles along, takes care of itself and, so long as the Prime Minister and the President have a good relationship... everything's OK". But Sir Christopher suggests otherwise. There are, he says, "seriously big differences, including cultural differences" between Britain and the United States, particularly when there is a conservative Republican president in the White House.

Sir Christopher, therefore, calls on the Foreign Office to "devote more resources of manpower and money" to the relationship with the United States because "things are too distorted towards Europe and the European Union".

Specifically, he wants bright young British diplomats posted to British consulates in Houston, Dallas and Chicago to learn about the other America that produced George Bush, in the same way that British diplomats are enthusiastically sent to obscure European capitals. Meyer has a point. Walk the streets of Washington, San Francisco or New York and you will learn nothing of the America that made the presidencies of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Spend a few days in Iowa or Arizona or Nebraska, and suddenly George Bush starts to make sense. You may not like him any better (why should you? Many Americans don't like Bush either). But at least we British might understand that alien other America from which he springs.

Personally, I hope that we British continue to criticise America -- just as I hope Americans will criticise us. That is what friends do.

But we have to recognise that our relationship with that vast, inventive and – in my view – almost entirely benign continent is not static. It changes. Things are good for now because Americans appreciate British support in the war. But that could easily worsen, especially if Americans are confronted by an infantile anti-Americanism that is unjust, unreasonable and absolutely not in Britain's interests.

'Which Way Are We Facing?' is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Mondays at 8pm