BORIS JOHNSON: We've got to stop sneering at America - its dynamic economy and can-do spirit is keeping the West secure... while all we've got is stagnant Starmerism
We don’t know who killed Brian Thompson, 50, on Wednesday morning in New York, brutally shooting him in the back with a long-barrelled handgun.
We don’t know why anyone would want to murder the health insurance executive as he walked into a hotel.
But as millions gaze with horror at the footage of the blue-jacketed father-of-two tumbling to the pavement, the hooded killer moving calmly and swiftly away, the image seems to confirm our every prejudice about what is wrong with American society.
This is a country, we tell ourselves, where millions of people have no choice but to pay expensive premiums for healthcare – and yet still don’t get the coverage they or their families require.
This is a country, we shudder, so awash with guns – 400million of them allegedly in circulation – that high school shooting sprees have become almost banal and the newly elected President Trump prevailed over two assassination attempts.
No sirree, we say to ourselves, with the smug satisfaction of people who have free public healthcare, and who live in a country where guns are generally banned. Not for us, we say.
These Americans may be phenomenally rich and successful. But we wouldn’t want to be like them, would we? We wouldn’t want their frenetic lifestyles, their hormone-treated steaks; and above all we would not want to replicate their ruthless dog-eat-dog style of free market capitalism.
Would we? Well, my friends, that question is increasingly urgent, because I don’t frankly believe that Europeans – and I include Britons – can really continue to sneer, as we do, at the American economic model.
We don’t know who killed Brian Thompson, 50, on Wednesday morning in New York, brutally shooting him in the back with a long-barrelled handgun, writes BORIS JOHNSON
I don’t believe that we can continue to lay claim to some moral superiority – for one simple reason. The American economic model is working, and delivering astonishing prosperity and growth, while the European model – upon which the UK is still too closely modelled – is failing, and failing badly.
In just a few weeks this new century will have completed almost a quarter of its span, and in that time we have seen something astonishing. We have seen how the predictions were wrong, from the 1980s onwards. This century doesn’t belong to Japan, as some said it would; and it doesn’t even belong to China, and it certainly doesn’t belong to the European Union.
As Larry Summers has famously said: Japan’s a nursing home, Europe’s a museum and China’s a jail. Like the 20th century before it, the 21st century obviously belongs – and will keep belonging – to the United States of America. The numbers do not lie.
The US economy is pulling away from the rest of the developed world like a thoroughbred in a field of donkeys. When this century began, the Americans were already in the lead. In the year 2000, the average worker was 8 per cent more productive even than the average German worker, for all their vorsprung durch technik.
Today the gap is widening, and the average German worker – swaddled as he or she is with EU laws on workers’ rights – is now 16 per cent less productive. As for us, the story is even worse. We started the century 18 per cent behind. We are now 27 per cent behind the Americans.
Yup, the average British worker is now barely three quarters as productive as the average American worker. In crude terms that means the average British worker will produce three cars for every four produced by an American; three British washing machines for four American washing machines; three British movies for four American movies; three British ideas for four American ideas.
You can see the results of this growing discrepancy in the vertiginous success of American capitalism, not just the tech giants, but the rich roiling culture of start-ups and innovation to be found in every state. So no, frankly, it is no longer good enough for us to wrinkle our noses at the US model, and to trot out the old tropes about how unsophisticated the Americans are, by comparison with ourselves, how many of them think the world began in 4004 BC.
Enough with all that Euro-snootsville nonsense. We can’t afford it any more. Unless we have the humility to learn from the Americans, and to emulate their good qualities, we will be condemning ourselves to fall further and further behind.
The US economy is pulling away from the rest of the developed world like a thoroughbred in a field of donkeys. Pictured: A General Motors Co. assembly plant in Flint, Michigan
How the hell can we sneer at the American way of doing things, when our country is increasingly shackled to low-growth, high-tax, high-regulation Starmerism? No European country can afford to feel even the slightest sense of social or economic superiority to the US, for one fundamental reason.
In an increasingly unstable and sometimes frightening world, we depend on America for our security, and so do countries around the world – from Japan and Korea to the Middle East to the whole Euro-Atlantic area. It is the Americans, for all their delay and hesitation, who have given the overwhelming share of the weapons with which the heroic Ukrainians have protected their freedom.
It is the US taxpayer who provides about 60 per cent of the defence budget of the entire 32-strong Nato alliance. To understand the scale of the US commitment, in hardware, Nato currently has about 5,000 fighter and ground attack aircraft – of which about 4,000 come from the US, with the 31 other countries of Nato together supplying the rest.
We are proud in the UK that we are on track to push defence spending up to 2.5 per cent of GDP; and yet most other countries are barely on 2 per cent, while the US is spending 3 per cent of a vastly greater GDP. We cannot have it both ways.
We cannot clap the smelling salts to our noses, and complain about the American way of doing things – when we are shamelessly piggy-backing on America; benefiting from the US tax revenues generated by the very economic model we affect to disdain.
We are going to have to snap out of it, get real, and learn from America, because there is plainly a link between the culture of freedom – the constitutionally protected freedom of speech and thought – and the American culture of innovation. There is a link between American risk and reward, between tax cuts and growth, between deregulation and dynamism.
We need to use Brexit freedoms, and to learn these lessons fast, precisely because the world is getting more dangerous, and because we therefore need to spend more on defence – and to persuade our American friends that we are willing to share the burden more equally; because otherwise there really is the risk that one day they will just call our bluff.
Why should they work all the hours God gives, and take a week’s holiday a year (as many Americans do) to pay for the defence of Europeans who can’t even be bothered to go into the office?
We need to show the Americans we mean business, by trying to reacquire some of the incredible energy and can-do spirit that is now propelling their economy.
We may not want their healthcare system, or their gun laws. But we would be mad to sneer at the US economic model when it is such a storming success.
Above all, we can’t sneer at the American economic model and simultaneously sponge off America.
Pictured: Dog walker killed in hit and run two days before Christmas as police hunt for 'noticeably damaged' car
